no, i am not an egg, and i am not particularly stoned here

Hassan Nasrallah poses with Paula Schmitt

Dush and Paula - sue me, ho!

in the hope this will help sell my books...

Eudemonia

This is an excerpt from my novel Eudemonia, launched on Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/Eudemonia-ebook/dp/B006E5JI0S

Enjoy!

Eudemonia

A. P. Schmitt

1

“I grew up worried that one day I’d give birth to the son of God and no one would believe I was a virgin. I had a whole speech prepared for the moment the Chosen One started to germinate, and the only thing I now find weird is that I never thought I was the Chosen One himself, and only because at the time I didn’t think a woman could be more than the container of the elect. One time I had an aspiring zit smack in the middle of my forehead, and I know I should have been embarrassed and I tried to hide it and all, but while the other girls called that my uni-horn, I thought that was my third eye finally making itself known – my uber wisdom was becoming physical.

I’m like that. I assume things happen to me for a reason, and they have a cryptic, supernatural meaning. A zit is not a skin problem – it’s the corporeal manifestation of unbound insight. I see purpose related to my person in every little detail, the universe has a plan for me and I can feel it. Even if part of me thinks that’s stupid, the other part retorts no, you stupid. Later in life I was sure I was going to die at 33. That was my connection with the Divine, our magical integer, I thought that number was beautiful – if you put 3 and 3 together side by side, not like they are doing it doggy style but like they are french kissing, you get an 8, which if you lay to sleep becomes the infinite. Life was written in ciphers and I was anxious to crack my code. Some of it was probably hidden in my talents, but they had so many purposes I got confused. What to do with the striking traits I share with cyborgs, like my superhuman sense of smell? Bionic woman or sniffing bitch at airport security?

Confronted with the burning doubt of what the hell I am good for, I sat thinking on lesser conundrums like the chicken, the egg and the incessant quest for the origin of poultry. Meanwhile, I waited for the stars to reveal their plan for me. Yeah, I meant exactly that: stars with the ability to plan and with an eye on me.

That’s the thing about knowing and believing – the first requires reason, validation. The second doesn’t require shit. It just takes some unbalanced hormones, the wrong amount of dopamine and voilà, suspension of disbelief. People with extra dopamine become so credulous they take up gambling or religion. I myself have no dopamine to spare. My disbelief is widespread, deeply ingrained. I’m the unwanted child of the cynic and the nihilist when they were both drunk on half-empty glasses. I doubt almost everything with one nagging exception – my sainthood. When it comes to self-awareness, I am the first to know I’m nuts and the last to question my sanity. This duality could be a type of schizophrenia but I have it on good authority that if you call it first and say you’re crazy (I’m crazy), then you’re sane, because a crazy person never suspects herself to be crazy.

So one day I woke up and decided to do something for the world, something meaningful, a thing that could change people’s lives. Don’t get me wrong, I feel sorry for those afflicted with messiah syndrome and I’m often annoyed by their lack of efficiency. People are so bent on making the world a better place they hardly worry about their sidewalk. I mean, yes, ok, go ahead and try improve the world, halt global warming, stop war, free Tibet, save the fucking whales, but we’ll be happy enough if you just help the elderly cross the street, recycle your damn bottles, learn to fucking vote. But of course, not me – those were way too small for my mission. I did some of those things and was rewarded with instant gratification, but then I thought:

Am I not being selfish with the world?

How could I limit the scope of my interference when I had more means than the average Joe and could thus do more for the world than recycling my bottles? Even my physical beauty, always searching for a tangible purpose – how could I confine it to the emptiness of fashion just for the hope of saving a bunch of seal cubs? And how best to join these two powers together, attractiveness and intelligence, into something truly useful? These two unmerited gifts must come with a burden, I thought. With a point. So I pondered: what do I want to do? And then I re-pondered: what must I do? Because the problem when you get the calling is that you may not unscramble it well. I knew I was being called, I just couldn’t tell what I was being called for. It was nothing small, that much I knew. Having a baby? Riiight. Planting a tree? Nah. Writing a book? Too much trouble. I thought I should do something meaningful, far-reaching, and yet something that didn’t require much work. (That’s when my reason always kicks in, by the way, in applying the law of the least effort, the only law I really bow to.)

So I considered my multi-purpose task:

1) help the world be a better place;

2) inspire people;

3) perpetuate my teaching.

How can I do all of that at once, with one single strike? And it dawned on me, at dawn no less, that I should kill someone.

Yeah, I know, killing is not cute – it’s messy and it horrifies people, who then go to the movies to see people being killed. But I was never horrified. When it comes to death and killing I always felt very natural about it, even as a child. For a long time I thought Thou shall not kill was a statement unfairly singling out this guy, Thou, and I just wanted to know who did Thou kill to deserve the mention. I can’t lie about it: I looked up to Thou. Later when I saw the other commandments I had to ask my dad what drug was Thou taking – the guy was on a rampage. I was eventually very happy to know he didn’t exist, because the murderous Thou I admired would never bear false witness. Never.

I imagine most people think the power of killing is one that should not belong to men. But, please, let us not be so adamant about killing, will us? There is a taboo against murder that’s very boring, it makes me yawn. Like death, killing is just part of life, yet try telling anyone something that includes the phrase ‘when you die’ and see the reaction. It’s rather poignant that humans cannot accept the one true certainty we are born with, that all those eons of guaranteed ending haven’t managed to make the ending any more acceptable. And if death is taboo, killing is an even bigger one, because it’s death by design. But then, consider this: What human would have objected to my attending a parade of the Third Reich and putting a bullet into the fuehrer’s head? It’d be very hard to find someone who’d blame me if I had chosen to kill Hitler. Now, if that is the case – and I believe it is – then we have established that people are not so inflexible against killing – it’s just a matter of finding the right target.

So I figured killing would be my way of helping the world. Of taking a stand, making a few things right. I had this feeling I could be fairer than most judges I knew of. And what do judges do? Well, for one, they sentence the criminal to prevent him from repeating his crime. But, more important than that, the punishment serves as a warning to future criminals, something that will pre-emptively hamper similar crimes. ‘Hmm…’ I thought, ‘what type of crime do I want to hamper?’

