The Gertrude Bell Jar

On The Grift, Lebanon-Style

I guess they don’t have grifters in Portland. Maybe a city has to be certain size before you get many of them around, I certainly hadn’t encountered any before I moved to Chicago, and I did not come from a small town. Nonetheless I was surprised to see Michael Totten describe the very typical grifting behavior he’s encountered in Beirut as a Lebanon-specific thing. For example:

I argued with one guy downtown for an hour about whether or not I was going to give him 10,000 Lebanese lira. (That’s six dollars plus change.) I told him I didn’t have any cash on me, that all I had was a credit card, which was true. “No problem,” he said. “I will go with you to the bank.” No doubt if I said yes he would have bumped it up to 20,000 by the time we got there.

It’s always fatal to try to fob them off with the excuse that you don’t have cash right this minute. You have some usual way of rectifying that problem, don’t you? So why not right now? A friend of mine made the mistake of mentioning that he so happened to be on his way to an ATM machine that very minute to bolster his claim of empty pockets, to a man who had stopped him and showed him ID (to prove what, that he really existed or something?) and given him a long sob story about how he needed $50 dollars, one night when a group of us were making our way home from some excursion or other to downtown Chicago. So naturally the man said, I’ll go with you, there’s an ATM just down the block, and meekly off we went together, and the man waited and my friend took his money out and gave him the $50 from it. Every single one of us knew that the man was lying and our friend had just been conned, and so did our friend if I was reading his body language correctly, but not a word was said about it among us afterwards, not to this very day.

Why? It’s all just too embarrassing. Grifting above all is about gaming implicit social contracts. Ordinarily we have considerable social distance from criminals and feel comfortable excluding them on some level from the common run of humanity. But this turns out to be very hard to do to someone who is actually standing in front of you and speaking to you. “Excuse me miss” or “Can I ask you a question” is always a gateway to hearing someone’s sob story and then not being quite able to bring yourself to indicate that you suspect this person you’ve engaged in eye contact for whole seconds and possibly minutes at a time already is totally lying, via refusing to help them with their very compelling dilemma, whatever it may be. The implicit social contract that makes it very hard to treat a person you’re engaging with on some level as dishonest or criminal is much more powerful than empathy per se, one finds if one examines one’s own feelings after such an encounter. The best con artists, the kind that can still catch me and other long-time big-city dwellers out, can make maximum use of this fact under the right circumstances by implying that there may be some kind of actual social relationship between the two of you beyond just this conversation. Just a few years ago a really good grifter got 10 bucks off me—for an emergency cab ride, IIRC—by standing on my doorstep and posing as one of the new neighbors I hadn’t met yet. I didn’t really 100% believe him, but the risk of mistakenly treating one of my actual neighbors like a con man was too horrible to contemplate. My friend M. when told this story said he’d been caught in a very similar one once, in which the grifter posed as someone who worked in another part of the institution where my friend was employed. What if M. ended up running into him again at the office holiday party? M. didn’t really believe it either, but who wants to risk it if it’s only a few dollars at stake?

But most grifters aren’t able to work an angle like that most of the time; instead, they present a problem so compelling that you would never consider refusing assistance to a person really in that circumstance, like needing money for baby food and diapers when all the public assistance offices are closed, or having just gotten released from the hospital with no way to get home (impossible, btw, hospitals require someone to be there to take you home before they will discharge you, but not everyone knows that, so it goes in the script), or being stranded and just needing a few dollars to put some gas in the tank, or something of that nature. I can’t remember what ATM man had told us his problem was, but his very act of showing us his ID was designed to embarrass us. Oh no, of course you don’t have to prove anything, you’re a worthwhile human being and I’m decent enough to recognize that without proof. Heh heh heh.

The only way to win is never to hear the story, which is why everybody learns not to stop for “Excuse me miss/sir” or “Can I ask you a question?” As Totten notes, “if someone doesn’t instantly tell you exactly, precisely, what they want, get away from them immediately.”

What’s interesting about Totten’s encounter with the woman who wanted to marry one of his single American friends and get a green card that way is that there almost certainly must have been a Part 2 involved, I think. It’s not the sort of thing that can be transacted from beginning to end in a single sitting in a cafe, is it? She perhaps expected to catch him off guard admitting to be single, in which case she would expect him to eventually try to fob her off with probably a false name or address, either supposedly his, or perhaps that of his fictional single friends if he were married already or at least quick enough to pretend to be so. She’s counting on the fact that he can’t possibly tell her to her face that she’s too unappealing to tempt him or any of his friends.

