A Lebanese Saturday Night Fever

The ‘POP, CURSE, SHOOT’ scene rewinded

Recap:  Two angry men showing up one night at the Lebanese White House (aka Maison Blanche), one of the hip night club in town, located in Sodeco,  Ashrafieh.

A Saturday night ‘à la Libanaise’ fever that started as usual, with all the bling-bling set on fire mode for a show off long night-party played on a strident volume, and a base finely tuned. 

However, that night, ego entered the arena like a flashlight, as fast as guns charged in, and rumours followed, spreading out of all proportion, on an exceptionaly unrealistic scale…   

I’m sure you all agree; encounters as such adversity involving an exchange of insults–have high probability to end up with an injury than not. 

Nonetheless, i’m trying to understand how could two educated young men end up in such a furious face-off,  as one could hardly believe that a Mazen el Zein has been willingly targeted with a “shoot to kill 007 plan” from an Antoun Sehnaoui, as he declared to the media.

It was a screw up on all sides, easily admissible. Everything went wrong that night after the war of words kicked in. In a blink of an eye, an incomprehensible hateful downward spiral, which like an inverted tornado, took amazingly hold of Lebanon.

Now let’s think of it this way: whoever is insulted in front of others will see himself as diminished in his masculine mind & body, reputation and status. Perhaps partly as a result, the insult produces more aggressive or domineering behavior depending on each individual.  In fact, the “public” insult produces heightened aggression over and above a “private” insult.  We do believe this was the case in the White House shooting,  where the public versus private nature of the flow of insult played an important and determinant element here.  It is normal to see that publicly insulted individuals would show a more extreme pattern of responses than privately insulted people, as traditional “macho” behaviors emerge, specially in Arab countries.

Indeed, in private, an assaulted man would make an approach that is entirely different than that what we heard happened at Maison Blanche. 

What am trying to ponder here, is that a lonely cowboy is not as prone to ambush; he doesn’t charge in randomly nor purposely, if not given the right stimulus. Antoun became upset and prepared for aggression on the physiological level; and only because he was chaperoned by big dudes with plenty of beef on their shoulders that hostility increased and the high degree of aggressiveness made the guys easily primed to react with no wise thinking.

A story by “The Free Spirit”