But I didn’t need think too hard. There is one crime that is almost never discouraged here, on the contrary – it’s mostly praised, rewarded, and serves as an inspiration. The criminals usually make it to the cover of magazines, Man of the Year type of thing. People grow up wanting to be exactly like that. It’s practically taught in universities. What is the crime? Corruption.

Surely I don’t mean small-time corruption. Yeah, yeah, corruption is corruption in any form, with any amount, and you may even want to include in the definition things like jumping the line and bribing the maitre d’. But as I said before, I think big. The people injured by those misdemeanours are so few, and the harm is so small, that I say just go soc the jumper on the mouth and send him to the end of the line. What I’m talking about is not that type of corruption, that you can fix yourself. Let us optimise my powers here, please, I hate waste. (It’s like that managing-editor I had, who paid me a fortune to research and write, and one day he sees me asking the assistant to make photocopies. He then makes a Marxist face, the bonus-stuffed bastard, and says, ‘In this newsroom we all make our own photocopies, we’re equal’ (some damn weird definition of equality) to which I reply ‘Then you must be a stupid manager, and this must be the most expensive photocopy ever.’)

Yes, I was fired, and no, he is not on my death list. Digression.

When I say corruption I mean corruption of the worst form, corporate-political thievery, the one that is part of the rules and regulations, the sort of crime that makes dishonesty legal with the strike of a pen or the swift rental of a judge. I wanna get those guys who know they will never enter a courtroom through the right door because they are the very ones making the laws, squeezing, stretching, bending them forward and fucking them from behind.

So I made that decision, and was beginning to get ready for action. It had to be done in the right way, not only because killing was complicated but because I wanted to make sure it would become an inspiration, something to scare the bejeezus out of every white-collar criminal for years to come. I wanted others to follow in my footsteps. I wanted to create a precedent. I wanted future criminals to think twice before stealing money from senior citizens. So I had to do it in a way that was going to be easy, and could be easily imitated, something like finding one of those bastards at a restaurant, a Ken Lay type, catwalk up to him, purr a ‘Nice tie,’ or ‘Have you got a lighter,’ and thrust my butter knife right into his throat. Once the killing is done a manifesto is issued and fear will finally spread to where fear doesn’t reach. That’s what I want – I want those rascals to be afraid for once, to be terrorised. It’s the reason why looming punishment works so well – because it’s preventive. Only the guys who are never at risk are the ones who control us, who hold our money, our future, the guys who should in fact be terrorised, be kept on their toes. These are the men who have not one boss, they have millions – all of us – and yet they are never made accountable or compelled to perform. I want to slap one of those sons-of-bitches in the face and say ‘You broke my heart, Fredo,’ then break his neck in return and leave a note stapled to his forehead with a message to other evil-doers, ‘Truth is gonna get you, buddy, and it will smash your teeth, chop your pinky and break your kneecaps.’

Now, get this. I used to be against gun ownership. I thought only idiots bore weapons. But I was wrong. In fact, the basis for gun rights is so enlightened Jefferson would have an attack of cognitive dissonance if he came back today. The founding fathers believed that citizens should have the means to revolt against an unjust government. They believed the state should not be more powerful than its own people united. We must spread the word that guns are not only useful against burglars, they also protect us against the tyranny of corporatocracy and the government, its most obedient slut; that guns may help us equalise some stuff – not all stuff, some stuff. I don’t want to make guns seem more important than they are. We can also kill white-collar criminals with the right injection. With a heavy book. Something in their food. We can strangle them to death in their neckties. We just have to know how to infiltrate, enter their environment, climb the elevator in that rotten corporation until we reach the penthouse office and crack the crook’s head with a paper weight. I say let us all be potential vigilantes. Let us make them scared. Let the miscreants and their enablers fear the streets, traffic lights, restaurant tables, even the corridors of power – because there will always be someone with a bucket and a broom cleaning it. Let them fear every minion worker in the world. Let them be terrorised with the idea that they can never hire a nanny for their brat because she may have been inspired by the same indignation.

I know there is one glitch in this: who can know for sure who are the white-collar criminals? That’s a bitch, because the same papers that should expose the criminals are the ones usually owned by them. The papers may even try to throw us off course. So now the drag is to find the sources that would keep us reasonably informed of the crimes we want to curb. And I know it’s hard to find them. Even the well-intentioned ones have problems. They are often badly written, or way too passionate, and way-er too left-wingy. They think it’s wrong for corporations to fuck us but they assume it’s ok for the government to do it. I don’t get that. They also think the salaries of politicians and technocrats should be small by principle – objection! Get bloody real. If we don’t pay them well, we get only two main types of political candidates: the ones full of good intentions who can’t tell budget from revenue, or the skilled thieves who are there to become rich. The political aberration known as an honest-and-competent politician can hardly happen in our world, because the men with those qualities know they will not be fairly rewarded. So we’re left with the ones seeking the unfair reward.

Anyways, I want to go back to the killing topic because that’s my pet salvation of the soul. Who should I kill, I wondered. Then I wondered some more. And then I thought, wait, I know a guy who should be on my list. (It’s not you, Prof.) And I am ready to do it. But the method is still unknown. I imagine it will occur to me in a dream, or I will have a vision, or someone will read it in my coffee cup. Until then, I continue being a journalist waiting to strike. By strike I obviously don’t mean writing. Writing is tamed, it’s yet another way we deviate from action and stay in the realm of ideas, stuck in the brain fog, living a life of words and grammatical errors while real life is happening outside and we are doing fuck-all. So I thought, ‘Hmm… here is my opportunity to transform my work into some real achievement: I could kill someone I’m interviewing.’ Oops, have to postpone killing, my breakfast is ready. Breakfast of champions (and it’s not me saying it, it’s the cereal box. Uncanny.)”

Sophia got an F on that essay.

On top of a compulsory visit to the university’s psychiatrist.

She named her dissertation “On the Very Personal Responsibility to Punish the Wrong-Doer When the Justice System Keeps Refusing To,” but her professor called it “a narcissistic and rather infantile apology of assassination.”