So what’s the next step, once a fictional social relationship in which Totten would be participating as a liar himself were established? Maybe she has a confederate who will follow him home, so that accidentally on purpose she can run into him again, or maybe she’s already scoped this out herself, or has seen him in this cafe before and expects she will find him here again, etc. She could maybe say, forget about your friend, I met somebody else who has a friend who wants to marry me. Then maybe he’s supposed to feel guilty for having doubted either her truthfulness or mentally insulted her attractiveness. Or maybe since she’s letting him off the hook, he would believe that she really has found someone, or at least find it socially impossibly to visibly doubt it in any way. But wait! She has no money for passport fees or photos! What about airfare? She doesn’t want to look greedy, he won’t marry her then, so she can’t ask her fiance, etc. What’s the excuse for not helping now, with her one chance in life slipping away? Would he be relieved enough at the prospect of finally getting her off his back to go ahead and just give her something, whether he really believed her or not? Is it even relevant whether he really believes it, if he feels too embarrassed to openly doubt her by not giving her the money he obviously must have as an American tourist?

Well, that’s how I’d play it anyway, if I were her. I guess we’ll never know what she was really up to.

It strikes me that grifters must make out like gangbusters with the unwary in Arab countries, the implicit social compact with strangers is so much more elaborate and obligatory in that culture than it is in the U.S. Maybe that’s why there are apparently so many more grifters in Beirut than in Chicago. Totten reports encountering one every other week or so; here on the South Side of Chicago it’s more like once a month or so, or even less often than that sometimes. (On the other hand, a presumably wealthy American might just be a particularly attractive target, who knows.) I’m not surprised that Totten’s friend is actually aggressively rude about brushing them off (whereas in Chicago a murmured “sorry, no” while keeping moving is good enough); it must be very important to completely deny all human connection with such people at the very outset. How difficult to be even that impolite!

The level of politeness and hospitality ordinarily shown to strangers in Arab countries seems always to astonish travellers. In journalist John Hockenberry’s memoir Moving Violations, he describes learning very quickly never to pause his wheelchair anywhere near a staircase in Palestinian areas, or passersby would suddenly haul him bodily up or down them on the assumption that he must need to go up or down, but was simply too proud to ask. His protestations would always be ignored, because of course it is also polite to refuse any offer of help multiple times. From what I’ve gathered in reading about Arab cultures, personal dignity is assigned a very high value, and the wounding of it is an unpardonable social sin. Thus, leaving someone in the humiliating position of both needing that kind of help and also having to ask for it is unthinkable and unbearable, the situation must be rectified, unasked, immediately.

Hockenberry found this so extraordinary that he took one Palestinian’s question about whether his disability had been caused by an Israeli bomb as an explanation for the deference shown him, but I think he’s probably wrong about that. First because there are plenty of maimed-by-the-Enemy Israelis to go around too, yet no parallel culture of extreme kindness to disabled people has arisen in that country so far as Hockenberry was able to find. Secondly because another incident confirms the compelling-respect-for-the-dignity-of-others theory. When Hockenberry goes to rent a car in Israel, he needs to get an attachment that will allow him to operate the gas and brake pedals with his hands, and there is a bureaucratic kerfuffle about permits and paperwork and whatnot involving this piece of equipment that delays his rental for days. When he goes over to Palestinian territory, the dealer simply rents him a normal, unconverted car, no questions asked. Hockenberry is so surprised by this that he asks the dealer if he’s not concerned about whether he can drive the car as is. The dealer slightly misinterprets the question, and is so appalled at the thought the he or anybody who works for him might have implied in any way that the gentleman can’t drive an ordinary car that he insists on Hockenberry accepting a very lovely dinner with him in his own home by way of apology. I think the truth of the matter is, on an ordinary day Arabs are about that polite to everybody, it just turns out to be a somewhat arduous task to satisfy the Arab notion of politeness and respect towards a disabled person.

To get caught in a conversation with a good grifter while operating with a cultural background like that must be like being in the grips of some kind of unholy, merciless machine that you can’t possibly stop or control, I would imagine. Aggressive avoidance is probably not only advisable, but required.

Happy Happy etc. cont.

I thought this was one of the more interesting comments of the day, from the Opinion Editor of the Daily Star in Beirut:

For most Lebanese, the killing of Hariri was very much perceived as an outrage against the normal order of things, because it targeted a rare Arab leader who left behind a constructive legacy and didn't pack a gun. Even recognizing the former prime minister's faults, one often-heard refrain somehow makes perfect sense, particularly against the backdrop of photographs of Hariri's burned body widely disseminated in the local press: "It was unnatural for such a man to die in such a sordid way." This suggested the extent to which the Lebanese today understand (as many should have, but not so long ago didn't) that autocracy is the triumph of the aberrant and the promotion of the inferior.

