Does It Matter That Lebanese Nurses Support March 14?

What loud celebratory gunfire and second-order elections have in common in Lebanon.

The measure of greatness…

Two relatively-new phenomena have been taking hold in Lebanon since we got into our famed political standstill. The first is the increasing importance partisan media is placing on second-order elections. News websites are spatting over the tiniest of university elections and the old media are joining in: Today, for instance, Hariri’s Almustaqbal newspaper run a major story on its first page about the preliminary results of the elections in the order of Lebanese nurses, in which March 14 had a strong showing.

The other is the new habit of shooting in the air whenever a political leader appears on TV. Sure we had that before, but only the holiest of holies, the ones that have beards and promise the destruction of Israel got that privilege. Today, even those who promise modernity are hailed with storms of Klashnikove bullets.

All this is happening because the Lebanese can’t have a real civil war. We would love to fight but the memory of the last one is all too fresh in our memories. so we go to the next best thing: We fight proxy wars in which supremacy is measured by who enlists more dentists or whose gunfires during public appearances are louder.

Well, at least we get distracted until the big boys decide our fate.