Ghost of a Golden Age
A Hauntology refers to the return or persistence of elements from the social or cultural past in the manner of a ghost.
When I think back, all I can remember is his face plastered all over Beirut.
I’m told, over and over, that this man, this leader, is our savior, that he has altered the course of our country and saved it from itself.
But who was he?
I couldn't tell you, but I knew his name, I knew his plan, and I knew how I had to feel about him whenever I stared up at that effortless smile that promised us everything.
It is said that Lebanon experienced a golden age from the mid-1950s till the onset of the Lebanese Civil War in the mid-1970s. However, following the end of the civil war in 1990, our elders' narrative of what had transpired had been called into question, and, as our little belle époque felt farther and farther away, it was hard to believe that a country like Lebanon could even experience a golden age. In light of the failure of the 17th October Revolution and the ensuing liquidity crises, our lives were wasting away here in the "intersection between East and West" that seemed only to offer us the worst each culture had to offer. It was inconceivable to us that Lebanon could be anything other than a burial ground for itself. And yet, the distant specter of that golden age seems to haunt us, all of us.
Youth, like myself, in particular, are captivated by it. Having come of age in the reconstruction era following the end of the Civil War, it’s not hard to understand why.
We were promised it.
We were promised all the sound bites that foreign journalists covering Lebanon peddled to their orientalist audiences, from “Beirut was destroyed, rebuilt seven times, and will be rebuilt again” to “like the Phoenix rises from the ashes, the Lebanese will rise again.” Unsurprisingly, they were wrong, very wrong, and even if the jaded among us did not buy into their pittances, many of us dreamers did.
It couldn’t have been a crueler trick to play on us at that age because, on the surface, the promises of this period seemed genuine. Lebanon was witnessing unprecedented growth ushered in by Mr. Lebanon, then-Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, and his neoliberal agenda. Lassez-fair capitalism was now our king; market-oriented reform was our church; privatization and austerity were our state. Loans started pouring in, and there were finally government plans to bring Beirut back to the world stage in Khaliji style.
On every corner, something or another was being built that we’d prosper from in due time, “changing life as we know it.” On all our screens, men in custom-tailored suits promised us things, shamelessly name-dropping jargon and buzzwords into sentences that liberally mixed from English, French, and Arabic. All of this was always being commemorated with extravagant events that were too expensive for most of us to get into, but that sure seemed exciting from those standard-definition TVs. Because not having the money then didn’t mean we wouldn’t have it eventually if we just worked hard enough and struggled long enough to succeed. We, the ungrateful children of Lebanon, could finally rest easy, reaping the rewards for our steadfast belief in the lofty dream of Mr. Lebanon, who, with his seemingly infinite money hose, saved us from our worst inhibitions.
But what did the future really have in store?
It’s hard to overstate how much of a shock the assassination of Prime Minister Rafic Hariri was to the Lebanese public in 2005. Despite the string of assassinations of anti-Assad regime critics that led up to the fateful day, Lebanese from all over the world had so bought into Hariri’s vision of a revitalized “Paris of the Middle East” (or “Switzerland of the Middle East” depending on how we were feeling about France that day) that they were convinced that Lebanon just wasn’t like that anymore. We just couldn’t have still been that failed state that always seemed on the precept of war, where it was hard to tell the armed militias from the organized crime syndicates that ran the country as a political elite.
Even the fact that Hizbollah, an Iranian-backed militia, was still flagrantly operating under the guise of a resistance group didn’t seem to temper that preconception. Its stated mission of liberating the Lebanese south had been accomplished years ago by the underground guerrilla alliance, the Lebanese National Resistance Front. However, Israel’s withdrawal only seemed to encourage them to enter the local political scene, and they ran on a firebrand platform of anti-Western resistance rhetoric, a rhetoric that was coopted from the same local leftist organizations within their own community that they themselves had silenced. But no doubt the real irony wasn’t lost on any of us. After all, it was Rafic Hariri, Mr. Lebanon himself, who had assuaged our concerns about the paramilitary group and its patron's ambitions back in the early 1990s. Circumstances had conspired that Mr. Lebanon's Western-backed allies and Hezbollah's ‘resistance’ bloc, which had clearly antithetical ideologies, had found that, for a brief moment in time, their interests had aligned, aligned in a way that would allow them to shift power out of the last oligarchy's hands and into theirs. Worse yet, was that the reason that Hezbollah was the only civil war militia allowed to maintain their arms was a result of a tenuous agreement that Hariri himself had somehow brokered during the Taif Accords to end the Civil War under the auspices of the Khomeinist’s loathed rival, the Saud Royal family, without the involvement of the IRGC at all.