Tomayto, tomahto.

Iran and the Principle of Mutually Assured Destruction

Like a cheap war pamphlet prodding a very susceptible bully president, the weekly The Economist had on its January 31 cover the question-headline “Has Iran won?” The Economist has lost much of its respect and has ceased to be a sober reference (remember the cover just before the Iraqi invasion saying “Why war would be justified?”) but the magazine’s articles on Iran are important because they spill the beans on the reasons for an attack – a rationale that is as irrational as it can get. There are several fallacies in The Economist’s article, and I am using the piece precisely because it repeats the average, lowbrow arguments with which we have been swamped in the days leading to the IAEA report on Iran. Let us not belittle the importance of a biased press – while not giving us the truth, they dutifully authenticate and spell out the day’s agenda. If recent news articles are any indication, we are no more than months away from an attack on Iran. Now, I have little fondness for Islamic republics or any religious republic for that matter. And yes, I would rather live in a world without nuclear weapons. But in the current setup of weapons distribution, Iran is only doing what it politically should, and what it is legally entitled to.

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is the most widely accepted arms control agreement in the world. According to the NPT, only five countries are entitled to own nuclear weapons: USA, China, Russia, France and the United Kingdom. It is no coincidence that these countries are the permanent members of the Security Council – they are the most capable of destroying the world, and thus keep it on a leash. What happens if one of the permanent members wants to attack another? That is prevented, or so one hopes, by the principle of MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction. Countries are deterred more efficiently, it seems, by the certainty of their destruction. This logic is laid clear by the chronology of weapons acquisition. Allegedly out of fear of Nazi Germany, America was the first country to develop a nuclear weapon, efficiently tested on the Japanese. The US was then made, ad hoc, the world’s police not based on its prudence and justice, but on its power – and willingness – to destroy. Yet fear breeds dread and four years later Russia started building its own nuclear arsenal, as a defence against a possible US attack. Three years later, fearing the proximity of Russia, the United Kingdom also chose to have nuclear weapons, then it was France and then China. It’s worth noticing that this logic is at the core of the very right to bear arms in the US: citizens should have the means to defend themselves – even against their own government. If the monopoly of power was left in the hands of the state, citizens could be made hostage to an illegitimate ruler.

Now, if the US government can be seen as a potential threat even to its own people, it was therefore very naïve to imagine that in a multi-polar world all the rest of the non-nuclear countries would be fine with having five nuclear states dictating the rules. Hence, since the exclusive club of nuclear states was closed for membership, countries that wanted to go nuclear simply chose to not sign the treaty. To protect itself against China and Russia, India got its nukes. Pakistan felt threatened and started developing its own weapons program. Israel, which feels menaced by its neighbours, got its own nuclear warheads, also refusing to sign the NPT. Why, in this scenario, is Iran considered a rogue state, or, to borrow The Economist’s appalling words, should be made to “quake in its boots”? Here is where the whole story of nuclear proliferation gets even more sinister.

Iran is a subscriber to the NPT, and according to the IAEA, as of yet, has never failed to comply with the treaty itself. On the other hand, India, who did not sign the NPT, was rewarded by the American Congress with transfer of civilian nuclear material. The USA also mocks the NPT when it violates its first article by providing nuclear weapons to Belgium, Italy, Turkey, Germany and the Netherlands, under the official excuse that those weapons are “under constant and complete custody and control” of the United States, being there only for storage. In fact, Iran started its nuclear program precisely when it was on good terms with America, under the shah’s government. Why is Iran now considered a bigger threat than Israel? What qualifies a state as ‘rogue’? Is it its ruler? Its people? Its rhetoric and pathetic rants? Shouldn’t a country’s actions, rather than words, determine its level of threat to the rest of the planet? Haven’t we learned that governments, even in supposed democratic states like the US, do not always represent their people, and sometimes are not even actually elected? How can one think America is the same America under Bush as it was under Jefferson, or under Carter, to find a more recent comparison?

Mohammed ElBaradei is doing a decent, technical and honest job at the IAEA, despite all the external pressure. A lawyer by formation, he has refused to skip due process and is sticking to the letter of the treaty. It is not his, or America’s job, to guess the ‘motivation’ of countries. Israel believes its soil belongs to the Jewish people, and that they have been chosen by God. This type of religious premise is as horrifying, though more dangerous, than India calling its first nuclear test the “Smiling Buddha” or Ahmadinejad denying the Holocaust – something more pathetic than harmful. In politics, words mean very little. Actions, on the other hand, mean a lot. It is the IAEA, not the US, which has the means, competence and independence to decide Iran’s nuclear future. America doesn’t have the legal mandate to decide, much less the moral right – the one thing we expect from the police is that they are less criminal and corrupt than the thugs they are trying to protect us from.

Paula Schmitt

Op-Ed published in Executive Magazine, March 2008.

This is a rough translation of my article on Lebanon (Bem-Vindo ao Libano), published in Rolling Stone Brasil, August 2007.


Welcome to Lebanon
by Paula Schmitt
August 2007, Rolling Stone Brasil

Beirut, Friday, 3 pm, my phone beeps with a text message. It is a notice from Basement, a nightclub in the dungeons of an old, abandoned factory, calling for a party with an international DJ, Abe Duque. That could be just another invitation for a night out in a cosmopolitan capital in the world, were it not for a detail that has become very Lebanese: at the end of the message, a reminder that has almost become the slogan for the club gives me yet another reason to go party at Basement: "It is safer underground".


In the first four weeks of this summer, in Beirut alone there were six explosions and several deaths, almost all of them from car bombs. One could expect the Beirutis to get frightened and spend their nights at home – but not the Lebanese. While bombs explode on the surface, they have fun in the underground and on top of buildings. Bars that sit on the terraces of hotels and commercial buildings were resuscitated by necessity and pack every night, though tourists failed to show up this summer. The resilience of the Lebanese is such that last year's war with Israel was barely over and construction works started the next day. Since then till now, in one single ten-block area in the neighbourhood of Gemayze, 14 new bars and restaurants have been opened. Fear – the Lebanese seem to insist – is a failure bigger than death.

