I WOULD LOVE TO SEE A POLITICIAN RAPED, THEN, LET’S TALK RAPE LAWS!

Few days ago, U.S legislators amended the understanding of rape in North America to cover male abuse. They also redefined rape as basically any kind of sexual abuse.
In Lebanon, if there is no “real” penetration, it is not rape. Hum… Now I understand how politicians get away with raping the entire population…
Rape law? In Lebanon? For God’s sake!
What law? You steal a loaf of bread and you go to jail. AND laws are very clear about that and other stupid misdemeanors.
And we are still debating a law against rape?
Go debate how to preserve, no, “create” our independence.
Go debate how to sentence politicians who disgrace themselves on national television.
Go debate how to punish politicians who sell a whole country for individual purposes.
Go debate why electricity is still the slave of a few while the many bask in darkness.
But for heaven’s sake, stop debating rape!
Is rape now a peg in your political chess game?
We live in jungle where women are afraid of reporting rape, where women have to endure fear twice. Twice. Once by getting violated and then by living with it, alone.
How can politicians and legislators speak about preserving our interests? When they cannot even preserve our dignity?
What country is that where we still debate whether sexual abuse should be sanctioned and how?
But you know? I am not surprised in a country where spy agents of the enemy are let free.

After raping a whole nation, who would care about a couple of women? Right?
It is a sad day when the rulers of a country fail to protect their Maters, and forget that the womb being raped, is the same one that brought them to life…

I WOULD LOVE TO SEE A POLITICIAN RAPED, THEN, LET’S TALK RAPE LAWS! by Ibrahim N. Lahoud is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at ilahoud.wordpress.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://ilahoud.wordpress.com/.

© 2012 Ibrahim Lahoud

All I Want for Christmas – The Last Post of 2011

For this Christmas, I want the driver of that modified Subaru Evolution with a loud exhaust as wide as his empty brain cavity, to beat him till he begs for mercy.

I want the driver of the tinted-glass Picanto, to humiliate him till he decides to spend the rest of his days walking, and I want his car to set on fire.

I want that woman in the black Range Rover with a four digits plate number, to tie her hands behind the wheel, put a brick on the accelerator and watch her fly and hit a wall, and I want her cell phone to dial a long distance number and leave it on for a week, and her lipstick to… you know what!

I want that policeman playing G.I Joe on the intersection under my office with a finger up his nostril and a beer belly down his pants, to glue him in the middle of the road, hands shackled behind his back, and watch him scream like a baby girl watching the Subaru Evolution guy rushing straight at him.

I want the electric generator guy to teach him manners, the hard way and make him understand that his generator has more power that all his neurons combined.

I want the bank teller… To tell him who the client really is, hold him by the necktie and hang him from the top of his ego.

I want a gum-chewing clothing shop saleswoman to be sentenced to chew the same gum for a year while smiling and saying “how can I help you”.

I want that disgusting ugly castrated macho with mustaches like a floor mop to stick his lit shisha up his… you pick a hole!

I want the owner of the double parked Mercedes in the hospital parking to stand on the white line divider of the parking lanes, take the space of two cars, and get a first-row show of the insults he usually gets but doesn’t hear.

I want that Neanderthal bastard who pushes through the line at the ticketing counter of the movie theater to be squeezed between two gays till he feels something hurting his throat!

I want that bunch of botox-filled women talking loudly in the restaurant to have their ears stuffed with hearing aids with the volume pumped to the max till violent noises and squeaks melt what’s left of their brain.

I want the group of nouveau-riches, talking politics, drinking expensive Scotch and smoking fake cigars they never knew they are fake, to put each and every theory of theirs to work, and make “only” them live through it.

I want every Facebook user who presses the “Like” button on a group to swear they really like it. I want them to prove to me that their 1432 friends are really friends.

I want a restaurant owner to eat from his own restaurant kitchen.

I want a Muslim to read the Holy Quran and a Christian to read the Holy Bible, and then dare to talk about true tolerance.

I want an illiterate politician, any politician, to make him listen for a whole day to his own speeches on loud speakers.

I want every “Patriotic” Lebanese who lives in abroad to come back to Lebanon, stay there, and then tell me they’re patriotic.

