Saturday afternoon about three o’clock, I was alone at home in Great Falls, reclined on the couch with my cat Twinkle nestled in my lap, enjoying the latest edition of The Atlantic Monthly. (Yes, Virginia, there are still people who subscribe to literary magazines.) My landline rang, and Caller ID indicated it was Telhas’teeze al Ayrehfeek “Freddy” bin Sharmouta, Special Assistant Policy Liaison for International Issues at the Lebanese Embassy here in Washington DC. He’s not all that regular a client – at least not lately, since Lebanon has had some problems paying its bills and therefore has had to cut back on some luxuries, and even expensive necessities, such as my advice. Nevertheless, it’s not like Lebanon owes me any fees in arrears or anything, so I figured, why not, even if it is the Goddamned weekend?
Tom: Hello, Freddy? How are you doing?
Freddy: Not so good.
Tom: What’s the matter?
Freddy: Tom, I’m back here in Beirut for the week, and it stinks.
Tom: What? Beirut, the Paris of the Middle East? Isn’t this peak tourist season? Aren’t hordes of world-class celebrities and billionaires flocking to attend your multitude of lavish cultural festivals?
Freddy: Yeah, they’re arriving, all right, but they’re not staying very long. I’m telling you, Tom, Beirut smells bad enough to knock a buzzard off a pile of dead camels!
Tom: Really? Are you sure that hanging around in America so long and so often here in DC hasn’t maybe made you a bit… sensitive to the normal odors of your colorful native capital?
Freddy: You bet your BP I’m sure, Tom! They stopped collecting the garbage here six weeks ago, and the daily temperatures have averaged over fifty degrees!
Tom: You mean, over one hundred and twenty degrees Fahrenheit?
Freddy: Yeah, that’s what it works out to if you don’t use the metric system like everybody else. Either way, it’s hot as hell, and let me tell you something else – the Beirut sewage system can’t process toilet paper! You know what that means?
Tom: Um… that in addition to the usual collection of spoiled vegetables, rotting meat, decomposing seafood, discarded sanitary napkins, rancid fats, used condoms and moldy baked goods, Beirut “garbage” also contains… um… human feces?
Freddy: Right, now you’re getting the picture. It’s piled three, even four meters – ah, make that ten feet, fifteen feet high – all over the city. The stench is everywhere! It goes in your nose, in your mouth, down your throat! You get up in the morning, you make coffee, and your coffee tastes like spoiled vegetables, rotting meat, decomposing seafood, discarded sanitary napkins, rancid fats, used condoms, moldy baked goods and human feces that’s been sitting in the sun at one hundred and twenty degrees for three weeks. You have your breakfast, and it tastes like spoiled vegetables, rotting meat, decomposing seafood, discarded sanitary napkins, rancid fats, used condoms, moldy baked goods and human feces that have been sitting in the sun at one hundred and twenty degrees for three weeks. You walk out into the street and the whole city smells like spoiled vegetables, rotting meat, decomposing seafood, discarded sanitary napkins, rancid fats, used condoms, moldy baked goods and human feces that have been sitting in the sun at one hundred and twenty degrees for three weeks. You order lunch at a cafe and it tastes like…
Tom: I think I get the picture.
Freddy: No, you don’t! Five days in this city, and your breath and your sweat and your urine starts to smell like spoiled vegetables, rotting meat, decomposing seafood, discarded sanitary napkins, rancid fats, used condoms, moldy baked goods and human feces that have been sitting in the sun at one hundred and twenty degrees for three weeks! My wife smells like spoiled vegetables, rotting meat, decomposing seafood, discarded sanitary napkins, rancid fats, used condoms, moldy baked goods and human feces that have been sitting in the sun at one hundred and twenty degrees for three weeks! My daughters…
Tom: Okay, okay, I get the idea, I swear I do!
Freddy: Sorry. It’s just… I… [expletive], Tom, it just wears you down, that’s what it does. It breaks you, living like this. You feel filthy, no matter how much you wash your hands, no matter how many showers you take!
Tom: It must be horrible. I suppose it might even cause serious psychological effects.
Freddy: It has! The people here have started to riot!
