26th January, 2007

Last Tuesday evening I began to write the following:

"Well, what a morning we have had. I will spare you the details about the incompetent procedurals that lead to the school being closed, suffice it to say that it took a good couple of hours and lots of telephone calls for it to happen."

I stopped (obviously), and since then events have moved on apace, so let me try and bring you up to date. You have all probably been watching the news, reading the newspapers, looking at the photographs and images which have been published. As one of my friends said, "it probably looks more dramatic than it actually is", and isn't that always the case. The response to that comment is, of course, that it is both true and false.

I shall try and fill you in, backwards, not on what happened, but on what appeared to be happening from this perspective. YESTERDAY (Thursday), early in the afternoon, fighting broke out at the Arab University. By 18.15 the government (those bits of it that weren't in Paris schmoozing up to the Saudi's, French and Condi Rice, announced Martial Law until 06.30 this morning. The fighting dissipated gradually as the evening wore on, Nasrallah issued a fatwa telling everyone to go home (I won't bother telling you the cynical reaction that got from the Americans in my school as you can probably guess, but of course all sorts of Machiavellian intentions were induced), and so on, until everyone went home. In the Chouf mountains and on the road to the south, it appears, masked gunmen were stopping people in cars and asking for their identity cards which, if it happened (whether or not it did, it did, because people said it did) reminded everyone of the Civil War Identity Card Massacres (in Capital Letters). So, then, paranoia levels have been re-set to ape-shit.

The next several hours were spent channel-hopping looking at the different images being broadcast by the various TV channels here. Depending on who owned the TV station of course dictated what was seen. We saw the Syrian National Party offices being burned down for what seemed like hours on New TV, the Hariri channel, whilst al-Jazeera was out in the streets...and so on. Guess the rest yourselves. School today, Friday, was, of course, cancelled.

On TUESDAY morning we awoke to the pre-announced General Strike, which I am sure you have all read about, seen pictures of, and so on. School was cancelled, we all came home, tyres burned, guns were fired, people were shot (as they were yesterday) and, by the following morning, it was as if nothing had happened, although there was still no school.

Anyway, that's the sequence of events, and you all know it already. I don't want to bore you anymore with details and trivia that you might already know, so that's that.

What's not 'that', however, was a series of thoughts sparked off by a question one of my students asked me on Thursday in school (one of only two days of school this week): "What do you foreigners think of what's happening here in Lebanon?" (on a digression, this is, as some of you may know, a frequent question - those of you who live in a foreign country are more than
familiar with this question!). The answer, though, is this: I think the verb 'think' is perhaps not the most appropriate one. Put simply, for a whole host of reasons (lack of Arabic, limited social circles, work/time commitments etcetera), we foreigners neither know much nor, therefore, think much. There is one daily newspaper in English (there are many in French, but being an
anglophile community we ignore them!) and two English-language websites here in Lebanon, and then of course the BBC, Al Jazeera English and CNN on the illegal cable. So, there are a limited, very limited, range of opinions circulating and these tend to get circulated around, with Chinese-whisper alterations to suit political prejudice. These opinions are then added to by whatever limited contact we may have with "the local population" (Arabic teachers, shopkeepers). Add to this the 'return-to-civil-war' paranoia, the stories, rumours and inventions, all of which (and I have said this before) become the truth as soon as they are uttered, and, well, the answer to my student's question is easy: we don't think. We have thoughts, which is by no means the same thing at all, but you we be amazed how little we actually 'think'. We trade thoughts with each other, most of
which are in agreement, broadly, but there is little real thinking going on. I suppose you want an example, so here it is. Watching the TV images being broadcast by the various stations yesterday and on Tuesday, the word 'Live', of course, appeared in the corner of the screen. In most cases, what was being shown 'live' was, in fact, live, but watch it for long enough and you
begin to realise that they are just spooling the tape.

Now, we could speculate about the reasons, impact and effects of this practice, standard journalistic practice; we could also discuss the language used, the use of loaded questions, but all of those are for Media Studies classes, so I am saving those up if you don't mind. The point is this: we all saw the images, we all saw what was happening, as we sat inside our lounges, on
our sofas, channel-hopping. Occasionally a glance outside the window confirmed that it was, in fact, happening..except it didn't, of course, as we could see none of it, except the smoke from burning tyres on Tuesday. However, we all assure each other that we did 'see' it, that we were 'witnesses' to it all, and have an insight into it. The next day we meet each other, we foreigners, we talk to the students, we 'take the temperature of the school community' (I have to put up with crass phrases like this now I am part of a 'school community', so bear with me...), we trade anecdotes, all the time assuming (if it even gets to that level of cognition) that, because we are here, we saw it, participated in it (passively, in the sense that it is happening in our city) and, crucially, assuming that we all believe the same things about the same things and know the same things. Take another example, though it's an easy target: a colleague is leaving the school in July to go back to Uncle Sam to study...Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies. Of course, I understand this, becuase the built-in assumption is that living here might be 'interesting' (insert your own vacuous, meaningless noun here), but it is not really a place where you can really study, whereas Washington State University (or whatever), being a serious place of academic study, is the best place to learn Arabic and study the Middle East. This is the sort of foreigner who populates this place. No further comment, but you all know me well enough to know what sorts of things I would say about this intellectual stupidity.

So, things have been happening, and I have not been thinking, because thinking is not what 'we foreigners' do much of.

And this all relates to a conversation I had months ago with a friend here. I like thinking; I like the process of processing thoughts, impressions, ideas. One of the reasons - the main reason - to leave Finland was the lack of external stimulus to think ABOUT. Now, curiously (and I am not going to say that here there is too MUCH of it to think about, to process), there is no time to process, to think about what is happening. I would say that I reflect, I have thoughts, but there is too much happening to be able to process any of it, and my interlocutor, a longer-term resident of Lebanon, said to me that the living of it IS the processing of it. The truism embedded in this statement has come home to roost in the last week. I have intended to write about what has been happening, first on Tuesday night, then last night, but the mediated experience of it, which IS the experience of it, IS that act of processing. Sitting down to write this is the closest I get these days to thinking as it might conventionally be described..but then, as you may have gathered, 'thinking' is not all that conventional here.