But I’m easy… So I will just settle for a pair of ear-plugs, and one of those blindfolds they provide for free on long flights. That’ll do.

Happy Holidays!

p.s. I don’t really hate this country. I just hate it’s geographical coordinates, and the fact that unlike a zoo, the animals are on the loose and the visitors in the cage.

All I want for Christmas, the last post of 2011 by Ibrahim N. Lahoud is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at ilahoud.wordpress.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://ilahoud.wordpress.com/.

©2011 – Ibrahim Lahoud

Shame…

Shame on the country where religion is politics and politics are religion.

Shame on the country that doesn’t protect those who protect it.

Shame on the country that doesn’t advertise from what it creates.

Shame on the country that doesn’t say what “it” thinks.

Shame on the country that doesn’t believe in what it preaches.

Shame on the country that doesn’t respect what it forces others to respect.

Shame on the country that doesn’t aim as high as those who carry it far up.

Shame on the country that doesn’t breed from within.

Shame on the country that doesn’t put rights above privileges.

Shame on the country that doesn’t punish those who punish for the fun of it.

Shame on the country that doesn’t force respect instead of respecting force.

Shame on the country that doesn’t dare look me in the eyes when speaking to me.

Shame on the country that exports what it should retain and retains what it should expel.

Shame on the country that brags about it’s grottos instead of its flag.

Shame on the country that puts civil servants above their employers.

Shame on the country that uses the illiterate to educate its intelligentsia.

Shame on the country that uses inertia as its way forward.

Shame on the country that buys its dignity instead of earning it.

Shame on the country that yields to threats and cheers its oppressors.

Shame on the country where I am me on if I am someone else.

Shame on the country where politicians are hired, creeds are slogans and “I” is “Him”.

Shame on the country where you’re as important as your plate number says you are.

Shame on the country that still debates the rights of women to full equality.

Shame on the country where civil marriage is a political bargaining tool.

Shame on the country where schooling fees are a hundred fold the salary of teachers.

Shame on the country where criminals are free and the free are criminals.

Shame on the country where your opinion is owned… but not by you…

Shame by Ibrahim N. Lahoud is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at ilahoud.wordpress.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://ilahoud.wordpress.com/.

© 2011 Ibrahim Lahoud

ARAB S“T”ING

“You suck!”
“No, you suck!”
“No no, no, You suck!”
“No, it’s you who sucks! And your family, and neighborhood, and whole damn town!”

This was a political debate between two Arabs in the know, brought to you courtesy of Arab Spring TV.

Now, here are the options:
1- Either one of the two sucks, and that’s 50% of the population.
2- Both suck, and that’s 100% of the population.

In either case, we’re screwed.

We are a race driven by pure emotions. This renders us inapt to judge, be objective, and consequently, speak about politics. We either do what we’re told, or act upon our own emotional judgement. And both scenarios are scary. Yet, we proudly claim how patriotic we are.

PRIDE
Or is it? It’s amazing how branding can create a revolution. It is amazing how much momentum an embryonic idea can gather when it gets a face and a voice.

Ask the Soviets!

Revolutions are the brainchild of basic emotions. No “real” revolution was erected upon a rational idea. Although rooted in rational beliefs, “revolutional” triggers are ignited by an emotional fuse, one that rallies the deprived, the oppressed, the change-makers, and of course the mentally blind followers, around a basic “feeling”.

Indeed, ask the Soviets. Their legacy of propaganda is still praised today as more art than politics. Yet, how rational was it?

I ask: Whether you live life, or love it in colors, what have you done about it?

A message remains embryonic until, just like in a fetus’ cells, it starts multiplying itself, creating clones of its own DNA, until an entity is born. And that’s what happened all over the Arab world. Having said that, not all newborns are healthy… or alive…

I love the coined term “Arab Spring”. Another branding slash media tour de force.

No, really, spring? What spring? Let alone “Arab”…

Poland had a spring. Arabs have nothing. They never will, and for a simple reason; they can’t agree on a real unified brand positioning for their “Arab” or “Spring”, let alone the 2 combined words.