Tom: Over the garbage?
Freddy: Yes!
Tom: You’re sure?
Freddy: Sure, I’m sure!
Tom: I mean, it’s not like they’re rioting over Lebanese politics, religious factionalism, rampant unemployment, crumbling infrastructure, ridiculously unfair taxes or the absurd Lebanese economy?
Freddy: No.
Tom: You’re certain they’re not rioting over Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, or the latest fatal border incidents with Israel? They’re actually…. rioting… about… the garbage?
Freddy: Absolutely! Eormous mobs, Tom, like something out of a dystopian science fiction movie, confronting police among these unimaginably huge piles of garbage, with water cannons knocking people around like rag dolls and clouds of tear gas wafting through the streets. Huh.. you know what, Tom? It just occurred to me – a little bit of tear gas actually clears you up for a while. I noticed that last night when I got a whiff of the stuff, just walking down the street a couple of blocks away from one of the demonstrations. Suddenly, as I passed a bakery, I could smell again. I rushed inside right away and ate four pastries as fast as I could before the effects wore off.
Tom: Sounds like everybody there in Beirut is losing it pretty fast, all right. What’s this garbage strike all about?
Freddy: It’s not a strike, Tom. The garbage collectors have been more than willing to take the stuff away – there’s just no place to put it.
Tom: Oh, come on, Freddy. I know Lebanon isn’t a very large country, but seriously, you expect sane members of the international community to believe you folks have actually run out of places to put your garbage?
Freddy: Well, it’s complicated.
Tom: Freddy, this is garbage disposal; basic public health and municipal sanitation. How complicated can it be?
Freddy: In Lebanon, very much so. We ran out of places to put our garbage in the late 1990’s, so the government came up with a temporary solution – the Naameh Landfill. It was supposed to close after accepting two million metric tons of garbage, which it had done by 2002, but it stayed open until last July 15, with nearly twenty-five million tons of garbage in it!
Tom: Twenty-five million tons of garbage in a two million ton landfill?
Freddy: Yeah, can you believe it?
Tom: But… okay, then… I mean, if the situation was that far gone, what’s twenty-six million tons? Twenty-seven? Thirty? What happened?
Freddy: The people who lived near Naameh rioted. They started blocking the garbage trucks.
Tom: Oh, I see. And what was their problem?
Freddy: They had gone beyond smelling like spoiled vegetables, rotting meat, decomposing seafood, discarded sanitary napkins, rancid fats, used condoms, moldy baked goods and human feces that had been sitting in the broiling sun for seventeen years to actually getting sick and dying from exposure to fumes from spoiled vegetables, rotting meat, decomposing seafood, discarded sanitary napkins, rancid fats, used condoms, moldy baked goods and human feces that had been sitting in the broiling sun for seventeen years. That made them the worst kind of rioters.
Tom: What kind of rioter is that?
Freddy: The kind with absolutely nothing to lose. As far as they are concerned, dumping any more garbage at Naameh is going to kill them, so what’s the difference dying from police bullets? They’re poor, they’re desperate, they’re living next to a mountain of filth and there’s no way they are going to let one single more garbage truck into that dump. They’d rather die – it’s as simple as that. When the social situation goes that far, well, forget about Lebanon, there’s simply nothing any government can do. Arrest them? We’d have to relocate the entire population surrounding the Naameh landfill to Lebanese jails; and damned if they wouldn’t consider their jail cells a distinct improvement!
Tom: And, uh… has anyone ever though about… ah… another dump? Your government has had nearly two decades to initiate another one, hasn’t it?
