Crepuscules...

During the last few weekends I have spent a good deal of time outside of Beirut. This past weekend I was with friends at an eco-lodge near Hermel in the Bekaa. Majestic, harsh, unforgiving mountain ranges. Peace, apart from the distant sounds of machine-gun fire from the Hizb'allah training camps in the hidden distance. A warming, enveloping cold. A few weekends ago, near Hammana, a different mountain range, a different non-sense: pine trees, identical and identikit villages nestling on the slopes. And last weekend (or that's at least how it seems), what is without doubt the most alluring place in Lebanon, Sannine. Isolation. Purity. Tranquility.

Partly to escape from the destruction of Beirut by property speculators, and the attendant noise (so much noise) that comes with it, partly to experience cold, which is long overdue (autumn shows no signs of arriving at any point soon down here in the city by the sea), and partly just to escape from the person that I become when I'm in the city too much. There are other more important reasons, but these will suffice for now.

Coming back to the city, the domestic, to work, containing and isolating my 'dromofilia' is increasingly a struggle, a dilemma better said. I am finding fewer and fewer reasons to do so, and more and more reasons not to do so. There is only one reason why I am still here, back here. Again. Still. Yet.

"The experience which I am attempting to describe by one tentative approach after another is very precise and is immediately recognizable. But it exists at a level of perception and feeling which is probably preverbal - hence, very much, the difficulty of writing about it...By this time you are within the experience. Yet saying this implies narrative time and the essence of the experience is that it takes place outside such time. The experience does not enter into the narrative of your life..." (John Berger, Field).

Still. Yet. Again. Words which all have double-entendres of a profoundly existential variety, and which describe both a state of being and a non-state of flux. 'Still': not-yet altered, but calm; 'Yet': for-the-moment', but 'however'; 'Again': the promise of continuance, though also the ordered disorder of inertia.

'Live' and 'leave' are two words which, in English, are difficult to phonetically distinguish. I leave because I need to live; in leaving I live. To live is, often, to leave.

Berger talks, in his beautiful, poetic, metaphysical style, about the 'narrative of life.' He is right (or, at least, what he writes resonates so much with me), and sometimes this narrative, however, condenses, crystallises into just a few (dis)connected words. Still. Again. Yet. I am still in Beirut, yet, again, I'm not.

When Big Brother Gets A Little Too Close...

Last week I discovered that I have a file held by the Lebanese Internal Security Forces. This doesn't surprise me: I'm a foreigner, I work for an organisation funded by the U.S. and operating under the auspices of the U.S. Embassy. The name on my file is mine, with the bracketed appendage "a.k.a. Koutalakis." Now, that 'nickname' is used for many things: three of my e-mail accounts have it or a version of it as the name; one of those accounts is linked to this blog so I have to suppose they are reading this too. it is also my Flickr and Facebook name. It's not that difficult to find this out and link them to me, though I think what surprises me is that anyone would bother. I suppose, charitably, that they didn't know that I wasn't a threat to national security until they had researched and found out that I wasn't. Fair enough.
...and I wonder what else the file contains. Not much, probably, otherwise I would have been either arrested and/or deported by now.
However, the circumstances surrounding my finding out about this file are what interest me. A colleague, in the presence of a third person, happily blurted out that he knew this about me because he has a friend at the ISF who let him, or allowed him, or didn't prevent him from, seeing the files (plural). In one sense this doesn't surprise me either: such is Lebanon. I told my boss about it and asked him to give this colleague of mine the third degree, for obvious reasons. It's partly an issue of confidentiality, but not really that either: when a society is based on transparent superficiality, information becomes a commodity to be traded. So it is everywhere of course, but the information that is most privileged here is trivial information, gossip. From the upper echelons of politics in Lebanon down to the corner cafe discussions, the exchange and possession of the trivial and the superficial become a modus operandi; witness the amount of 'celebrity' magazines, pages in newspapers, and TV shows. So it is almost everywhere, of course, but in a country where even MacDonalds have a valet service and VIP parking, what appears to be so is so, irrespective of any serious criteria.
What makes this different is that this act of reductionism, this particular piece of gossip, was lifted from the secret police. What disturbs me is that I am not at all disturbed by either the existence of the file nor by the fact that whoever is in charge of it shows it to anybody he wishes to. That's Lebanon. Excellent. They can't even get internal security right...

Αληθινη Athenian Democracy

Exiting the Metro slightly ahead of me today were a well-dressed, slightly-older than middle-aged couple. At the top of the escalator they made a strange movement which, when I reached the top, I decided to investigate. In the end it was the most banal, yet most optimistic, thing I had seen in a while: they had left their Metro ticket stuck to the bar at the top of the 'down' escalator, so that anyone entering could take it and use it. Athens Metro tickets have a time limit of one hour and a half so you can have unlimited travel during that period. If, of course, your journey takes ten minutes, then there is still another eighty minutes of use left on it. Moments before, I had seen such a ticket sticking out of the validation machine at the entrance to the station proper, and for the self-same reason. I had learned about this practice some days before, and ever since then I have been offering my partially-used ticket to anyone entering as I was leaving.

