The Lebanese Dance of Death

By LANCE MORROW

In the Arab world, there is a widespread belief that if a child is too beautiful or brilliant, he may attract the evil eye. Parents were once known to disfigure especially pretty babies in order to protect them. God should have arranged some such mild, pre-emptive mutilation for Lebanon. He did not, however.

Lebanon was always as sweet and cunning and ancient and beautiful as the world. It was literate, rich, fabulous, chic as Atlantis in better days. No land was ever luckier, more cosmopolitan. If you drove in from the east, out of the deserts of Jordan, Iraq or Syria, Lebanon was the coolest, greenest, richest land in the imagination of Allah. You climbed the Lebanon Mountains, and suddenly beheld the Mediterranean. Its deep blue waters played in the eye against the snow on the tops of the mountains. The air was dense with the scent of thyme and cedar.

It was a profoundly favored place. No oil, of course. Oil was the geological dumb luck of certain desert peoples. But Lebanon had beauty and protective fastnesses in its mountains. Shrewd and unusual people found refuge there, sects like the Maronite Christians and the Druzes. Lebanon was never really a nation in the ordinary sense, but a sort of charmed collection of tribes. Its pace in the old days was a delight. TIME Correspondent Wilton Wynn, who has written about Lebanon since 1946, remembers the hospitality of the countryside, the farmers in their fruit groves forcing a stranger to accept gifts of grapes and white figs and apples and pears. He remembers the magnificent village breakfasts of arak, kebab, grilled liver, tomatoes, yogurt, onions, eggs fried in pottery pans and flavored with sumac.

The merchant genius of the Phoenicians seemed to linger over the land that Lebanon inherited from them. Beirut, a bright, amiable amalgam of beach resort and international bank and world-class shopping mall and neon whorehouse, was invariably called the Paris of the Middle East. It may have been more like Monte Carlo, crossed with Miami Beach and Zurich. The Lebanese were cultured and vividly commercial. They stood precisely at the intersection of Western and Middle Eastern culture, and took a handsome profit by mediating between the two. They have the highest literacy rate and the only real parliamentary democracy in the Arab world.

Desert sheiks banked their oil wealth there, took their pleasures there. Money poured in. Multinational companies installed their regional headquarters. Lebanese lawyers would know more about Iraqi law than Iraqi lawyers, or more about Saudi law than Saudis. The Lebanese were cheerfully prepared to do anything for a price.

Life may have been a little too beautiful. The evil eye arrived. Haifa dozen years ago, the evil burst up through the floor boards of the civilization. It came in gangs, the clockwork orange, and shot the Holiday Inn to pieces. It came up shaking Kalashnikov rifles, blazing away, shattering a culture. Sweet Lebanon became the repository for all of the bitterest hatreds of a region deeply talented at hating. The amalgam of tribes grew viciously tribal. Everyone in the country got a gun, and, as a desparring doctor said last year, since "everyone has arms, there's no reason to reason. People use guns now to get a parking space." Someone ruefully published a Bullet Dodger's Guide to Beirut, giving instructions on how to pass from one neighbor hood to another without getting killed. Among the almost glee fully homicidal tribes mingled refugees, foreigners and, after them, foreigners' armies. Palestinians and Syrians and Israelis crashed through Lebanon last week. Once, it could have seemed a charmed Rousseauan state of nature. It became the one that Hobbes described -- a morass of savagery and terror in which life is "nasty, brutish and short."

We usually construct our cultures on some predictable order. have society is self-confident otherwise. The Lebanese have by now developed a weird talent for living with the Hobbesian beast; their banks are even flourishing. So instinctive is the Lebanese commercial spirit that the people have learned how to profit handsomely from war. But it still is life in the ruins: strange, inspiring, depressing.

If the fate of Lebanon moves us, it is because the country has become a late 20th century fable of the end of civilization. The story of Lebanon carries at least a slight reverberation of every aboriginal myth of the fall from paradise. One feels an eerie pre monition and vulnerability before the spectacle. What happened to Lebanon seems both a reversion and a forecast. It is a glimpse of the skull beneath the skin of civilization.

Part of the horror unleashed by the fate of Lebanon arises from man's fear of going crazy. Although it was outsiders (Palestinians, Syrians, Israelis) who destroyed the peace, still the factions of the Lebanese themselves have for several years given an operatic performance of sheer, violent lunacy. It is a madness practiced sometimes with savage gaiety: Kalashnikov fever, blowing people apart just for the hell of it, to hear the guns go off, to feel the kick, to watch the woman crumple half a block away, and spill her groceries and bleed to death in the middle of the street.

Lebanon, of course, suffers from a thousand unique vulnerabilities; it is, for one thing, preposterously unlucky in the people whom geography has chosen for its neighbors. But if an accomplished culture like the Lebanese can disintegrate so suddenly, a little gust of foreboding must pass through other societies. "All that will be left of these cities," in Bertolt Brecht's dark words, "will be the wind through [their streets]." Lebanon comes to seem a strange 20th century version of feudal Europe: when the larger armies depart, the law comes again to reside in the trigger finger, or in the authority of certain warlords with sectarian demons eating at them.

For all the fatalism and almost weird resilience of the Lebanese, the awful pageant of their land pains the imagination. It is a dance of death. It expresses a myth of ominous speculation. Lebanon comes to seem a model of postnuclear society: culture and law in rubble, the citizens withdrawing into into paranoia, darting from street to street, furtive,terrified, quick to kill.

--By Lance Morrow

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