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

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 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

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

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

I am almost 52 years old. I was 15 when the civil war started.

War stole my adolescence. It raped my youth and everything I believed in.

Since then, I live submerged, surrounded, overwhelmed by messages of patriotism, giving oneself, defending one’s honor… But also of betrayal, hypocrisy, decadence and corruption. I spent years trying to put both together. I didn’t work. It still doesn’t.

I wasted my precious years – more precious than any other cause on earth and heavens -  stupidly trying to philosophize the basic atom of life, the one that makes us who we are, the universal truth. It was simple, but as everything else in Lebanon, we turned it into an ambiguous complexity. This atom is us, humans. We are life, not the country.

Countries never make people. People make countries!

How hard is that to grasp? It is the answer that makes you think twice. It is actually not hard at all, yet, those who claim building the country are the same who answer this question with “very hard”. They are those who stole my adolescence and raped  my  youth and everything I believed in…

We defeated the purpose of existence, turned ourselves into the slaves of what we originally enslaved to protect our very own existence. We got lost in our own game, fell victims of our own lies and thought, just thought that by creating this big scheme called nation, we become safe, we become someone, we become One…

To top it all, we made it in the name of God!

We had the guts to build lies, tell lies in the name of what we call, when needed, our creator.

God did not create countries, we did.
God never asked to fight for land, we did.
God never asked to establish parties in his name, we did.
God never asked to use His name or teachings as creed, we did.

God never had borders, money or politics. He never used deception or diplomacy. He never lied or asked us to lie. God never had border patrols. He never had a country. God never asked for a visa to let you through. God never said “this is yours, and that is not”. We did.

I lost the best years of my life staring at those fighting in the name of their “own” God. I wasted those years listening to idiots preaching to idiots about fighting for land, honor and dignity…

They can’t possibly have honor, nor dignity when they impudently claim fight a war in the name of God. Who are they to defend God, let alone His land, His word our His cause?How can they then claim a land?

Give me one reason to believe.

I am not a patriot. I will never be. I don’t “live” anywhere. I “stay” where the money I have allows me to. The same money that we created in the name of God, the money that we pay to buy weapons in the name of God, and kill in the name of God. The money that we use to “defend” the prison we created with our own hands, and in total denial, called a “country”.

I don’t belong to any country. I don’t own one. It’s rental!

Today, at 51, I sit and stare at the years go by, watch the same people, or their heirs, blabber the same words, make the same mistakes, claim the same freedom their parents never had, the one they will never earn. All in the name of God.

Is that all these prehistoric idiots learned from God?
How many of those go to church on Sunday?
How many pray 5 times a day or visit a mosque on Friday?
Where are the teachings of God now?
Oh! I forgot, they are to busy defending the country… In the name of God

Give me a reason to believe.

As a brander, I tell them:
You created the dirtiest brand for yourselves and your so-called country. You rebranded God and religion to your liking.

As a non patriot, I tell them:
You spent your lives (and mine) fighting for a small piece of land when you all had an entire planet to enjoy.

As a 51 years old man, I tell them:
Fuck you. Trying to claim to protect it, or claim to make it better, or so arrogantly claim to gift it, you ruined the most precious thing God ever gifted us, life.

As for the son of a bitch they turned me into I tell them:
Fuck you again. Protect, gift anyone’s life you wish. Just get the fuck out of mine and let me live the rest of it in my “own” peace.

I hate you for getting me stuck in the endless unreachable dream of wanting to be 25 again..

My reason to believe is this: God asked us to respect life first, and not waste it to respect countries. If a country can be created without wasting a single life, then be it. If not, it is not, and will never be a country. It is tainted, smeared, disgraced by the killing of those who fought building it… Or just happened to pass by at the wrong time.

We simply defeated the purpose of a country. Trying to create a haven for humans, we ended up creating a zoo, a killing field where the innocent die every day, where the guilty blame it on others… And where the 50 years old, like me, spend the first half of their lives watching it slip away and are spending the rest wondering why…

Sunday is over, so is coffee and the cigarette. Now back to war.

Give Me a Reason to Believe 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

She’s wearing more makeup than clothes… For real! Her lips are so swollen, you can’t tell if it’s the Botulinum Toxin (vulgarly known as Botox) or permanent surgery; but you surely could tell they did not come with the original package from her mother’s womb. She must have depleted a whole lipstick of dark blood-red to cover both lips, around which, an interrupted and uneven line of black liner painfully tries to trace a contour. Her mouth looks like stuck in an endless kiss rictus.

