New at Reason

Charles Paul Freund asks: Do the Lebanese pop music charts herald the end of Arabism?

Comments

matthew hogan | June 30, 2005, 10:00am | #

"Lebanonism, in all its free and libertine disorder, has been on daily display in Martyrs� Square...."

Libertine does not equal libertarian.

It is a little myopic to include Phoenicianism, indeed a partly fascistic and racist particularism, as an implicitly healthy rebellion against the Arabist collectivist-nationalist straightjacket. Phoenicianism is a straightjacket with cedar and a cross, rather than a flag of gren black red and white, or a crescent.

Lebanon's current back-to-the-future return to its own particularism is only a marginal improvement to its past of control by backward Arab nationalists in Damascus.

chthus | June 30, 2005, 10:27am | #

Matthew,

A marginal improvement for whom? I've spoken to a few Lebanese and read/seen a good number more that may disagree with that assessment of their case.

Perhaps you mean only marginally better for the US, but that also seems to ring hollow when looking in the larger context of further isolation of Syria.

Maybe you just mean for you?

gaius marius | June 30, 2005, 11:05am | #

The video, directed by Leila Kanaan, evokes in miniature Lebanon's violent recent history, and it surrounds Ghandour (who is making a futile attempt at return) with the wariness of those who stayed behind and with the taunting ghosts of his unlived, might-have-been life. Ghandour's personal tragedy of exile, the video suggests, is also Lebanon?s national tragedy of loss.

it baffles me that the resident revolutionists at reason don't see this for what it so plainly is. this is a lost cultural dissident pining a western sentiment -- the faceless angst that is borne of a dislocation from history and culture. so appropriate that a singer trading in the entirely western meme of disposable pop would feel and express so -- as a wandering child of lebanon, how else can he feel?

lebanon (particularly beirut) is a splinter cut off from the society that bore it by the invasion and very successful usurpation of levantine culture by westernism. the modernist condition of beirut is certainly testament to that, and the video's evocation of lebanon's violent cultural catharsis that ended in the reincarnation of beirut as chicago is as well.

'lebanonism' as you use it, mr freund, is i suspect a simple metaphor for westernism -- "pluralism" and "particularism" are the affectations of the western postmodern idealist. if the maronites have adopted westernism most, that is signal of byzantine cultural depression and vapidity, not strength. you correctly link your lebanonism to another manifestation of western mimesis -- fascistic movements.

that is not to say that beirut is chicago -- its mimesis will never make it what it isn't. but the beirut of the 21st c is now so culturally distant from damascus, aleppo, cairo or even amman that it is effectively unmoored from deep syriac/byzantine/islamic cultural history.

you may see that as wonderful, mr freund -- the global democratic revolution at work, the clash of civilizations won by the ascendant west, what-have-you. but i respectfully think you should read your history. cultures collapse from within, not without. the cradle of so many rich civilizations and histories past will not sit happily or long as a cheap western mimic. for all the appeal westernism might hold for some, the response to that western challenge to levantine culture is already tearing down new york skyscrapers as it is fuelling the powerful furnace of hezbollah. this interruption by the west may tear apart pan-arabism for the time being -- but will weld from the pieces something more directed, more focused, more dangerous to us.

i'm sorry, mr freund, but you and mr young and others are far too eager to manifest your western-postmodern-imperialist political idealist agenda by reading success in the collapse of rival pan-arabism into every trickle and crevice. please consider that our aggressive challenge to arabism may be, for all its pomp and force, a desperate display of cultural weakness -- reflected back at us from without in the mirror of a lebanese pop song.

TheDumbFish | June 30, 2005, 11:33am | #

I love it when you talk dirty.

chthus | June 30, 2005, 11:43am | #

"for all the appeal westernism might hold for some, the response to that western challenge to levantine culture is already tearing down new york skyscrapers as it is fuelling the powerful furnace of hezbollah. this interruption by the west may tear apart pan-arabism for the time being -- but will weld from the pieces something more directed, more focused, more dangerous to us."

Why gaius, are channeling Kissinger?

gaius marius | June 30, 2005, 12:18pm | #

lol -- only this childlike neoconservatism could make me yearn for kissinger's pragmatism again.

matthew hogan | June 30, 2005, 10:58pm | #

"A marginal improvement for whom? I've spoken to a few Lebanese and read/seen a good number more that may disagree with that assessment of their case."

I've spoken to a few, including one who flew back to participate and celebrated the Syrian withdrawal, who say what I just said. And most important is the obvious -- going from Syrian bullying, ideology, and kleptocracy -- to the old zaim network. Like going from Sovietism and Titoism to Serbianism. Maybe, we pray (can we do that at Reason), it will be different here.

Certainly the simplistic -- they wear miniskirts and sing of Lebanon -- tells us little, they did that before and during the civil war; heck they do that in Damascus.

"Perhaps you mean only marginally better for the US, but that also seems to ring hollow when looking in the larger context of further isolation of Syria. Maybe you just mean for you?"

I have no personal stake, though I feel the US should leave the region and these events could cut either way. It's just that there is alot more distance to go than soulful regrets of a largely privileged class.