Friday, February 10, 2006

Alchemy

I'm getting more and more disappointed in our country's leaders. It's incredible how political power, or even the mere temptation of it can reduce our leaders to fickle, backstabbing, shameless peons.
Collectively, our leadership should win the next Nobel prize for chemistry.
Their accomplishment?
Turning the gold of the March 14th movement into shit.

All that goodwill generated by 1.5 million citizens, gone. Lebanon Profile of the Lebanese Political Journal has it right when he says: "The worst thing we have done is let the politicians coopt our movement."
There has to be a new breed of Lebanese citizen - one who, in spite of sectarian affiliation, will seek accountability from all across the political spectrum. Is this just howling at the moon?


The cartoon debacle has taken a new turn. While I stand solidly in favour of freedom of the press, some newspapers have decided to reprint the cartoons again this week despite the violence they have caused in some countries. This to me smacks of irresponsible sensationalism and a desire to sell newspapers rather than a true commitment to upholding the lofty (and often blurred) ideals of freedom of expression. It appears that there is no end in site, the gap between the two camps expanding at a vast rate of knots.


A good article on the BBC website titled Bloggers: an army of irregulars shows the power of blogging and why it shouldn't be underestimated - a good read.


In other news, my lovely Chelsea have had a stunning week, firstly taking down LiverPoo on Sunday in a match where we could have left our goal unattended and the Reds still wouldn't have scored (oh wait, we did & they didn't). Then on Wednesday, we proceeded to demolish another Merseyside team in the FA Cup.
Everton, funnily enough the first team this season to stop Chelsea's winning streak, went down 4-1 which is also starting to look like a good number for Chelsea when playing Scousers. We play Middlesborough tomorrow which, unless reality disintegrates by then, will bring us one match closer to getting our grubby little hands on the trophy. Again.

Tomorrow also brings the 6 Nations again with a cruncher between France and Ireland and a more prosaic game between England and Italy.

Enjoy your weekend.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have been posting for a long time on the need to temper expectations in Lebanon because the political leadership that we hve has shown that it is not capable of delivering on any of the expectations that the March14, 2005 brought forth.

I don't believe for a second that these bankrupt pols would have been able to coopt the March 14 movement without our complicity. This tells me that the public as a whole does not seem to have an interest in anything but busines as usual. And that is unfortunate but the public's right.

desmond said...

Hi Ghassan,
I think a lot of people, myself included, were too optimistic at the time and believed that things could truly change. I don't think it was complicity, more likely complacency - which is why I say we need a new breed of citizen.

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