Freddy: Right – well, maybe you could do something like that in the United States, but in Lebanon? Forget it! Every region and sector surrounding Beirut has a specific religious and ethic constituency. Do the Maronite Christians want a landfill with Melkite and Eastern Orthodox garbage in it near their homes? Hell, forget that – do they want to savor the stink of Muslims’ spoiled vegetables, rotting meat, decomposing seafood, discarded sanitary napkins, rancid fats, used condoms, moldy baked goods and human feces? No way! Same thing for the Muslims, of course – if not worse. The Alawites consider Sunni garbage to be just another form of chemical warfare, and the Druze won’t have anybody’s garbage but their own in their enclaves. The Shi’ites have the same opinion, and what’s more, Hamas has even gone so far as to propose that everybody have their own ethnically pure garbage dumps! Of course, doing that would require all garbage in Beirut to be separated into stinking piles of Maronite, Eastern Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox, Armenian Catholic, Sunni, Shi’ite, Alawite and Druze spoiled vegetables, rotting meat, decomposing seafood, discarded sanitary napkins, rancid fats, used condoms, moldy baked goods and human feces and then hauled away to eight different landfills!
Tom: I guess it says something about the situation when that’s the most sane proposal on the table.
Freddy: That’s why I called you. I figured maybe you could come up with some way to get all this rotting garbage out of the city and stop the riots.
Tom: Hmm. Interesting problem. Um… how about this. I’ll bet there’s plenty of discarded lumber and old tires lying around Beirut landfills along with all that spoiled vegetables, rotting meat, decomposing seafood, discarded sanitary napkins, rancid fats, used condoms, moldy baked goods and human feces, isn’t there?
Freddy: Yeah, I’m sure there is. What about it?
Tom: I say organize the rioters to converge on Naameh and construct ten thousand giant wooden crossbow catapults made with discarded construction boards and tires, then have every garbage truck in Lebanon haul them and twenty thousand volunteers to the Syrian border.
Freddy: Organize them? How?
Tom: Use Twitter.
Freddy: Oh, okay, sure.
Tom: Then haul all that garbage out of Beirut up to the Syrian border, wrap it in plastic bags and start slinging it into Syria.
Freddy: Where are we going to get the money for all those plastic bags? Not to mention breathing masks and respirators for the volunteers so they don’t pass out while they’re doing all this stuff? And what about plastic gloves and hazmat overalls? And what about bottled water? What about the catering?
Tom: If we are discussing logistics and supplies, then would also recommend a large amount of pathologist’s camphor for the volunteers to smear under their nostrils.
Freddy: Yeah, okay. Great idea, that. I wish I had some right now. Buy where are we going to get the money for this?
Tom: Kickstarter.
Freddy: Oh, right. Sorry, I should have thought of that. Got a hashtag for the Twitter campaign?
Tom: How about #FromBeirutWithLove?
Freddy: Okay, yeah, that should work. However, what if somebody on the other side of the Syrian border starts shooting at the Lebanese slinging bags of Maronite, Eastern Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox, Armenian Catholic, Sunni, Shi’ite, Alawite and Druze spoiled vegetables, rotting meat, decomposing seafood, discarded sanitary napkins, rancid fats, used condoms, moldy baked goods and human feces at them?
Tom: By that time, Freddy my friend, your efforts will have attracted such worldwide media attention, getting the White House to order jet fighter sorties and drone attacks on ISIL, al-Nusra, al-Assad or whoever is doing the shooting should be a piece of cake. And, of course, if Obama does his homework on this, he’ll know to order some white phosphorous and napalm so the air support attacks will also incinerate the damned garbage. And since the Pentagon will be able to place all of its target spotters on Lebanese soil, the entire operation ought to pose very low and highly acceptable risk; not to mention the considerable propaganda value and general public satisfaction with roasting legions of murderous terrorists alive in huge heaps of stinking garbage. It’s bound to be a win-win situation.
Freddy: That’s brilliant! Thanks, Tom, I’ll recommend your plan to the Lebanese government right away. Only time will tell if they have enough sense to realize what a stroke of genius it is!
Tom: For your sake over there in Beirut, I hope that isn’t very long.
Freddy: Me too, Tom, because when the stench of spoiled vegetables, rotting meat, decomposing seafood, discarded sanitary napkins, rancid fats, used condoms, moldy baked goods and human feces that’s been sitting in the sun at one hundred and twenty degrees for three weeks is so strong, you need a snort of tear gas so you can taste your wared al sham and kaak knafeh, that’s real [expletive] up right there, and something’s got to be done about it!
Tom: Truer words were never spoken.
Freddy: Right. Okay, then, ma’a as-salāmah!
Tom: Ciao!