Bright green contact lenses hiding the irises and forbidding the pupils from dilating give her an eerie empty stare. She is looking at you but seems to be in a drug-induced trance. Look her in the eye and you will be in the presence of a Borg craving to “assimilate you”… Her eye lashes are stiffened with the excess of black Mascara and the rest of the eyelids displays a peacock-tail color palette that reminds you of a “Cirque du Soleil” performer… Minus the talent!

The eyebrows are reduced to a hair-thin line bestowing upon her a Frau Blucher look from Young Frankenstein. Poor thing, if she could at least smile…

Her hair makes you wonder how do the neck muscles cope with all the weight… Add to this the whole works, huge metal and colored crystals necklace and earrings. Thank God, she’s blessed with a pea-sized brain to counter-balance…

I won’t even indulge in describing the rest of the body. All I’ll say is this: When we called the coke bottle “sexy lady” we did not only talk about the shape, we also meant the proportions…

Tight white jeans, tight pink t-shirt through which transpires an even tighter bra squeezing her breasts like a baby buttocks and lifting them up all the way casting a late afternoon shadow over the wavy hills of her belly. Bracelets and rings cover her hands and wrists, producing a percussion cacophony every time she lifts her hand to take a puff of her Super-Extra-Wildly-Slim mint-flavored cigarette. To top it all, she’s wearing flip-flops that came straight from some bedroom. It seems that her feet hurt from all the standing outside the shop to smoke…

Of course, to subtly accessorize it all, the gum. Chewing and clicking sounds place her between a ruminating cow and an old ham radio plagued with interference noises.

She’s bored from the lack of shoppers on that hot spring mid-week day. She yawns every now and then, slowly opening her mouth so wide you could see her panties, so loud, whales do actually answer her song, ending it with a long “Aaaakh ya Allah”!

I step in looking for a pair of black jeans to try on. That was a mistake, a big mistake… Although bored, she was not happy to see me. She was actually finishing a cigarette just outside the shop, with a grumpy face, leaning against the wall, right next to a small poster that promoted anti-smoking.

I walk in. She stays out for some time before she reluctantly decide to follow me in after a frowning grimace. Obviously, the aim was not to help me choose the jeans, but to make sure I don’t steal anything first, and second to insure she turns my experience into a living hell as quickly as possible for me to leave as swiftly as possible. She did have one last cigarette while sending a couple of text messages; one to her boyfriend reminding him to fit the dark fumé on his 1977 yellow BWW 2002 Tii windshields, and another to order a Rami Ayache song as ringtone…

She finally follows me in and starts sizing me up from a very short distance, so short I could smell the nauseating mixture of cheap perfume, sweat, and tobacco. She did not say a word, but I kept thinking she did… Until I noticed it was the chewing. So I said to myself, since she’s there pretending to help, let me pretend to need her. I turn and ask if she had black jeans. She points to the opposite shelf of the store and manages to mumble the word “there” between two chewing gum clicks. I smile oh so cynically and leap to the opposite shelf. There was no black jeans either… Damn! Now I have to ask her again. She was texting again with a smile. Should I interrupt such an “intimate” moment? Hell yeah!

“Excuse me, but I can’t see any black jeans there either”. “No?” She asks, “reverse-bursts” a bubble with her gum (Author note: You know, those bubbles blown inward inside your mouth and then popped?) and continues “look over there” pointing to the display at the end of the shop, right next to the fitting booth. I walk to the display. No black jeans… I walk back towards her like on a death-row and tell her. She sighs rolling her eyes upward (but subtly I have to note), continues texting for a few seconds and then looks at me, or so she seems with her zombie contact lenses, and says “Mmmmm, yeah, we must be out of black jeans!” And she leans against the shelf, chewing her gum louder and looking everywhere except at me.

Fine, fine. I understand. Time to go. I walk out, and while passing by her, she says “Ya ahla!”… It all simply looked like a movie played in reverse, which normally starts with welcome, and ends up… Well… with a cigarette…

Be afraid, this is what most of the sales people at shopping outlets in Lebanon look like and behave. I once asked a saleswoman, in a very reputed outlet, for the price in Dollars instead of Lebanese pounds, she went for few seconds and came back with the answer. When I asked her the second time, she went and came back with a calculator and… gave it to me…

Two lessons:
One: If you can’t handle this job, go and be the personal assistant of some cadaver in a remote cemetery.

