" .... "It's all his fault," my taxi driver spat out, pointing straight ahead. I ducked out to look. There, in the middle of the sea of honking cars, stood a thin young man in an oversized policeman's uniform.
Helplessly he waved his skinny arms trying to steer angry drivers. The problem was that he was steering them in all directions at the same time.
"He is the one who created the jam, he should just mind his own business," my taxi driver said. The fact that traffic was the policeman's business did not seem to cross his mind. Ask anyone in Beirut and they will tell you that, if there is a really bad traffic jam, chances are there is a policeman behind it. It is not always true, of course, but it is certainly indicative of how Lebanese people approach authority......
The attitude is not surprising. For decades, Lebanon's politicians have done nothing but drive the country into deadlock....
Frighteningly little, it seems, has changed in Lebanon since the civil war which started in the 1970s and lasted for almost 20 years. Many of the former warlords are now the country's top politicians. They still recruit supporters into privately run militias.....
Beirut may boast state-of-the-art shopping malls but its streets cannot even handle the changing weather. The drainage system is so weak that every time it rains, roads turn into rivers. "Fixing this mess would mean doing something for the public good and here we don't do that," a friend commented sarcastically the other day, as we made our way through the flooded streets.
...... Lebanon's private sector works so well that many Lebanese like to say that they do not need the government at all...."
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