Inevitably, in 2006, another war with Israel followed not long after, and my generation would, for the first time, understand the fear that shook our parents whenever the prospect of yet another regional conflict loomed. Only a couple of years later, our worst fears would then prove to have been founded when the Lebanese government announced a decision to dismantle Hezbollah's recently uncovered telecommunication system and, in response, the para-military group took west Beirut by force, the opposition parties, and the West unable to wrest back any control without an internationally-brokered ceasefire. After yet another agreement in another monarchy in the Gulf that again favored Hezbollah, everyone's worst suspicions had been confirmed. Lebanon was no longer our country, and it was clear it would all be downhill from here.
You couldn't tell that from the hustler’s mentality that had taken hold of the adults who benefitted from the pre-war, inter-war, and post-war cash influx, as well as the unprecedented opportunities for 'self-actualization' through higher education generously funded by foreign powers. In the minds of our deserving elders, the sociopolitical and economic reasoning behind foreign countries offering them these privileges had nothing to do with the geopolitical machinations Lebanon was entangled in. No, on the contrary, the market mindset that had now taken hold. It was not wasitas that had turned them into the overpaid, underqualified corporate executives that they had been indoctrinated to idealize in their youth; it was just how smart they were and how much harder they worked than all the other “failures” that just didn’t have what it took to succeed in this fairer world where the invisible hand chose only those worthy, like them, of course.
Of course, this was passed onto their equally unremarkable children, who would not and could not understand how any of this had occurred. In their minds, the realities behind how their once ‘humble’ families had become the new 1% was, of course, the tireless effort of their fathers and mothers whose hands must’ve been drenched with blood, sweat, and tears after all that palm-greasing they insisted had never happened. Never mind that even their social media profiles had all their political affiliations and extended network of cronies on display for all to see, or that classmates seemed to automatically pair up into what can only be described as sectarian clans inside of institutions of elementary education. Conveniently, these random groupings only consisted of those whose parents were politically allied with theirs or, at the very least, neutral in a way that didn’t offend their allegiances. If you grew up in this environment, it wasn’t hard to see what was wrong, but it was hard to see how strange it was unless you came into contact with foreigners, who were not shy about how unusual it was for prepubescent children our age to be concerned with the minutiae of MENA realpolitik.
In addition to all the political grandstanding, we occupied our time with, all of us were vying for the flashiest European and American brands, showing off our perceived prestige in ways that would be too much for the reality TV stars that were all the rage at the time. Luckily, we had the misfortune of developing our identities with their ever-present branding on all our screens. Subjecting ourselves to diet plan after plan, health cleanse after cleanse, and fitness workout after workout was the new name of the game. And, once teenhood was upon us, a ‘not insignificant’ amount would even kick and scream for superfluous plastic surgeries that only heightened the sense of competition that seemed to exist between the student body of the nouveau riche. All of this just to live up to the legacy of the self-actualizing Übermenschen we had the honor of calling our parents after they had ‘won’ capitalism. To them, what we were forced to deal with was not only an honor but a duty we had to uphold once we had completed our higher education in order to maintain our unprecedented growth. The promise that the late Mr. Beirut had blessed our undeserving country with had to be fulfilled, or else we would live on in shameful mediocrity.
Now, this was all before one of the worst financial crises in history wiped out all of our savings. Then, one of the worst explosions in history destroyed half the capital. Suddenly, we were reminded that we were not past the corrosive political corruption, the stifling sectarian strife, and the international meddling that pitted us mercilessly against each other. In fact, none of this had changed about us at all; it was still Lebanon, and it seemed we always would be.
After that, life would never be the same; real shame would set in. And, for a while, it was a welcome change of pace.
We were finally having open discussions on the taboo subjects that had led us to the crisis in the first place. For the first time, others admitted to putting themselves in debt to fund unsustainable lifestyles that they had pursued not out of any desire but because of the pressure on them to seem successful in an environment where that was never possible. For the first time, people were open about the favors they had received over the years and voiced their regret at being sworn to silence about the things they were forced to stand witness to and could not report in fear of retaliation. For the first time, Lebanon was finally honest with itself in a way that seemed like it would lead to growth, real growth; the growth needed for Lebanon, not to return from the dead, but for something new, something different to be born out of our current predicament, our hopes and our fears. But, like all other prior chances at change Lebanon has been presented with, we would not take advantage of our brief respite from our own hypocrisy.
As the financial crisis and the Beirut Blast became distant memories, the influence of our elders, who refused to accept blame for what they had voted in, retook hold, and they now had to remind us of that second golden age conjured following the end of the second Civil War, the second golden age that their blood, sweat, and tears had birthed and that we, the ungrateful generation, with our arrogance and laziness, failed to uphold. Coupled with the global rise in the popularity of hustle culture, self-help regiments, and the lies of opportunistic thought leaders, another 'self-actualization' wave gained traction with Lebanese youth. The same youth that was told they could accomplish anything had now finally come of age and felt utterly powerless to make a difference in what had robbed them of their futures. Looking inward, they would follow every influencer that promised them a chance at succeeding in hopes they can finally have their own golden age, all on their own, all by themselves, because if we just worked hard enough, struggled long enough, and believed, then somehow the same old system that had failed our parents and their parents before them would work out for us.