Two: Shop owners, while you sit in your air-conditioned offices, behind Jean Nouvel desks surrounded by switched off laptops, mini-fridges and fake antiques, some employee is ruining your business and reputation trying to get a Rami Ayache ringtone to work on his $30 monochrome Nokia!!

And guess what? To hell with black jeans, I’ll stick to my worn out denim.

©2011 Ibrahim Lahoud

Shopping… For a smile 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/.

Today, with the advancement of modern times, Sukleen chooses to clean the city at peak hours, ranging between 10:00 am and noon. And even better, they intentionally purchase trucks that don’t fit in our narrow streets. They leave the city clean of trash, and you of your sanity.

Why? you may ask. Humm Let’s see, we’ll try to explore the different plausible scenarios that force such a “clean-headed” organization to pollute our sanity.

SCENARIO 1
Communication is the pillar of modern days, and Sukleen, who has chosen to use its trucks as communication vehicle, was compelled to perform its task at peak hours. So, when most of us are already going insane over traffic jams generated by Lebanese whom vision of a road is a prostitute working by the hour that they have to “consume” swiftly, Sukleen fills our sight with beautiful ads that speak about a clean green environment.

Fine, but here’s the loophole morons: Your trucks run on polluting fuel. When you create traffic jams, you pollute the environment far more than stinking trash. And for God’s sake, what’s the use of a clean environment populated by drivers with nervous breakdowns?

SCENARIO 2
Sukleen is simply a sadistic organization owned by a sadist who enjoy the sight of a mile-long traffic jam halted behind a garbage truck in the narrow streets of Beirut. So, they hire foreign labor from countries where they sleep during the day and who do not speak one work of Arabic, purchase large trucks to make sure you don’t squeeze in between them and the side-walk and flee, and place more than 4 or 5 trash-collecting bins in strategically located over-crowded areas.

If this is the case, I wish they publicly admit it by changing the ads on their trucks to something like “Watch us clean your city” or “Build yourself a career, watch how we do it!”

SCENARIO 3
The garbage-collecting company is simply dumb! It happens. You may be a large organization ran by morons. I mean look at our government!! Someone must have thought that you really don’t need a PhD to run a garbage-collecting company… Sure you don’t… I rest my case.

SCENARIO 4
They simply want you to bask in the beauty of the nausea-inducing colored bins. Their super-duper marketing team philosophized that the money spent on repainting the bins using a vomit-inspired color palette should secure a return on investment. Solution: Make people slow down or stop for a time ranging between 10 and 20 minutes to appreciate the sight. It is probably the first multi-sensory advertising campaign in the country; the sight of trash, the smell of trash, the sound of trash… and the color of trash…

BOTTOM LINE
A week ago, I was driving down to Gemmayzeh coming from Tabaris. That road is already narrow enough, with cars parked on both sides leaving enough space to drive your car with your side mirrors folded. As I reach the entrance of that street, a Sukleen “large truck” makes it in front of me. As it starts to negotiate the street, it brushes two cars and comes to a complete halt when it hooks the third. And here we are, no way forward, and no way back because of cars that have already lined-up behind me. It took us half an hour to reverse all the cars back and take alternative roads.

Common sense says… Hehe. Look at me, speaking of common sense in Lebanon… Forget it. Probably the business of cleaning the streets is more important than my business in branding consultancy. I must have gotten my priorities wrong.
My one million dollar question is: Who’s going to clean the city of companies and people like that? But then again, what’s the rush?

© 2011 Ibrahim Lahoud

SUKLEEN, MOVE OUT OF THE F*****G WAY!! 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/.

At the most visible table in the Shisha café, alone sits a hairball. Nothing fake here, except everything. 60s’ Grease-style disproportionate hairdo on the front, covers all the shameful parts, especially the brain cavity. Hair gel drips from the tip of a short and shy pigtail. A two days beard that reminds of the early neanderthals with the way it reaches right below the eyes. A perfectly straight shaving-line stretches from the top of the cheekbone all the way down to either side of the upper lip. Mustaches that bring back Russian czars memories adorn the lips and bask in the shade of a nose the size of the Khufu pyramid. The eyes are covered with over-sized mirror-coated fake D & G shades reaching halfway to the forehead.

