The prototype Lebanese man is a wonderful, if slightly bonkers, creature. Who else would buy a huge bottle of duty-free eau de cologne on the airplane, open it, liberally splash it about as if he were heading out for a night at Studio 54 and then offer some to the passenger sitting next to him, in this case yours truly.
If that doesn’t break life’s ice, nothing will, and thus he proceeded to tell me that, for the first half of the flight, he had sat with a blanket over his head – burqa-like – because he was suffering from a terrible cold. He apologised in advance, should I succumb in the coming days.
“As long as it’s not Ebola,” I quipped. At this point he feigned mock shame, gripping my hand and adopting a puppy dog look in his eyes that said: “as if I would ever do such a thing”.
Before long I was getting a potted life story. Our man had moved to America because there was no work in Lebanon, but even after three years in the promised land he had to concede that whatever charges one could level against his country the resilience of the people never ceased to amaze.
“When you drive into Beirut tonight you will see that the city is functioning,” he assured me amid sneezes and an all-pervading wall of bergamot and citrus. “And yet really there is no reason why it should. God really blesses us. In America when a man is shot dead by the police all hell breaks loose. In Lebanon we have no president. The politicians don’t do anything and yet the county carries on. Amazing.”
Flights have a habit of fast tracking a sense of male bonding, and before I knew it I was telling my new fragrant friend that, despite there being a grain of truth to what he said, I had to admit that for the first time in 22 years I was scared for Lebanon’s future.
I told him that I wasn’t scared in 1993 when we had a brief skirmish with Israel, nor was I unduly worried when there was another, this time bigger, flare-up in 1996. Ten years later we had a truly nasty war, but I still kept the faith and two years after that, when Hizbollah staged an attempted coup, I knew that eventually things would settle down and that the political tension was basically a readjustment after the 2005 Syrian withdrawal.
The most important thing in all this was that we were still making money hand over fist. The political landscape held no fears, neither for free-spending Arab tourists and seasoned investors nor for the equally flush expatriates who arrived each year and regularly sent money home. Those in the know knew we were always open for business.
But in the three years after the 2011 Arab Spring, we have found ourselves at an existential crossroads. In early August we were served notice that the Islamic State was here and ready to scrap with the Lebanese army, while our inability to choose a president has meant that the state has not been able to focus on stopping the country from going bankrupt and descending into social collapse.
Just to add to our woes, there is still no water and even less electricity. Growth has fallen from 9 per cent to 2 per cent in four years and the presence of 2 million Syrian refugees is, as the think tank people like to say, “exerting downwards pressure” while ramping up sectarian tensions.
Oh and by the way, unemployment now stands at 20 per cent, courtesy of an immigrant workforce pushing down wages. Our US$65 billion public purse is reaching unsustainable levels as it seeks to make up the shortfall in an economy that has businesses going bust every day.
Our notoriously weak infrastructure is buckling at the knees. This summer, after a dry winter, a water shortage has forced many households to buy in water, paying each time half of what they pay the state for a year’s supply. A few weeks of war we can take, but a sustained attack on the very fabric of society may very well be our undoing.
And yet, as I sat in the taxi heading into Beirut, it was clear that my new friend was right. Yes, there were the mad drivers, bikers pulling wheelies, the families of five on one moped and the usual cars driving down the motorway against traffic. But I had to admit that despite everything the country was working.
I smiled as I noticed my hand still smelled of his cologne, but I couldn’t help but wonder how long it could last.
Michael Karam is a freelance writer based in Beirut and Brighton
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