We’re Arabs when need be, and we’re not when need be. Egypt’s spring shifted from bringing down a corrupt regime to a Christian-Muslim conflict. How cheesy is it to get married in Tahrir square among your “brothers” from the opposite religion at noon, and go get a mosque or a church burned down to rubble at sunset?

It is indeed about priorities. The question is “who’s” priorities.

I’m not defending those regimes, as a matter of fact I’m quite thrilled they vanished, but I am starting to get the feeling that they represent more our inner fears and psychological complexities, than they do the physical nation’s situation.

Why did the Syrians have to wait for 3 revolutions to trigger theirs? Oh yeah, they where learning the ropes… Did it take Tunisia, Egypt and Libya to wake them up? Or was it another case of everyone’s partying, let’s party too?

Spring? What Spring? It really sounds more like Fall…

Everyone is jubilant, but let me tell you this, we Arabs, were never, and still are not ready, to rule ourselves. Comes to me? We never will! We’re still just novices, mediocre apprentices. We’re like that tail of the class student that loves to brag about his or achievements only because mom and dad said so… A pure exemplification of a famous Arab proverb (A monkey is a deer in his mother’s eyes)

We call for help, we wait for it, and when it comes, we shoot everywhere, mostly in the air to express joy, and end up performing the weird ritual of walking on or burning leaders’ effigies and posters.

Oh come on! How childish is that?! Please.

- If the intelligentsia runs revolutions, intelligentsia does not stampede posters.

- If the illiterate mass is running the revolution, what revolution would it be?

- If the intelligentsia runs the revolution using the illiterate mass, they’re not intelligentsia anymore, they’re freakin’ Machiavellian dictators in the making.

Do you have any other scenario for Arab Springs?

You want a real Arab Spring? I’ll give you one:

Nations are made of humans. Not educated, poor, illiterate, rich, Christians, Muslims, blue, red, green, or yellow…. Humans; full stop. Classification is the first ingredient of division, and division will never make a revolution… Look at Lebanon…

Get the humans to revolt. Get the emotions to speak. Be subjective, be real, be you. Only then, Mr. PhD will accept to mingle with Mr. delivery boy, Peter and Mohammed will meet, not for a photo-op, but meet, really meet.

Tyrants and dictator are afraid of unity, nothing else. Divide and conquer was not a ballad title. It works. And we’re so idiotically stupid to listen to politicians manipulating us like Kermits and Miss Piggys.

THE PEOPLE:

 

 

 

THE POLITICIAN

 

 

You tell me…

Arab S”T”ing by Ibrahim N. Lahoud is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at ilahoud.wordpress.com.
© 2011 Ibrahim Lahoud

I’M A SON OF A BEACH. LET ME ENJOY IT!

This one’s for @StatusInBeirut who’s as crazy and eternally disgusted as I.

As we near, I get the scare of my life. Five or six men-in-black (no, not Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith) rush towards the car and surround us. One of them asks me to open the window by making the typical rolling gesture with his finger, while his other hand is already grasping my door knob trying to open. Aha! My central lock is activated.

I slit-open the window and the guy barks “welcome sir”!

Welcome?! You call this a freakin’ welcome? Jesus! This a reenactment of a 1982 militia barrage in downtown Beirut!

What a strange way to start a day at the beach…

Valet parking… The democratization of bullying and intimidation. The legalization of stealing your car for few hours, doing “things” to it and get away with it, simply because on the parking ticket’s, the fine print says these illiterate jerks can.

I politely (just kidding) tell the “barrage-master” that I will park the car myself. He doesn’t like the idea and I don’t give a flip. Annoyed, he points to the far far away uphill parking lot where second class citizens like me shamefully park. He also firmly reminds me not to park anywhere lower. They use the walking distance as punishment for humans and the un-asphalted rocky parking space as punishment for cars.

I drop off the family to avoid them the torture (As head of the pack, I’ll take the punishment in the name of my protégés), and go park. On my way there, I drive by the “luxury” parking lot; perfectly even and asphalted, reserved for the upper casts who love to indulge in the ritual of the Valet Parking showoff.

I take my 5 minutes Golgotha walk back to the resort entrance. The wife has already bought the entrance tickets and is waiting for me with the kids. I reach the main entrance, and before I can reach them, I am again harassed by two of the men-in-black. One of them threatens me with his weapon, a parking tickets booklet, while the same barrage-master asks for L£ 3,000.

