Lebanese X-Box

Last week I finally bought an X-Box. Well, I didn't: I would have no clue how to go about the whole process. I gave a pile of money to a friend of mine who knows what's what, and knows people who know people so he could get me a "sweet deal", and he arrived back a couple of hours later with the whole shebang: the eponymous box itself, a couple of extra joysticks (which reminded me a little of those in Cronenberg's 'Existenz'), and 23 games ("because you had some money left over, so I thought 'why not?'").
Well, you can imagine, those of you who already have such an entertainment system...but the highlights: two all-nighters already, occasional, fleeting blurrings of the boundaries between the world of 'Singularity' and the so-called 'real world' (for example, as I entered the stairwell at work the other day, for a moment I wanted to reach for my plasma rifle..), and a whole host of thoughts regarding how I can understand Baudrillard and his ilk a whole lot better now. My second year Philosophy students are demanding daily updates on my thoughts regarding this, of course, and we are going to have to go back over some of the readings we've been doing for the course in order to accommodate my new-found 'insights. That's OK, as revision week is going to have to happen soon anyway, prior to their mock exams, so this now makes it seem like playing 'Call of Duty: Black Ops' is actually a legitimate thing for me to be doing professionally.
However, all of this Abrutschen between the real and the hyperreal has been playing itself out on a country-sized game backdrop this past week or so. Jorge Luis Borges once wrote a story about a megalomaniac king who asked a cartographer to draw up the most accurate map possible of his kingdom. Two dimensions wouldn't do, so he ended up 'building' an exact replica of the country in order to accommodate and describe everything accurately.I'm also reminded of a Russian science fiction film, 'Nightmoves' I think, where, whilst we are all asleep, everything about our world, including who we are and the memories we have, is changed without our knowing it.
That's what Lebanon seems like at the moment. We have no government (again) (so I'm going to have to change that widget further down on the right-hand side of this page...), speeches from this, that and the other sectarian patriarch (Wednesday Hariri, Jumblat every five minutes - the man loves the sound of his own voice -, tonight Nasrallah), and huge swathes of reportage (Al Jazeera and Naharnet are, in the words of Kevin Keegan, "loving it, just loving it"), and we can all engage in that other great Lebanese pastime, speculation, rumour and all-round paranoia...which feeds that other great Lebanese Leviathan, speculation about the speculation, rumours about rumours, and paranoia about the paranoia (viz., for example, this article from Naharnet: http://www.naharnet.com/domino/tn/NewsDesk.nsf/getstory?openform&62D557961BAF5A39C225781F005F9229).
The ostensible reason for all of this political shenanegins is the forthcoming release of the report of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, the "indictment" that will finally tell us, after years of painstaking research, who killed Rafik Hariri. It won't, of course, everybody already knows that. It'll be a damp squib. There may well be the names of some people who are already dead, in prison, or disappeared, but it will most probably, it seems, be about as interesting and enlightening as the Warren Commission Report into the assassination of JFK. Still, that's not going to stop the posturing Lebanese megalomaniacs from getting air-time, moving their pawns around the board, and generally seeking to fit as many terrible metaphors about blood and sacrifice and war in general into their rhetoric as they possibly can.
So it all reminds me of the world of the X-Box that I am beginning to discover: it seems like each group is playing their own 'Co-Op' game, within the same scenario of course, hitting checkpoints ('Speech on TV' - Checkpoint Reached), picking up health points ('Favourable Review of Speech in Biased News Outlet' - Health Points Gained), and arming themselves up to the back teeth ('Arms Cache Secured - Upgrade Now?'). If this all seems a bit tenuous, a bit laboured and stretched as a metaphor...then that's because it is. Still, you should try sitting where I am (by the way, 39 days without a passport and counting, thanks to the Surete Generale...).
It's not surreal at all: it is, in pure Baudrillardian terms, hyperreal. The lunatics have, however, once again taken over the asylum, but they think they are playing X-Box.