She’s wearing a white Lycra T-shirt covered with golden and silver words in French: “Me, You, Sexy, Available, Now, Yes…” which revealed a pierced belly button. Tight washed-out low-cut grey jeans cover her lower body, so tight, her bladder, kidneys and most of her intestines are now squeezed between her lungs and spine. The remaining cellulite casually bulges and dangles on either side of the jeans concealing a thick golden metallic belt covered with crystals, more words (English this time) and a Huge “P” for buckle. I tried to figure out what the “P” stood for but had to stop… The location was too suggestive to indulge in guessing… Her feet were squeezed in silver shoes with chrome high-heel stilettos. So high were they that it was probably windy and rainy up there… which explains the brain-rattling. She was carrying a fake Louis Vuitton bag on her shoulder. I don’t know what was in it but, from the way it was carving a groove in her shoulder, you could guess her entire vanity chest was dumped in there.

He was in a fake silk shirt. I am still trying to remember its color palette. It was just too much for someone like me who lacks serious color sophistication. As usual, the first three buttons were loose uncovering a half-shaved chest, a thick gold chain with a cross at the end, and a smaller thinner gold chain circling the lower neck. He’s wearing low-cut dark blue jeans, also very tight, with tears, holes and stitches covering every inch except the genitals, which by the way protruded so vulgarly. His feet were covered with a pair of white leather kickers and no socks. He was wearing a huge gold ring on his right pinky, so heavy it was constantly sliding to the side.

She walks slowly but not gracefully. You could hear the stilettos “clicks” on the tiled floor with every step she took. She stops, locates an empty table right across from his, heads towards it and sits on the seat facing the café entrance. She painfully crosses her legs, sending her kidneys to join the rest of her lower abdomen organs right up there. Now you can understand why all that make up; to conceal the red swollen face!

He’s smoking a Tutti-Frutti flavored shisha in an over-sized tastelessly designed narguileh. With every puff, he lets the heavy smoke out from the left side of his mouth in a thick and narrow stream. He pauses, and exhales the rest from his nostrils in a turbulent cloud lacking the usual aerodynamics due to the thick nose hair proudly protruding.

He sees her…

At first, he inconspicuously slides his eyeballs sideways trying to follow her without moving his head. Hidden under his dark shades, no one could tell he was sizing her up. His eyeballs reach the far side of the eyes and can’t slide anymore… He holds the position without noticing that slowly, his head was starting to move in the same direction. Few seconds later, he was literally staring at her, triggering the typical Lebanese macho set of reflexes:

One, his nostrils expand wide.
Two, his lower lip pushes forward in a prognathic spasm
Three, his left hand unconsciously drops and holds his genitals
Four, one of his eyebrows pushes upward

All done in a very subtle way of course…

Still, she notices… Which triggers her set of defensive reflexes:

One, she shuffles her hair with her hands carefully avoiding to drop the extension
Two, she swings her whole body 45 degrees in the opposite direction
Three, she looks at her watch every ten seconds
Four, she checks her cellphone faking to read a text message

The mating dance has begun. Unfortunately, it will never move beyond a mere dance, because in our “conservative” society, it is considered taboo…

Lebanese…. Aaaaah…. Lebanese…

© 2011 Ibrahim Lahoud

The Lebanese Mating Dance 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/.

Why wait for a newspaper or TV news when I can have it as it happens?! If the conventional media needs to know something, ask me!

24 hours news channels have also contributed to making print and news casts obsolete. What’s left for those? Analysis, that’s what’s left. But that’s a different story.

Now, don’t get over excited. Not every new website is a news website! If a newspaper starts its own digital delivery, that does not make it an immediate success. How many new websites do you read everyday, all the time? Really.

Most of us are stuck with one or two sites that we visit all the time to quench our thirst for news. ANd all we do is read the news. Who cares for useless gimmicks and hoopla? Yes, being able to share, print or email and article is great, but that does not make you a pioneer! And it does not either give you the right to invade my screen with annoying animations, buttons, links and stupid stuff I will never use.

THE INSIGHTS
Now, let’s look at what makes us read news at the first place. I think that there are 3 important drivers:

1- Immediacy
News as it happens. I have many times tweeted and read tweets about news way before it was published on leading news sites. You see, we the tweeters, are not after scoops. We do not sort material according to priority to yield more readership. For us, immediacy is the word. We are attracted to news when it happens. The digital age is about living the event, not reading about it later.