As the debate continues in the U.S. and elsewhere over Bush's merits and demerits, and over his dissembling, indeed lying, before dispatching forces to Iraq, the Lebanon example shows the advantages of selective interpretation. It matters little where Syria's Lebanese foes stand in disputations over Bush's record, nor did voters in Iraq much care either; both populations took what was relevant to them, accepted Bush's broad sound bites of democratization, and carried the idea on from there according to their parochial interests.

The whole article is worth a read.

Happy Happy, Joy Joy Joy

Wow, that was fast! M. and I were just talking last night about how we’ll know that the suddenly invigorated democratization trend in the Middle East is real and irreversible when the intelligentsia begin to argue that it was inevitable (as opposed to impossible, the conventional wisdom up to this point in time). And here, this very morning, is a NYT Times editorial laying the ground work already, by concluding: "The wonder is less that a new political restlessness is finally visible, but that it took so long to break through the ice."* The news article in the Chicago Tribune this morning deployed the alternate strategy of attributing all apparent progress primarily to the death of Arafat, with the Bush Doctrine trailing distantly as a secondary influence.

OH YEAH BABY! It’s all good.

It may all yet come to nothing, but this could turn out to be the point at which it was all over but the shouting, too. M. and I were also talking about how truly mysterious this sort of thing can be. We are both Cold War babies and grew up with the assumption that the Soviet Union would always exist, and that there would always be a Cold War, unless somebody screwed up and destroyed the planet and everything on it. And then you’re watching on tv about crowds gathering outside public buildings in Moscow, and Yeltsin addressing one of them over a bullhorn, and waiting for the tanks to roll in as they had in Prague. But they don’t come, and don’t come, and, at some undefinable moment, POOF, no more Soviet Union. I still don’t understand how that happened, exactly, how consensual reality just suddenly changed like that, in a way that utterly deprived the existing government of any power; how only consensual reality could have been holding all of that up in the first place, and why it had failed now and not in 1968. But a genuine anti-government protest in a country occupied by Syria that not only 1) occurs at all, 2) has thousands of participants, and 3) results in an actual change rather than a massacre should have been completely impossible, but somehow wasn’t. That may very well be the paradigm shift, right there.

Belgravia Dispatch has an email from a guy who was circulating and talking to the protesters in Beirut last Friday, btw. (And what looks like a nice round-up of responses to these developments in subsequent entries, but I haven’t read through it yet.)

*I kid, but the NYT editorial is actually pretty good, and summarizes all of the significant events thus far. I noticed that the Michael Jackson trial was the lead story on CNN.com all day yesterday, and a spectacular local murder trumped the story in the Trib this morning, so there’s a possibility that not everyone is really getting how astonishing the last few days have really been.

Update: Woot! M. found another one, employing a slightly different approach. All hail the paradigm shift!

Update 2: M. adds: Today's "Worldview" on NPR is must-listening for a cavalcade of people falling over themselves not to give more credit to the Bush administration or the Iraq election than absolutely necessary. (As the interviewer asked each subject whether American foreign policy was responsible for what was happening, I was reminded of Reverend Lovejoy's "...ooooh short answer yes with an if, long answer no with a but...") They very much wanted to make sure that everyone understood that this didn't mean that people in Lebanon/Egypt/the occupied territories liked Americans or George Bush. (Because otherwise, you know, the average NPR listener would naturally assume that we're beloved by all.) Highlights include the Lebanese newspaper editor whose comments amounted to "all right, maybe-- maybe-- things were sped up a little by events in Iraq and the presence of an American army across the border from Syria, but is it really important who might or might not be able to take credit?" and the Egyptian analyst (IIRC, an Egyptian professor at an American university) who was saying "well, elections will be good if people wind up voting on the issues, but if it all becomes a marketing campaign like elections here in the US then that's not really much of an improvement." Because, after all, there's no difference between an autocratic tyranny and a liberal democracy, right? And could you help me move these goalposts a little further that way? I smiled all the way to work-- if this is the level of quibbling from NPR's experts, then maybe we really are winning.

But perhaps I'm not being fair in my paraphrases-- memory and interpretation are tricky things. The show should be up on "Worldview's" site shortly. (It'll be the March 1 show) Judge for yourself.

Stone of Laughter/Hoda Barakat

The Stone of Laughter by Hoda Barakat, translated by Sophie Bennett.