On the face of it are a couple of things: it is, of course, illegal. Secondly, the tickets only cost one Euro, well within the means of (almost) anyone. Thirdly, the Athens Metro system (and its associated Proastiakos (suburban) railway), is very good; new stations have been constructed sensitively around the cornucopia of ancient ruins that live underneath the Athens asphalt, many of the trains are new, run on time (...Mussolini would be very proud...), and it is being extended, in all directions, in an intelligent way. All of this takes investment and, of course, one of the ways in which that money is raised is via the sale of tickets to travelers. On the face of it, then, this practice of 'ticket sharing' is harming all of this.

On the face of it...

I've been in Greece for the last two months or so, and I have heard, first-, second- and third-hand a collection of horror stories about life in a country that has been declared "toxic" by the IMF and the EU. I know someone who has been given two choices, either to lose her job now, or to work until Christmas but only being paid every other month; an acquaintance who works so many hours (10 a.m. until 10 p.m is not uncommon for him) that he is seriously considering giving up working for a while; a friend who has been paying the loan on his car assiduously for several years but who, upon missing one payment, is telephoned by the bank continually and without respite and threatened with all sorts of legal and beaurocratic comeback; someone else was told repeatedly that he would be paid 'next month' (and this went on for four months) until, one day, he was told that the company was bankrupt and that he and his colleagues were out of a job and, of course, the promised salaries had disappeared into thin air; another acquaintance and his partner were told that their insurance policies had likewise gone up in smoke because the bank they had been paying them into all of these years went under without a trace, and without warning.

What all of these people have in common is that they belong to "Η Γενιά των 700 ευρώ", the "¢700 generation" (read more about it here http://g700.blogspot.com/) (yes, I know; it's now a "sociological phenomenon" with a label blah blah...forget that for the moment...). With the IMF (the "Troika") flying in this month to give the Greek government a pat on the back for getting down on their knees so quickly, with the "voices of reason" urging 'caution', and 'tightening the belts' and 'pragmatism' so loudly, that generation is slowly, but surely, having its own voice drowned out. For obvious and understandable reasons (riot police and, hey, summer is here after all!) the steam has gone out of the post-'Alexis' anisyxia. So...

So...you do what you can do; give away your unused Metro tickets; the people taking them are the people who most need them. But they are also the people who most appreciate them, who will see that it is not just they who understand what is happening, but that the well-dressed, slightly-older than middle-aged couple still remember what it is like to belong to the "¢700 generation."

Everything's amazing...and nobody's happy...

"Perception Is Truth..."

people often say. No, it isn't. Truth is truth, and unless your perception coincides with what is true, then your perception is, quite simply, wrong.

This phrase, "perception is truth", was the maxim of my previous boss; outwardly, and being charitable, it is a nice, liberal, inclusive, all-encompassing idea. It's like the liberal idea of tolerance...which turns out to be fundamentally ILliberal: tolerating every opinion, every viewpoint, means de facto giving them all equal weight, equal validity which, in effect, means abandoning all criteria for judging between different opinions, and becoming unable, simply, to sort out the wheat from the chaff. When it comes to opinions about mayonnaise, it doesn't really matter; however, when it comes to anything substantial, the implications are enormous. You must (logically) en up tolerating the intolerable, accepting anything...even to the point of accepting those views which seek to suppress yours and you. "How do you see things? Let's listen to you and we'll talk about it." If other people en masse 'perceive' you to be wrong, then clearly you have a problem; if they 'perceive' you to be correct, it is because you are telling people what they already believe about things they already accept.So, it turns out, only certain 'perceptions' are 'truth.'

http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2005/percipi-est-esse/

In reality, it is a placebo, a way of inducing acceptance of the status quo. What is my perception of what is happening in Greece? In Thailand? It turns out that my perception of these events, if it doesn't accord with what economists want my perception to be, then I am somehow mis-perceiving; my viewpoint, my opinion, is still valid, of course, still welcomed, my voice is still listened to...but wrong. If, however, my perception does fall into line with what the clearing banks and the credit agencies, the IMF and the EU say, then I am seeing things clearly. John Pilger, then, must quite simply be wrong, but isn't it great that he's allowed to express his opinion. John Stuart Mill would be proud...

http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2010/05/greece-pilger-britain-imf

Eons ago, the Scottish Philosopher David Hume explained what he called the 'is/ought gap': facts are facts, and values are values. Ethical principles cannot be decided by appeal to empirical reality. Morality, in short, cannot be made a slave to what actually is the state of affairs in the world. The point of ethics is to determine what OUGHT to be the case, not to reflect what IS the case; once you even begin to allow facts to determine ethical principles, then you are caught up in the same logic as that expressed above, viz., that you have to accept that whatever IS happening must, by dint of the fact that it is happening, OUGHT to happen. Simply, however, irrespective of how things are, certain things are wrong, and certain things are right. No matter how many Palestinian bodies the Israelis pile up, killing is still wrong; statistics are not going to settle the issue. One life taken or a thousand will not change the morality of the issue. What is sauce for the goose, however, is sauce for the gander: state execution (with or without a 'fair' trial) is wrong, no matter how much under pressure Hamas feels it is, no matter how many Israeli collaborators they uncover. No matter how large the debt run up by the Greek government, an office worker in Lamia is still not responsible for it. Whether that debt is one euro or a billion, "austerity measures" that 'target' this office worker are wrong.

However...all of this is just my perception. It turns out that I have been listening to the Rong Radio Station....

Beirut...with rose-tinted musical spectacles....

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