The political inability to form a Lebanese national unity government is meeting a general indifference with the fate of around two hundred journalists as well as press and media staff whose employment has been terminated over the past two weeks, declaring inability and indifference towards the sluggishness and lethargy that afflict society and state. These two events, or shall we say non-events (considering the complete absence of any general and broad reaction to them), are not separate from trends in politics, culture and “media” which are working to erase the features of life and movement on the Lebanese scene. The object of such trends lies in a cultural bankruptcy that sustains and deepens its political counterpart. The traditional story of the Lebanese coexisting peacefully no longer convinces anyone, and its makers and promoters in arts and culture have disappeared, the products of their inheritance now orbiting around “the Four Cats” and their artistic leader and inspirer. Theatrical plays today, which the sons insist on signing by the names of their fathers, say nothing to those who are not impressed by flashy costumes and scenographic ornamentation. Popular wisdom says that the massiveness of claims is what usually reveals the vacuity of their content. The newspaper that carried the burden of the project of the Lebanese entity, and whose makers and friends dubbed the beacon of defending freedoms in Lebanon, followed the dismissal of fifty of its writers and staff with an article by its editor-in-chief containing slander against those dismissed, slander that reaches all those who showed solidarity with an issue in which they saw an infringement on the standing of the press in Lebanese public life. The issue was never one of insults or of stirring up trouble, which is the most extreme depiction or representation a hyperbolic mind could come up with. Indeed, the issue was and continues to lie in how general awareness in Lebanon is being shaped and formed, and in what the qualifications of the people entrusted with such a task should be. Added to this is intense insistence on the difference between, on the one hand, the private property of newspapers and television channels, which gives their owners the right to do as they wish with their property as long as the law deems it permissible, and, on the other, such institutions offering a public service that concerns the public as a whole, and the results of this in terms of the prominence gained by certain names that contribute to shaping a common and “national” social and political stance, regardless of the age of those who bear these names, and of the extent of their understanding of professional ethics. Such a paradox is not restricted to the fields of media and culture, but is rather the product of the contradictions of the political and socio-economic field upon which cultural productions and relations are established. Without easily taking for granted historical and non-historical certainties, it would have been extremely difficult for the myths upon which the Lebanese entity was built not to be confronted with difficult challenges, grounded in regional influence and the shifting internal political balance of power, and, ahead of either one, the change in the world that allowed the state of Greater Lebanon to be established, a change that has come to place the Lebanese every few years before the question of fate and existence. Perhaps completing the picture requires saying that the aspect that complements the raggedness of culture and media in Lebanon appears most clearly in political formations centered around the person of their leader taking control of life and death among their followers (or rather among the general Lebanese population). The sheer size of this scourge can only be fully understood when reflecting on the consequences it has had on the most dynamic and productive segments of Lebanese society, and the extent to which such strenuous paralysis has reverted to it. If the Christians in Lebanon were those who undertook the greater tasks in constructing Lebanon's historical narration and forged the culture that justified this entity and rooted its existence, it is inevitable to say that the other sectarian communities are today, in partially shaping their own narration, only “recycling” ruins and ruminating ideas amidst attempts to use them to build a new country.