When he was here in 1997, Pope John Paul II said something that synthesises the fascination exerted by this place: " Lebanon is more than a country, it is a message". Confined in a small area (88km in its wider part and about 220 km in length, almost half the size of Sergipe), the four million Lebanese in the country represent a social and religious diversity among the richest in the world. In a region dominated by religious fundamentalism, where the colours of the individual are diluted in a monochromatic behaviour, Lebanon is an oasis of freedom in a desert of prohibitions. And I noticed that the first day I arrived here.

After two years working in Egypt, at the end of 2001 some friends and I came to ski in the snowy mountains of Lebanon. The Lebanese like to boast that in their country one can ski in the snow and in less than half an hour be at sea swimming. But the contrasts here go far beyond geography – and that is the message the Pope was referring to. While in Egypt a group of men were awaiting trial under the 'accusation' of being homosexuals, on my first night in Beirut I saw the unthinkable: public displays of affection between people of the same sex. In Lebanon there is even an association founded for the protection of homosexuals – moral protection, not physical. This is because, according to George Azzi, coordinator of Helem (dream, in Arabic), in Lebanon there have been no cases of attacks against homosexuals, as those committed by skinheads in Europe or the United States. "Gays and lesbians have here a freedom that one cannot see anywhere else in the Middle East , but we still have a lot to do in order to eliminate the stigma within the families". After years living here, I am still surprised at the diversity, though I keep bumping into it on every corner.
Images of the Virgin Mary punctuate the city, sharing space with Iranian ayatollahs. Women with their head covered walk by the corniche side by side with friends exposing legs and bellybuttons. At the end of the year, Christmas trees decorate the streets, and in downtown Beirut, late afternoon, one can hear a religious battle that has a charm of its own: church bells and muezzins in the mosque try to see who can call for prayer the loudest. While in Saudi Arabia red roses are taken from the market during Valentine's Day, since this is considered a pagan celebration, in Lebanon even Muslims have the nativity scene at home, in a religious syncretism that would put people in jail or send them to death in other countries in the region. But freedom, like almost every concept, is relative.

Having just arrived from Egypt, where more women were opting for the niqab, the full veil, in Lebanon I felt that freedom seemed to suffer another type of oppression, albeit consented. Women here had so much plastic surgery and silicone in their faces that some of them became deformed. According to data from the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, in proportional numbers Lebanon occupies the fourth place in the plastic surgery rank, and in absolute numbers it is the 22nd in the world. The demand for plastic surgery is so high that a Lebanese bank ended up launching a whole loan exclusive for plastic surgeries. According to George Nasr, Marketing Manager of First National Bank, "the number of surgeries here grows more than 100% every year". But in their quest for impossible perfection, some women looked like inflatable dolls. Plastic surgery today is a little more subtle, but five years ago the permanent black contour on the lips was so ostensive that a friend used to describe the women who had it as "black belts in blow-job". For me, Lebanon was beginning to make sense: good or bad taste, extravagance or simplicity, it was refreshing to be in a country where one is free to copy or innovate, hide or reveal, be what one wants to be – or almost.

In a philosophical contortionism, for some the freedom to show invades the freedom to not see. As soon as I got here I was confronted with a very emblematic example of this situation. When one drives on the highway from the north of Beirut (Junieh, Christian area) to the south of the city (Ouzai, Shiia area), the horizon of billboards changes drastically. In Junieh, billboards advertised a jeans brand showing women wearing practically no jeans at all. But as soon as one gets to Ouzai, close to the international airport, one has the impression of being in another country: photos of women baring nothing more than their shoulders were blacked out with paint to hide what they dared to reveal. According to Hughette Nassar, Sales Manager of Pikasso, the biggest billboard company in Lebanon, the problem is not restricted to the Shiia areas controlled by Hezbollah. "In Dahie (Shiia area) as well as in Saida (Sunni city south of Beirut), Pikasso simply does not show women on the billboards, unless they are completely dressed. It is not the law that forbids the billboards, but the local customs, and we respect those customs".

The only time I needed to cover my hair was when I interviewed Hassan Nasrallah, the Secretary General of the shiia group Hezbollah. In 2003, after having paid them a few visits and having probably been investigated, the party accepted my request to interview its leader, the first exclusive interview for a Latin American journalist. The excessive security is not for nothing: reporter and photographer are two of the professions most used as cover for spies, and Lebanon is considered by specialists as having the largest proportional number of intelligence agents in the world. Two former agents who worked as spies in Lebanon were contacted by this reporter, Alastair Crooke (ex-MI6) and Robert Baer (ex-CIA), but they refused to confirm or deny the information. Regardless of how many spies are working in the country, Hezbollah is certainly one of the biggest targets of intelligence agencies operating in the region. After the end of the civil war, which lasted 15 years and killed around 150 thousand people, Hezbollah as the only militia in Lebanon allowed by the government to keep its weapons. Unlike other groups in the civil war which used to fight each other, Hezbollah was created with the declared objective of fighting for the liberation of Lebanon, occupied by Israel.

But nothing is clear or definitive in the Lebanese civil war. The first time I watched the 12 hours of the longest documentary on the subject, Harb Lebnan, I had to rewind the DVD all the time, thinking I had misunderstood the story. Apologising to the Lebanese friends who were probably watching that story for the umpteenth time, I used to put the blame on my short-term memory: "Sorry, guys, I thought that militia was fighting against the other one, I must have missed something". "No you didn't", was the answer, "you saw it correctly – they just changed sides". But it was not only the Lebanese who fought each other. The list of countries directly involved in the Lebanese civil war shows the strategic importance of this land, and how it was used as a field for other battles. Throughout its 15 years, the Lebanese civil war had the participation (through money, militias and/or armies) of Saudi Arabia, Syria, Israel, Libya, Iraq, Iran, the Vatican, Jordan, Egypt, Russia, PLO, USA, Franca, Italy and others.