I wanted to add an exclamation mark after the “L£ 3,000″ but I changed my mind after remembering that, over here, even hospitals charge you for parking.

They should call the valet parking bullies stuff like 3rd brigade, 1st battalion, 26th company, etc. And the jerks in black should have ranks like Lieutenant and Private…

I try to argue. I understand that you pay for valet, but you also have to pay for parking your own car? After all I’m here to use the facility… I pay and go meet the family. I keep the positive thinking. Few steps and I’ll be in sea and sun heaven…

Or so I thought…

My wife and kids were waiting by another man-in-black standing near a small table right next to the stairs leading to the beach. The stairs went down not up… I should’ve guessed… Stairs to heaven don’t go down.

The guy asks us to put our beach bags on the table for frisking! Now it really felt like stepping inside military barracks! They search your bags, for food! Any type of food… If they find anything edible, they confiscate it! You are not allowed to bring in any food. You are only allowed to eat the junk they sell there. What happened to privacy? What happened to tourism? What happened to my day at the beach? Some moron is given the permission to fiddle with my underwear and towels looking for food… Once more, I comply.

Finally, we’re given “above-secret” clearance to access the nuclear facility. I was already looking for the bomb-bays dug in the ground.

Strangely enough the beach resort had the word “Bay” in its name (Dr. Evil look with pinky on the lips!)

The daily entrance fee is $16.50 per head, a total of $67 per family of four to use the country’s God given natural resource… And that’s one “cheap” place by Lebanese standards… Wait, that’s a total of $69 with the parking… I used to love that number… Now it looks more like a 68 and they owe me one

So close to $70 for the right to use a beach chair, an infested pool and everything else that’s supposed to be free.

We take the stairs down on go looking for a peaceful space to lie down and bask in the sun. On the way, the real Men-in-Black scenario unfolds. Exotic races of aliens from far away galaxies are roaming around.

Lying down, are what looks at first sight like females, with dangling bellies, thighs, underarms, you name it. The only thing that kept pointing upward were appendices that resemble our female earthlings’ breasts, only scarier. They do look like the tip of ballistic missiles popping out of their ground hideouts (hence the above secret clearance). They have abundant makeup on, probably in an attempt to camouflage their origins… They’re smoking shisha. It seems someone told them that by doing so, they will blend perfectly with the local population…

Hairy males with strange tattoos-like markings, also smoking shisha, paint a surreal tableau that reminds you of the Star Wars underground bars on the Naboo planet. Most are wearing strangely eccentric swimsuits, some so loose they must generate a whirlwind beneath, and others so tight and tiny that from afar, these creatures look like the famous Harrison Ford tag-along Wookiee. There was even one outrageously obese with a red mohawk hairdo who swung between a cross breed between a Tibetan bull and a Warhol essay. You couldn’t even put a planet on the face!

I thought it was going to be a serene day at the beach… My family and I found ourselves unconsciously huddling together with fear, overwhelmed by an eerie feeling of being transported in a parallel universe.

We manage to find a corner on the grass, facing the beach. We settle and establish a perimeter.

The ritual starts. Sunscreen for the family, tanning cream for me. They’re trying to mimic aliens from a planet with no sun, while I’m striving to resemble the ones from a three-suns system. Hey! I love my tan lines.

It’s almost noon and I was still looking for the sun behind thick grey clouds that get intercepted by the mountains on their trip east. I did not pay to see some cumulonimbus flirting with a hill! Did you notice how it always gets suddenly cloudy the minute you reach the beach?

Humidity and heat make you thirsty. Ok, that was a cheap excuse to justify the cold beer I was craving for. Earlier, I noticed young waiters roaming around, clueless university students on a summer job, dressed in an alarming red to be easily recognized among the numerous alien species. I hail one (on all frequencies) but it was a long shot. Waiters become suddenly invisible when you need them or uncomfortably close when you don’t?