2- Relevance
We want to read news that are relevant to us, in any way. And relevance is also child of immediacy, because when it gets old, it might simply become irrelevant. Relevance is subjective, and the winners are those who manage to cater for all tastes. The meaning of “news” varies drastically from one individual to the other. Take me for instance, local news are the least of my worries, which means I skim through the titles. For others, they are the heart of the matter.

3- Discovery
We do not know everything. We never will. But that does not mean that unknown news are not relevant. Discovery happens on well structured digital delivery systems. They guide you through to find out about matters you ignored.

So as you see, immediacy generates relevance, and relevance generates discovery.
What makes what?
It is undeniable that a perfect symbiosis has started to exist between the event and the news. We hear a lot about news that magnify events to the extent of blowing it out of proportions. OJ Simpson was a great example. And mind you, the digital age had not really dawned by then.

Celebrities scandals have become prime news now, sometimes over-shadowing political apocalypse. Why is that? The digital age caters to the widest target audience possible. In doing so, it reaches ages otherwise inaccessible via traditional media unless heavy investments are made. The younger generation has at reach a plethora of digital access points that constantly deliver news of celebrities and the fringe. Previously, traditional media had all these news packed in five minutes at the end of their newscast.

The result, a total blurring of the border between “serious” and fringe news. This blurring has created that ultimate symbiosis, the result of which was a similar blurring of news delivery and audience. Portals like The Huffington Post, AllTop, even CNN epitomize such a trend.

Events do not always make the news. Today, it is about the potential news portals see in specific stories that “internationalize” such stories, blowing them out of proportions, or even sometimes triggering a chain of events that change political landscapes.

Tunisia, Egypt, Lybia, Syria, Iraq; are perfect examples. In such totalitarian regimes, “things” used to happen decades ago… Very bad things… And all we used to hear were bits and pieces of “rumors” that used to reach us days, weeks or even months later, and then quickly fade away in the archive of history, without even having proved they ever occurred.

Rallying the masses is what the digital age managed to do. What’s more, it can now do it in a blink. Like a plague, text messages, tweets and Facebook messaging act as catalysts, bringing millions locally to act, and more millions globally to react. YouTube triggers a chain of reaction that gets engraved in our minds, souls and the Internet archives forever.

Here’s the perfect example: How many emails with attachments do you get with warnings about a poisonous food additive, or “immediate” world occurrences, only to find out that they actually date to years back. The sender saw it on the Internet and simply thought it was happening now, without bothering checking the date of the news?

No one ever cared about Sudan or the Ivory Coast! Millions were, and still are, dying from hunger in Africa, and no one ever moved a finger. Today, thanks to the Internet news delivery, rallies are organized at the four corners of the Earth in support of these “causes”. People around the world demand the departure of dictators they never heard of! Or have they? Today it’s about what the digital news tell and show us. Conspiracy theories about media manipulation by super (and not so super) powers is starting to make sense, to me at least.

THE SECRET FORMULA
You want to topple a ruling monster? Here’s the formula: Start a Facebook group, a Twitter account and a YouTube channel. If you can afford it, start a news portal. Start spreading the news by registering hundreds of fake accounts who end up “commenting” and voicing their opinions in support to “your” cause, then sit and watch the snowball effect. Depending on your means, reach, and magnitude of the cause, you can achieve your goals in a few weeks. You can even create your own heroes as a bonus!

SO…
Bottom line, and the one million dollar question (That’s 710,000 Euros and 2,802,600 Polish zlotys), is it good or bad?

Don’t ask me!

Ask the idiots who believe websites that claim the end of the world was supposed to occur on May 21, or constantly visit websites that claim to turn you from Gargantua to Brad Pitt in four days.

Or ask the politicians who hire web geeks, writers and journalists to help them build a social media universe in compensation to their lack of meaningful social life.

Or, you could ask those who justly use the Internet to spread the news of oppression, voice the words of the muted minorities, educate, entice to explore, encourage knowledge and turn the global mess into a true global village, one where we don’t only meet to gossip, but one where we gather in empathy and support, and share knowledge instead of rumors.

The true purpose of news in the digital age is this: When your fellow human is in trouble, wherever he or she might be, you are in trouble too. If not today, then soon, pretty soon.

© 2011 Ibrahim Lahoud

News in the Digital Age 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.