One of the scenes in Harb Lebnan that made me believe my brownie was enhanced was when the Israeli army invaded Lebanon in 1982. In one of those paradoxes that are not often discussed, the Israeli army was welcomed to Lebanon with rice and rose water, kindly cast upon them by no less than Shiia inhabitants of the South. This is because the Palestinians, taking refuge also in the South, tried to liberate their land attacking Israel – but those who got the retaliation back on their heads were the Shiia living in the area. The Palestinians, who in large part were the trigger for the civil war in the country, today are confined in 12 refugee camps, 400 thousand of them living in conditions that would put the Brazilian favelas to shame. In their fourth generation, the majority are made of people without a passport, without the right to own a property, without the right to work on any specialised profession, from engineer to lawyer, doctor to teacher, and without the right to become a Lebanese citizen, even after decades living here. There are two main reasons for the almost total lack of rights by the Palestinians, one is openly declared, the other not so much. The first is that Arabs believe that the Palestinians have the right to the land from which they were expelled, specially the ones
taken by Israel after the creation of the Jewish state, beyond the borders sanctioned by the United Nations. The other reason is that in Lebanon the political power is shared among the religions, according to the number of citizens in each religion. If 400,000 Palestinians were naturalised, the power – numerical and therefore political – would be in the hands of the Sunnis, the religion of the absolute majority of Palestinians refugees in Lebanon.

For those who think there was only one concept of democracy, the Lebanese political system is an eye-opener. So far, the concept of democracy for me was the one taught by Rousseau: the will of the majority. But even Rousseau made a caveat: the will of the majority can only be democratic if this majority is volatile, mobile, and at each election is composed of different people. If the majority group is always the same, then the system becomes a type of tyranny of the majority. Thus, let us suppose the majority of Lebanon citizens are Sunnis: if each voter has the right to a vote, the will of the majority would always be the will of the Sunnis. To avoid this and other distortions, Lebanon has a political system almost unique in the world, known as Consociationalism.

Under this system, the government is shared among the religions: the president of the country is always a Maronite Christian (the Maronite Church has its own liturgy but accepts the authority of the Pope), the prime-minister is always a Sunni Muslim and the leader of parliament is a Shiia Muslim. The parliament is also divided: half of the seats go to the Christians (among them Greek-Orthodox, Romans, Armenians) and the other half goes to Muslims (Shiia, Sunni, Druse). One of the problems with such partition is that the religious demographics in Lebanon today are different from when the rule was created. Scared by war and religious fundamentalism, and with less children per household compared to other religions, Christians no longer make half of the country's population, and therefore should not have the right to half of the government. But if the numbers do not match, just hide the numbers: since 1932 there has been no official census in the country.

While politics and religion sleep in the same bed, political chiefs acquire an almost holy status, and religious leaders meddle in politics. The incestuous relation causes situations rarely seen in other countries. In my Master's thesis in Political Science about the personality cult in Lebanon, a collection of over a thousand pictures shows how the religious-political allotment of the government ends up creating anomalies – some of them, fascinating. One of the most venerated Christian leaders in the country, the ex-warlord Samir Geagea, accused of having killed more Christians than Muslim militiamen, has photo-montages spread around the city in which he is posing with none other than Christ himself, and with the founder of the Maronite Church. Pictures of Nasrallah, the Hezbollah chief who is almost as much a religious leader as he is a politician, decorate the walls of student dorms along the photos of Che Guevara. Yet other posters manage to be endearing for how much they reflect a popular will, rather than reality. That is the case with the billboards of Musa Sadr, perhaps one of the most courageous and rational political-religious leaders ever to live in Lebanon. Founder of the Movement of the Deprived, the Shiia leader used to lecture in churches and Christian schools, and used to say that the Koran and Science could not be in contradiction. In his book "The Vanished Imam", Fouad Ajami claims that Sadr got to say that if the Koran and Science determined different things, either the Koran – or the interpretation we make of it – would have to be wrong. As could have been expected, Sadr did not last long. In 1978, in a visit to Libya, the Shiia leader disappeared, probably assassinated. But for many Shiias, Sadr is the Mahdi, the hidden Imam who is alive and will return one day to rule his people. Posters of Sadr are spread around the city, with a detail that is almost imperceptible: rejecting the evidence that the leader is dead, in some of the paintings and montage Sadr's beard continues to grow grey.

In one of those incursions into the Shiia neighbourhoods to take photos of political and religious leaders, I ended up in Haret el Horeik, where the offices of Hezbollah are located. With the help of Ali, a Shiia driver, I kept on shooting photos, usually from inside the car, of the pictures of martyrs who died fighting Israel and the Iranian Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei, omnipresent in the area. But at a certain moment a Hezbollah member, tall, strong, wearing a earpiece and carrying a radio, comes towards me and says I cannot take pictures in that area. "Why?" I asked. "Because you can't", he answered. I retorted saying that Lebanon was a free country and he was not an authority. "No", he said, I was wrong: that was a security area and he was indeed an authority. He asked me if I knew anyone from Hezbollah. I was going to say "Hassan Nasrallah", but until then I hadn't thought it was necessary. I said I knew Hussein Naboulsi, head of Public Relations in the party. The man then gets away, makes a phone call, comes back and tells me to call Naboulsi and "solve my problem". I respond saying "the one who has a problem is Naboulsi, not me. He has my number, he can call me". My problem, in fact, was not with Hezbollah, though somehow it is as well, but with authorities that authorised themselves a little too much, regardless of their political inclination – I am almost democratic in my disrespect of authority. In downtown Beirut, reformed and made into a private company whose main shareholder was Prime-Minister Rafic Hariri (in opposite camp to that of Hezbollah), private security personnel asked me to go and register in Solidere, the company that manages the area, so that I could use my movie camera. "I prefer to be arrested than ask permission from a private company to film a public area", I said. It worked. But with Hezbollah, it didn't. After refusing to call Naboulsi, Ali and I could not get in the car again. We were approached by several Hezbollah agents, all very big, polite, and incisive: they wanted to see the pictures I took. Until then I thought the problem were my photos of Khomeini. In a very broken Arabic, I would squeak "you revere Ayatollah, you put photo Ayatollah all over and I no can make photo of photo?" How silly of me – the Ayatollah was not the problem. At that time I didn't know, but those posters I photographed were plastered precisely on the walls of Hezbollah's security buildings, which a few months later would be destroyed in the Israeli bombing in July 2006. In the forty minutes that followed, Ali and I had to fill forms, give our passport number, contact, telephone, address, and we were taken to a parking lot where armed men were guarding I don't know what. When it looked like that drag was about to end, other men showed up, and with all the education in the world, without touching anyone, convinced me to delete some of the photos in my camera. At that moment, amidst the more than a thousand pictures that fit in my camera card, I see one photo that could help me: there I was, hijab covering my hair, sitting pretty with Hassan Nasrallah, a photo I had left in my camera in case I should need it. But the photo made no difference at all – or perhaps it did, for the worse. For the Hezbollah security men, I suppose, if I were a spy that picture could only be further evidence that I was doing a great job. I had already read the book By Way of Deception, written by a probable ex-Mossad agent describing the way they work, and after that the paranoia made all sense. The book, unfortunately, is not sold in Brazil. When it looked like everything was about to end, and both Ali and I thought we are going to be let go, one of the Hezbollah guys gets in the car with us. "What on earth is that, Ali?" I ask, thinking the situation is ceasing to be funny. "We are being taken to the headquarters", he says. I froze. But I tried to keep my cool. Breath in. Breath out. I tried to find something to do. I opened my camera and started looking at old pictures, remembering the happy moments: my beach house, my relatives, the wedding of my friend Dushanka in Italy, when we ended up swimming naked in a volcanic lake, the… QUE??? Pause to avoid fainting. I could not believe it. Right after my photo with Nasrallah,
there we were, eight friends, including me, walking out of the volcanic lake in pairs, hand in hand, completely naked, each one with his/her underwear covering the hair… My god. How the hell do I delete this? Does it help that I covered my head? The worst part is that those pictures had that bloody little key sign on them, protected from deletion, and I had no idea how to erase them. I started to tremble. We arrived.

