Power Struggle in Lebanon

Keeping the lights on in Beirut, and in Lebanon in general, is no mean feat. I'm writing this from my balcony looking out over the ocean and part of the city as twilight turns to night. The power in my building went out about 20 minutes ago, so I hopped out onto the balcony to see who else was without juice. Looking east along the Corniche, I can see the entire 8-story Bayview Hotel, including its first floor Hard Rock Cafe, blink in and out of existence as it loses and regains power several times per minute, as though its rooms were lights on a Christmas tree. The outsized Hard Rock guitar on the façade seems to turn off before the rest of the hotel and regain luminescence much later. In contrast, behind the Bayview and commanding the most attention on the skyline are the lights of the Four Seasons, carving a elegant curve against the night sky with the silhouette of a candle's flame. Notable is that the Four Seasons is under construction and nowhere near open, yet they have adumbrated the building's skeleton with brilliant blue and white lights seemingly immune to the vagaries of the capricious Lebanese electrical system. I suppose they are either sitting on a different grid than the Bayview and my darkened building, or the Four Seasons leaves nothing to chance and has diesel generators in the basement.

Today I visited the National Museum and got to see some of the earliest examples of human alphabetic writing in the form of Phoenician carvings on tombs. The museum showed a wonderfully put together film documenting the damage that was inflicted on the museum during the Lebanese civil war, and the work that was undertaken to restore it. Halfway through the film, the museum lost power, and the audience was plunged into total darkness inside the little theatre. Nobody said a word or moved for perhaps five minutes, behaving almost as though the film were still on. Finally, a American-accented Lebanese boy shouted, "We want our money back yalla!"

Construction (or reconstruction) seems to be the business to be in here in Beirut, what with all the new construction of hotels and condos, and of course the endless repair of the many scars left over from the last 30 years of conflicts, occupations, terrorist attacks, and inclement weather. Most notable of these scars, at least to me, is the ghost of the perhaps 20-story Holiday Inn that stands smack in the middle of Hamra near the city center. This windowless bullet-riddled shell is a mystery to me, as even the boundless Lebanese optimism must see it as a write-off, it has not been turned into a memorial to remind us with its gaping holes why civil wars are bad, and yet it has not been demolished to make way for something else. Just feet away from it is a haute couture boutique defiantly selling slinky dresses and bejeweled purses to the stratospherically wealthy. If anyone knows what the plan is here, please write to me because I am quite curious.