Lebanese Dream

I’m looking at a picture of a small boy. He has a little newsie hat on and a Palestinian scarf around his neck. He’s wearing a flannel jacket and heavy denim pants, which are a little too large for him. His hands are in the air, clasped slightly behind his head. Meanwhile, a man who appears to be a member of a paramilitary organization is pointing a Kalashnikov at the boy’s head. The boy has to be around eight years old.

He looks surprised more than anything else. He certainly doesn’t look scared. It’s like, all around him, awful things are being done to anyone with a pulse (and plenty without), but he’s still at that age that his own mortality can’t quite resonate with him. There is something dire in the air. Death is stumbling drunkenly in Bacchanal revelry: the fires and the blood, and bits of muscles, skin, and tissue strewn thoughtlessly around the city evoke a baroque, almost clichéd vision of Hell. This fact is unmistakable, even to an eight year old. But how does this register with him? What is his consciousness of his self amidst the gore?

I don’t know when this photo was taken; sometime in the last ten years (judging on the clothes worn in the background and the quality of the snapshot). On the website I’m looking at, it’s presented alongside an image probably taken in WW2, from either a death camp or a ghetto. The pose of the little Arab boy almost perfectly matches that of a little Jewish boy in the second picture, who can only be identified (once again) by the quality of the photograph and the style of the clothes he is wearing. At the same time, the gunmen are also nearly identical, separated only by the fashion and the thickness of their garb (the WW2 photo was clearly taken in the wintertime).

Looking at these two similarly surprised little boys, I’m struck by two things. The first is the unchanging nature of these circumstances: a rose by any other name. Cross decades and continents and mass extermination continues to play out as a macabre revivalist vaudeville, re-enacted perhaps for the sake of ritual or nostalgia. My second thought has something to do with the elements of the boys’ expression: it’s a kind of bewildered puzzlement as though a magician had asked them to pick a card, then took his time elaborately shuffling it into the deck and abracadabra! from out of the deck he produced a tortoise. This look somehow strikes me as representational for mankind in general when confronted with the concrete realities of mass killing. Perhaps it’s broader than that: mankind in general when confronted with the very fact of survival in this world that we live in. What seems so obvious on the face of the gunman might as well be quantum mechanics to a kindergartener.


These things happen. They have always happened and they continue to happen completely unabated. Slogans like ‘Never Again’ echo through history like facile New Year’s resolutions. And the thing about it – I guess the reason I feel compelled to write this now, making no point other than highlighting the fact – is that everybody knows about these things. We’re not ignorant. Sure there are plenty of people who just don’t care. But beside them, the rest of us all know about these things and care about them and are sad whenever we read about them, but...but...but what are you gonna do? There are phrases I’ve heard repeated time and again: there is no man who suffers on the face of this planet in whose suffering I don’t suffer as well; and all of the thousands of variations on that idea/sentiment. But what does that sentiment amount to? The suffering persists – both the nameless his and hers, as well as my own. Here we sit, going about our business, suffering as usual, and the narrative continues unallayed.

I have no reason to care about Lebanon. I have some ancestors from there, but I’m not from there and I don’t know more than four or five people who live there. And those four or five weren’t massacred in Sabra or Shatila. And yet those who were killed, as were those killed in Poland and Sudan and Cambodia and the Soviet Union and Armenia and Bosnia and Rwanda and Syria and every other place in the world where people have been slaughtered and continue to be even today, are all my family, they are all me. And when I look around at this wide open field of possibilities about what to be and how to spend my life, I can never escape the terrible weight of injustice that was and continues to be done to them. It gets to the point where the idea of enjoying a nice dinner out feels so loathsome knowing that while I’m eating my penne with vodka sauce and sipping my microbrewed stout, somewhere in the world, people are being slaughtered.

It breaks my heart every time I think about it and I have this terrible problem where I think about it too much. I wonder if I should just cure myself from thinking about it or if by thinking about it, by focusing enough vision on it, I along with other people can force those responsible to open their eyes to what they’re doing and just...you know...stop doing it.