The three of us went up in an elevator of a very simple building. We stopped on a certain floor. A door opens. A man with a calm voice, bare foot, and a hand over his heart, says "salam aleikom". "Waaleikom salam", I answer. "Your camera", he says in English, before letting me in. U-oh. Pause to think. Nothing came up. "I can't", I say. "The camera, please", he repeats, in a more serious tone. "Sorry, sir, but I cannot give you my camera". "Why? What is in there?" he asks. "Personal pictures", I try. "Personal?" "Yes, personal, private". "I need your camera. What are those photos?" The tension was pretty noticeable. Ali, without knowing what to do, with his eyes open wide, didn't blink and did not move a muscle. The other men seemed to be waiting for an order. As for me, I don't remember well, but I think that in the absence of a better option, I just started to whistle mentally, looking around and conveying the unspoken message that the Hezbollah guy should not touch that or he would need to wash his hands forever. Ali looks scared. And then the Hezbollah man insists again, "Give me that camera". At that point I was not mentally whistling anymore. I became afraid that I could be dealing with an Islamic fundamentalist who, lacking the grounds to accuse me of being an Israeli spy, would arrest me for indecent exposure. He insisted: "What are those pictures?" Ali looked at me. I looked at Ali. We all looked at each other. I couldn't bear the suspense anymore and shot: "I have pictures of myself, naked". Shock. Silence. I begun to feel sorry for Ali. But that's when I had the big surprise: the Hezbollah official puts his hand over his heart, apologises and says I can keep the camera. "But give me your phone", he says. The machine, not the number. I did.

Yet my nightmare was far from over. Ali and I were taken to a corridor with several doors, all with a number on it and at the same distance from each other. I didn't like it. The Hezbollah official opens one of them. It was a tiny room, something like 2m x 1.5m, with a mirror covering one of the walls, two small speakers close to the ceiling, a simple plastic stool facing the mirror and an accessory that somehow triggered my fear: an ashtray. "Come in", the man says, politely, like someone inviting a guest in. "No, thanks, I will wait here", I answer, like a guest who doesn't want to impose. "No, no, sit down". "No thanks, I am fine here". "Madame, you have to sit down". "But I don't want to". I could see Ali sweating cold. Someone comes and tells him something. He turns to me and says, "Please enter, Paula, it's better". I do, and as soon as I step in the door is shut and locked behind me. Ali was also locked in another room. Seeing that the situation was irreversible, I sat down and tried to relax. I begun singing a bossa-nova in Arabic, which despite the strangeness of the language, is probably the most beautiful version ever recorded of Sabia, from Chico and Tom, transformed in Min Zaman by the Lebanese Paul Salem. But I had forgotten the lyrics and preferred to stop singing, afraid I would say something wrong (like the day I was searching for a restaurant called Saiah, a proper name, and ended up asking where was the restaurant "Sahioun". Facing the most puzzled look in the world, someone was kind enough to tell me that there would hardly be a restaurant in Lebanon called "Zionist". Despite all the odds, there is indeed one - Sahioun is also a family name.) And the life in the cubicle was boring. I didn't have much to do. I looked at myself in the mirror. I stared and stared. I got tired of my face and, in the interminable infinite of the next minutes, I started making funny faces in the mirror, in case there was someone behind it as bored as I was. While I made funny faces and saw nothing beyond that, everything was fine. But then from behind the mirror a door opened and, with the light that got in, I managed to see two guys laughing like malignant gargoyles, bwaahahaha – that, of course, was my mind reinterpreting what was certainly inoffensive laughter, provoked by my own funny faces. But the mind is something really fascinating, and a mind with fear is even more so. In a matter of seconds, I remembered the most sordid details of the book "An Evil Cradling", the real story of a professor in the American University of Beirut who was kidnapped during the civil war by a shiia movement (not Hezbollah, probably Islamic Jihad in Lebanon). In captivity for four years, Keenan was used as exchange currency between fundamentalists groups and foreign governments involved in the civil war. In one of the most terrorising passages, the author is approached by one of the wardens. Kind and nice, the guardian asks Keenan to teach him English. Happy to have a
purpose and make a friend in the solitude of that dungeon, Brian Keenan teaches English to his captor everyday. But the same man who was so docile during the day comes at night to Keenan's cell and, with a voice forcefully different, screams at his captive saying things like "you, aids, fuck, America satan" while beating the hell out of Brian Keenan. When I saw those two gargoyles laughing, the whole thing came to my mind and I had only reaction: I started hitting the door with my hands, so hard and frantic that they started to bleed. I transferred the task to the feet, kicking the door while screaming "moukhabaratak khara" – your intelligence service sucks. Under a lot of stress, silly me started to 'threaten' Hezbollah, saying that from then on they would have me as an enemy. I certainly didn't scare anyone and at that point the gargoyles may have been rolling on the floor with laughter, but after eternal ten minutes (yes, it was only that), the door opened and the man returned with my telephone, apologising, again with his hand over his heart, bowing in a sign of respect. And I, like a child who realises that someone else realised she fell down, finally begun to cry.

