Pen Thoughts

  At 6:06 in the evening on August 4, 2020, I was in my office, streaming a stand-up special while I worked through some financial paperwork. An unremarkable afternoon, the kind Beirut teaches you to treasure precisely because nothing is happening in it. Then the room shook. First like an earthquake. Then harder, until the walls themselves were drumming. I heard what sounded like aircraft. In Lebanon, that sound has never meant panic; we grow up hearing jets break the sound barrier over our heads, and we learn, the way you learn anything you cannot control, to keep working through it. That is what pacification actually feels like from the inside: a sound that should stop your heart, filed instead under background noise. This one did not stay background noise for long. I ran to the window and saw a white cloud rising over the port. Before I could work out what it was, I heard the real sound. The second one. I watched a shape climb into the sky that some part of me recognized be...

Written by Oswaldo De Rivero From the book:  The Myth of Development The non-viable economies of the 21st century "The social exclusion of human beings is not the same thing as the natural depredation occurring in a food chain, where one animal species preys on another species, as is the case with lions and zebras. The human groups that are preyed upon are not from a different species, and do not always behave like zebras. A human group that feels permanently excluded from the bare necessities of existence, preyed on by the market and by modernity, will finally turn upon its predators, resorting to varied forms of treatment ranging from delinquency to terrorist fanaticism." "The law of the jungle cannot continue to be applied among men without serious consequences for the whole community. Our genes, which are programmed for survival in society, begin to protest that we are being excluded, that our family or social group is in danger. Then, when we reach ...

Lebanese people have to voice the truth that have been studiously avoided since before the beginning of the civil war in 1975. It is clear that through voicing the truth, we will run the risk of causing deep discomfort and we will definitely injure false patriotic sentiments, which have only served to mask the historic dysfunction of our nation.   But it is a necessary reflection, a vital and essential one in a country that have wasted the entire twentieth century without achieving an identity, a viable economy and a developed regime. The process of development in Lebanon is still elusive in the present global chaos, regional uprising and national parallelisms. This illusion of development has to be replaced by a realistic pact for national survival

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes , The Daily Show on Facebook