I had to stand up and walk towards the young woman boringly making circles around the pool on the other versant of the resort. Once I got to her, I had the instinct of asking if “I” could get her anything! I nicely request that she follows me to my quarters to take the family’s order. Two lemonades with no ice, one Coke and a Mexican Almaza. She carefully takes the order, repeats it, smiles and leaves. Then she remembers, turns back and says: “My name is Hoda if you need anything.” Yeah! I need your phone number… For my next order, while you’re exercising around the pool.

A dehydrating half hour later, she arrives with the order. Two lemonades full of ice, a coke and a plain beer… I start looking around for the candid camera. Having found none, I nicely and patiently repeat the order, using my university teacher’s patience and set of nerves. Hoda apologizes, and rushes back to the kitchen, leaving my wife, daughter and I watching with lust my son sipping his chilled coke. When she finally comes back with the right order, I suddenly get this eerie vision: Who removed the ice cubes from the lemonades… And how…

We try swimming in the sea but it is infested with jellyfish and aliens making strange sounds… Probably some sort of ritual where they offer psalms to their divinities. We go try the pool.

The pool…

Let me put it this way, it reminded me of SeaWorld in Miami, Florida. The difference? Bacteria replaced dolphins, the water was yellow (you know which hue I’m talking about), hairy aliens replaced orcas, and the female aliens replaced the dancing seals.

As for smell… Ummm… Yep! Same as SeaWorld!

We reluctantly decide to leave it at sunbathing for today, or more accurately sun quest. We walk heads down back to our seats. It was already around 2 in the afternoon. Hungry. Lunch. Since the sun was shy, we opt to go eat at the restaurant.

That was a big mistake.

We step into the out of context restaurant. It has got nothing to do with the rest of the resort’s decor or mood. We find a table, sit and wait. Another young woman comes with the menus. So far so good. We order. This is where you could feel as if the crew had conspired against us. Again, three out of four orders were wrong. Not to mention that at first they got us the order of another table and I had to swear on the constitution that it was not ours! (We do have a constitution, right?)

My daughter’s order took exactly 45 minutes to be served after the original 20 minutes of waiting to get the wrong one. We tried to wait and eat with her but our food got already cold. I check with four waiters and the four had to ask again about what we ordered, check with some manager and burp the same answer, it’s on the way. I should have asked “on the way” from where?!

Almost two hours later, we finished what seemed like a death-row meal and headed back to our beach chairs. Now comes the music.

House, trance, you name it, playing from huge speakers, so loud we could not have a conversation, literarily. I remember my ears buzzing when we left, the same feeling you get when leaving a night club after a long night out.

It was so bizarre. House, trance and shisha! Kids building sand castles and teens dancing pornographically on the bar facing us. To top it all, a group of foreign Arab workers decided it was the perfect time to clean the lawn in front of us. Six or seven of them were grasping anything that fell under their hands while their heads were tilted 90 degrees towards my wife and daughter. One of them even stared at me for a while… Eeeewww!

That was it. We’ve seen enough of the freak-show ride. We packed and left. At the main entrance, I got again harassed by the valet parking battalion and had to tell them I parked my own car. They always give you the “Oh, you’re one of those” look.

This was the story of a day at one of the well known beach resorts in Jbeil.

The minister of tourism must have got it wrong. Working at the ministry does not mean you’re the tourist!

The owners of the place got it wrong as well. Neither Frisking me for food at the entrance will make me love the place more, nor charging me an arm and a leg for a plastic beach chair. They should ponder the word-of-mouth effect for a while…

The valet parking people got it all wrong. You are not an army! You are people who park cars for Heaven’s sake!

But the one who really got it wrong is me! The fact of assuming that a beach resort in Lebanon could be professional for a change was a silly thought. I repeatedly keep falling in the same pit. The only positive outcome Is that it feeds my blog.

So stop telling me about how beautiful the country is and all the tourism crap. We suck. The country sucks. Politicians and ministries suck! Greed and complacency are our only motto.

Bottom line? I wonder what the visiting aliens will think of us, the sons of beaches, and the embarrassing stories they will tell their hatch-lings when they beam back home…

I’m a Son of a Beach. Let Me Enjoy by Ibrahim N. Lahoud is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at ilahoud.wordpress.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at htt://ilahoud.wordpress.com/.

© 2011 Ibrahim Lahoud