According to Amal-Saad Ghorayeb, a scholar in the Carnegie Endowment for Peace and author of Hezbollah: Politics and Religion, one of the best-selling books about the group, "Hezbollah does not pursue religious objectives but strategic, political and social ones". Indeed, the Party of God is more rational than its name suggests. And it is hard to see this rationality outside of Lebanon. One of the quaintest religious celebrations in the world is the Ashoura, when the Shiia commemorate the assassination of Hussein, grandson of Prophet Mohammed, in 680. Every year, shiia followers gather in several cities in the Middle East and simulate Hussein's suffering in a ritual of self-flagellation. In Nabatieh, south of Lebanon, the spectacle is more grotesque than in places like Iraq, and it is reserved for those who have no problem with someone else's blood. Men of different ages, including children, queue up to have their forehead cut by a knife, generally with one single strike, in a part of the forehead from where the blood spurts more easily. The blood bath is supposed to denote faith, but what I really noticed was the good old macho exhibitionism taking a form I had not seen yet – the more the blood, the bigger the pride. What many people don't know is that, despite being an old shiia tradition, every year the leader Hassan Nasrallah goes on TV and, condemning the ritual, tells the Shiia followers the same thing: he recommends that instead of wasting blood, people donate it to hospitals.

In a country where critical thinking and religious dogma walk together, though avoiding the same sidewalk, extreme contradictions happen even in areas where the residents share the same religion. Baalbeck, a predominantly shiia city where Hezbollah has the majority of the votes, is looking more and more like Iran, and women cover themselves with the chador. In the town that boasts the largest temple in the world dedicated to Bacchus, it is hard to find alcohol beyond the Palmira Hotel, and drug consumption is seen as anathema, even of the local hashish, the famous Red Lebanese – in the good old times, hashish export was one of the biggest source of foreign currency in Lebanon. Today, with hashish production all but forbidden by the United States through the pressure of entities like USAID and the World Bank, plus the threat of being included in lists like the Axis of Evil, Lebanon is destroying its plantations – and poverty keeps on increasing. The produce that replaced hashish, among them the tomato, unfortunately doesn't fetch the same price per kilo. (Meanwhile, in America there are already 12 states where the medical consumption of cannabis is legal, and in at least one of them, New Mexico, a recent law determines that the state itself plant and distribute the cannabis). For the Lebanese economist Marwan Iskandar, "it seems a bit perplexing that Lebanon has to abandon growing hashish to please the US and UN authorities over a restriction that has become debatable (…). While Lebanese farmers suffer loss of income, hashish smokers in the US, the UK, Holland and other European countries enjoy the produce of Turkey and Afghanistan". But notwithstanding the US and Hezbollah, one can still get hashish in Baalbeck, even if it is hard to find the rolling paper – hard, that is, to the uninitiated. To evade the whistleblowers and the nosy, hash consumption created a small anomaly that may be making knots in the heads of some Japanese executives.

As an homage to god (god Bacchus), a group of friends went out to find rolling paper. I went with them. In the car, one of them, a resident of Baalbeck, insisted that we searched for a pharmacy or supermarket. I found it strange, since rolling paper in Lebanon is bought from petrol stations and newsstands (the Brazilian Aleda, transparent, is the best selling paper in many places). Stopping by a supermarket, my friend chose not to leave the car but insisted: you can ask for the paper, they have it. We asked the cashier and, without looking at us, he pointed at the cosmetics shelf. We were intrigued, looking at the shelf and seeing nothing. Noticing we were not locals, the cashier came closer and took from the shelf the most unlikely rolling paper I have ever seen, after the pages of the New Testament: a little pack by Shiseido with a wad of "oil blotting paper", a rice paper that absorbs excessive oil from the skin without messing the makeup. The Shiseido executives must be having smoke coming out of their brains trying to figure out how such product would sell so well precisely in an area where so many women chose to wear the chador.


Hashish is used practically in the whole Middle East region. There are no statistics but one can find hash with ease in places like Egypt, and even in Saudi Arabia. In Lebanon, during the civil war hash became currency used to buy weapons from Israeli soldiers who occupied some areas in the country. One of the stories I know was told by a former member of the Christian militia Lebanese Forces. In one of his dealings to buy and sell weapons, he was left with a brick-size piece of hash. With so much abundance, the guy threw a party in his chalet in the mountains, turned on the fireplace and, as he was not a smoker himself, placed the hash brick among the wood, burning more than two kilos of the drug in one go. Last summer, one of the complaints of the Israeli youth during the war was that hashish had disappeared from Israel – during its conflict with Lebanon, drug smuggling between the two countries was stopped. But stories of the war are rarely so harmless. One of them is so extraordinary that it seems to have been made up – but it hasn't.

In Marjayoun, a mostly Christian village in the south of Lebanon, the situation seemed awful for General Adnan Daoud in August 2006. Near the border with Israel, with missiles and rockets flying over his head, the general led a small military-police joint force that could barely protect itself, let alone the local residents. A few days from the end of the conflict, the post of General Daoud was invaded by the Israeli army in what would still become one of the most surreal stories of the latest war. Under the threat of a military power infinitely bigger than his, and incapable of defending his troops, the general didn't hesitate: when he was invaded, he applied what the Lebanese do best, the hospitality, and served tea to the invaders. Inviting the Israelis to come in, the general showed them that there were no Hezbollah guerrillas in the place, and that his arsenal was practically harmless. But the civility was not reciprocated – nor the honesty.

