Oh, Lebanon!

Friday mid-morning some friends came over to play cards and eat a late breakfast. I has been blissfully unaware of the outside world as our TV was not working (later discovered that the satellite cable was just not plugged in hard enough).

Ra'id asked if I had heard the news about Lebanon. What news? Oh, just the inqilab (coup d'etat). Inqilab! The TV was soon fixed, much to my embarrassment, and we sat around watching al-Manar (the Hezbollah station) while playing blackjack and betting with cookies. I was all for switching to al-Jazeera, since al-Manar was playing an old interview and the only news was the scroll at the bottom. But some of those present trust few channels outside al-Manar; certainly not al-Arabiyya, which is owned by the Saudis, and not al-Jazeera, which, while better, still is anti-Syrian sometimes.

From the scroll we learned that President Bashar Al-Assad had proclaimed that the not-actually-a-coup was Lebanese issue for the Lebanese to work out. So, I cleaned out my friends in blackjack, magnanimously sharing the cookies afterwards anyways, and enjoyed the beautiful spring day.

I don't want to sound too blase, but at times its hard not to roll my eyes and sigh, oh, Lebanon! But really - a nonstop crisis for months? How many militias and parties in a country with a total population less than that of Damascus? Oh, Lebanon!