Trap of the nighthawks.
Posted on October 6, 2011 | posted by:
Nighthawks I (tribute to Edward Hopper), 2007 ©gregory buchakjian
I promised Jamer Hunt that for my first blog post I would write about Beirut, but not about the nightlife there. I might just have to break my promise.
August 2011: Dressed in an elegant white dress paired with excessively high heels (that quite frankly pinch my feet) I gaze at my surroundings as I slowly sip my cocktail. I am currently in one of the most glamorous locations in Beirut city, the latest rooftop bar overlooking the endless horizon of the Mediterranean Sea, the one place you have to be to make it on the social scale of success. But what I am mostly doing there is wondering why everyone around me is ingurgitating incredible amounts of alcohol? When exactly did Beirut shift from being a convalescent post-war zone to the vigorous capital of clubbing and decadence?
Around 2:30 AM my friends and I decide it is time to leave, but we must grab a bite before we part. On our way to the hip afterhours diner, the latest Mercedes model pulls out right ahead of us from an invisible intersection. As I hysterically step on the brake (and shout at him from the deepest alveoli in my lungs words a young lady like myself shouldn’t be saying) I realize that the driver has also managed to roll down his window and throw a banana peel out. I am outraged. At the diner, one of the most classical scenes that you can encounter in Lebanon is depicted there: a heteroclite group in their late 20s is having an intense political discussion. As their volume begins to rise towards an infinite point of escalation, we chew our food in silence and roll our eyes in despair. Lebanese people always seem to clash, especially when they talk politics; they always have diverging ideas, principles or even solutions. And as they realize that, their expectations and demands start to lower. For instance tonight the discussion was about a government minister who they considered a hero just because he was trying to implement the law regarding traffic. The group is getting louder now. They are starting to irritate another quiet couple sitting next to them. This reaches a culmination point and the man stands up and bangs his fist on the table. We know what’s coming next; we’ve seen this way too many times… a fight is about to start. The waiters rush in and intervene trying to avoid this violent burst. As both parties quiet down we decide it is time to go to bed, it is 4:00 AM after all.
October 2011: I smile gently as I read a specific chapter in Donella Meadows’ Thinking in system. In chapter 5, entitled “System traps… and opportunities”, the author enumerates various traps that lead to failed systems. Beirut, by my eyes, has fallen for every single one of them. One evening in Beirut offers enough proof in favor of my theory. Allow me to elaborate, in order of appearance:
The crowd of young Lebanese people consuming alcohol and partying like there is no tomorrow is what Meadows diagnoses as “shifting the burden to the intervenor”. In other words, Lebanese people use partying in order to disguise the real problem and throw it to the back of their minds. At this point I should probably elaborate more on the nature of the problem they are desperately trying to numb. The failing infrastructure, the corruption, the national debt, the instability only scratch the surface.
The Mercedes driver is what Meadows likes to call the “tragedy of the commons”: individuals tend to abuse public property. This one individual is a fine sample of Lebanese people who couldn’t care less about the common wealth we all share, our country; and littering is just a ridiculous example compared to the more severe practices such as using public wealth for personal benefits. But it doesn’t end here, those young folks who so vividly argued about politics at the diner (they are what saddens me the most) they are the living proof that we have fallen for the wickedest trap of all, the trap of “policy resistance”. These young men are just mere samples of the various political parties trying to pull the system towards their own needs and goals, regardless of others. This trap is by far the trap Lebanese society has fallen in the deepest, fed by the political organization of the government based on confessionalism, which technically means that representation of the people in the government is according to their religion. And to aggravate that even more, came the civil war in 1975 and left some unbearable bruises, the sequels of hate, hate towards the person from another religion. In other words, we were raised in a community where you should only care for your own benefit and the benefit of people from you same community (or religion) and we were in parallel taught to hate “the others”. And we wonder why we can’t get out of that rut… We are either simply “seeking the wrong goal”, or just too many divergent goals…
The list goes on, from “escalation” and the unbearable need for violence young men deploy to express their emotions or their “drift to low performance” because they just got used to expecting less of life and of their government.
Donella Meadows offers various solutions to all those traps, and they mainly orbit around the themes of letting go and getting out of the game. But how can one do that when they are so deep in the system that they stopped realizing they were in it? What you do is that you drink, a lot; you dress well, smile to the camera and pretend like everything is fine. I am sorry Jamer, we do, and we party almost every day.