According to accounts of the Israeli soldiers themselves confirming Daoud's version, the general's hospitality was going to be rewarded: around 3,000 refugees and soldiers would be able to leave the town in safety, in a convoy that would leave from a specific place and time. Despite the agreement, in an outcome that many Arabs see as a lesson about the Israeli style, the convoy followed the pre-determined route at the right time, but even then was bombarded by the Israeli Air Force, killing at least seven people and hurting dozens. But Daoud's drama was far from over. Adding insult to injury, the Israeli visitors, ill-mannered, had filmed the Lebanese hospitality and showed the scenes to the whole world. In utter disgrace, Daoud saw himself showing the premises and serving tea to the invaders. Daoud was arrested, and policemen that did not even participate in the story had to swallow for a long time the humiliation of having cars passing by their station and people screaming from the window "Can I have some tea, please".

But Israel, despite being the only country officially in a state of war with Lebanon, is not its only enemy. Since 2005, politicians who had previously had an unctuous relationship with Syria begun to resent the neighbour's power and its intrusion in local politics – till then, practically no politician could be elected in Lebanon without the blessings of the Assad family, which has been ruling Syria for the past 37 years. The group's major demand became the withdrawal of Syrian troops, which had been stationed in the country since the civil war with the consent of Lebanon, which needed an external power to protect the Lebanese against the Lebanese. Rafiq Hariri, the billionaire who was five times prime-minister, responsible for a large part of the debt and corruption in the country but also for its post-war reconstruction, decided to head the anti-Syrian movement. In February 2005, with a blast that broke windows in buildings two kilometres away from the scene, 300 kg of explosives killed Hariri and at least 20 other people. After that, other politicians and journalists opposed to Syria were killed, usually in car-bomb explosions, one of them gunned down in broad daylight, in the middle of traffic. I asked Saad Hariri, the son who inherited his father political sceptre, if he saw any possibility, albeit remote, that
Syria was not responsible for those crimes. "No", he said. "All the people assassinated followed the same political line. Maybe the tool was different, but the source was the same". The last victim was murdered in June. The government, which still has a small majority in parliament, has its members hiding somewhere – if three more die, the government loses its majority and may be toppled.

Since Hariri's assassination Lebanon has been divided, despite the supposed union resulted from the war with Israel. To explain in a simple way a question that is beyond complicated, on one side of the divide there is the government, in its majority Christian and Sunni Muslim, which after the withdrawal of the Syrian troops has been demanding the disarming of Hezbollah. On the other side there is Hezbollah, Syria, and some Christian parties allied more out of political convenience than ideology. According to Hezbollah's rhetoric, the opposition alleges that the army doesn't have the power to defend Lebanon against an Israeli attack, and therefore Hezbollah's weapons are justified. They are also against the International Tribunal that will try the suspects of Rafiq Hariri's assassination and of the other politicians and journalists, adversaries of the Syrian regime. The government accuses the opposition of playing the game of Syria and Iran, the biggest supporter of Hezbollah. The opposition accuses the government of following orders from America and Israel. Last year, tension increased when sympathisers of the opposition camped in downtown Beirut .

Since December 1st, hundreds of tents and hundreds of Hezbollah members changed the layout of downtown Beirut. Camped in front of the prime-minister's office, they demand a new government in which the opposition would have more power in order to, among other things, vetoed the creation of the international tribunal. Months after a war with Israel that left more than 1,200 dead, destroyed more than 80 bridges, several telecommunications antennas, exploded water reservoirs and polluted the beaches with oil spills, the occupation of downtown Beirut is another blow against the Lebanese economy. Full with bars, cafes, shops and nightclubs, the capital's centre is one of the biggest attractions for rich Gulf tourists. After the 9/11 attacks, Arab tourists who ceased to be welcome in Europe and United States come to Lebanon to spend their money, fomenting an industry that until recently was Lebanon's third largest source of foreign income.

Today, downtown Beirut is practically dead, and that is more owed to Hezbollah than Israel – so says Michael Karam, editor of Executive Magazine, one of the best-selling English-written business magazines in the Middle East . According to Karam, "Since the occupation of downtown by Hezbollah sympathisers, 80 commercial establishments have been closed". According to Paul Ariss, president of the Restaurant and Nightclub Owners Association, 30 of those businesses closed permanently. As soon as Hezbollah militants started to replace tourists, an ideological war started. This time, the weapon was the billboard.

In the advertising war that took place, sympathisers of the government and the opposition started to spread billboards around the city. Using the heart sign to replace the verb 'to love', the two sides were fighting to prove who loves Lebanon and life the most – or who can spend more money claiming so. "I love life", says the pro-government billboard, alluding to the supposed ease with which Hezbollah members give their lives for the party's cause. "I love life – with dignity", retorted Hezbollah. The pro-government executives then tried to clarify their concept of life: "I have school", "I am going to work", "I want to go out", said the billboards. "I love life without foreign interference", insisted Hezbollah, accusing the government of extra-marital relations with the West while forgetting its own affair with Iran and Syria. According to Eli Khoury, CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi Levant and founder of the pro-government campaign, "we are independent, but we cannot afford the luxury to be neutral". More than 1.2 million dollars have been spent in a war so full of love that was becoming nauseating. The campaign inspired other people and, professing a less elevated love, shops and other businesses started to make their own billboards like "I love carpet", "I love jewellery". Lebanese with a knack for creativity, and without political affiliation, printed their own posters with the photo of politicians and religious leaders from all parties and, above the pictures, the line "I love life – without them". And to prove that Lebanon is a country where Socratian wisdom may bump into people all the time, even I started admitting a love that, years ago, I would only have professed under torture. In a country where almost all levels of the government are divided by religion, and where the army is practically the only institution where all religions are fighting together for a common cause, I painted my own t-shirt: "I love the Lebanese army". Walking by the seaside corniche, passing by people of all colours and beliefs, I hear, even if timidly, Lebanese of unknown religions yelling back "me too".