A novel set in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war, which traces the personal transformation of an apolitical observer in the person of a 20-ish gay teacher named Khalil into an active combatant. Barakat's elliptical style is frustrating at times, and I'm not sure if re-reading would clarify some passages (as some of the Amazon reviews seemed to imply), or make Khalil's transformation (the change is signalled by his rape of a female neighbor) seem less sudden and unmotivated. As those who read the long quote from this novel that I posted earlier will understand, the novel is depressing enough that I doubt I'll be putting that to the test. Barakat does capture the emotional effects of living in a city under siege very well, and the novel is worth reading on that count alone, I think.

Quote of the Day

From The Stone of Laughter by Hoda Barakat (translated by Sophie Bennet, a novel set in wartime Beirut):

The auspicious bombing returns primal time to you and restores the city's first coherence. Death is the only spur to the city, for it is death that gathers the city's many little splinters and holds them to itself like iron filings.

Death is the only man in the city. When the city is plunged deep in her seductions and games he twists her arm and, in one swoop, holds it fast towards him and she leans on him and calms down and she beings to breathe regularly.

He gives the city her real flavor which she forgets, when the bombing starts. It is death who is the father of the city, who always reminds her that she must refrain from standing by the window … who chides her, holding her back from the dreams that tempt her to play outside the fence, to talk to strangers, that tempt her to the desire to be like the distant world that sends the city its disgusting pictures in magazines, in immoral books, and on television.

When the bombing becomes intense, death sits at his desk. He cleans his spectacles thoroughly before picking up the long rules and the pen to draw up a plan for the city as befits a great architect. Only those who have some connection go out into its streets: the fighters and the death squads. As for those who have no job, they loiter in his vaults, in his natural places. Things are not confused, the lion does not lie with the lamb, this is one of Nature's catastrophes, ones of its bitter peculiarities. There is no place for confusion, no place for you to wonder whether the shoeseller is a blood merchant, or sells plundered electrical goods. Even the petty thieves restrain themselves and take their family life seriously.

Death is the master of clarity and precision but, so precise and clear is he that he rises up from the city like a spirit and is tormented whenever he has to define his features or forms. In his buildings he suffers the torment of one concerned with God's incarnation in man and man's incarnation in God, buildings that perpetually fall a little short, that are always tight across his infinite shoulders.[…]

They lose their entrails and their limbs on the asphalt in the heat and rain because they are sensitive and because they are generous, as intelligent people are, because they know that it is better for them to rise to the jewel of martyrdom than to die just for nothing, by mistake, without becoming immortal […] Look at our disabled, victims of the enemy, whom the god death returned to us that they might bear witness to our innocence, that we might celebrate them with their eternal mutilations, that we might spit the poisons of anxiety from our weak consciences. Our lovely disabled lean on their sticks, their hands outstretched for our intercession, they are better than you are at making cane chairs and sitting us on them so we can find rest from you. They play with their severed limbs and their plucked out eyes to make us feel happy and to ease our consciences, to encourage to walk in the path of righteousness. They run around in their wheelchairs, happy as sandboys, urging on the fighters of our organization, crying out for joy and beating drums. They leave their mothers and wives and children to follow the organization which walks on the face of the water.

We shall whet society's appetite. We shall arrange classes for sewing and fitting, workshops for knitting and embroidery, markets to sell stuffed peppers and stews and pickles and preserves. We shall fill sandbags with the gravel from their kidneys, we shall clean the areas around the blockades and wash the pictures of the martyrs with the juices that run from our wounds, we shall polish the glass of the party headquarters with the waters that run from the corners of their eyes and we shall steep the bullet in mothers' milk so that it shines and glimmers in the dull light.

We shall put life in order, this whole dirty, short, wretched life, this life that does not deserve to die by a stray bullet but by a bullet shot true for the sake of the order, we shall put life in order along the same lines as death's eternal order, we shall reduce it for the confused and bewildered, we shall reduce it a great deal …

Quotes of the Day

Today's quotes of the day come to you courtesy of Fouad Ajami's Dream Palace of the Arabs and, in the case of the first, by my adopted Chicago parochialism, triggered by the sudden appearance therein of Steve Kerr's winning three-point shot in the final game of the 1997 NBA championships:

In the dispatches of the Chicago Bulls, it was reported that Kerr had once had a scuffle with Jordan and that he stood his ground against 'His Airness.' That reporter had filed the dispatch as something wondrous and unexpected. But for the grandson of a man who went into the hills around Aleppo and Marash with a pistol at his side to retrieve Armenian waifs and take them on a caravan to Beirut, a boy who had endured his father's loss [Malcom Kerr was assassinated in Beirut by persons unknown in 1984, while serving as the president of the American University of Beirut], the struggles of the NBA must seem quaint in the extreme.

And, discussing the life of the Lebanese poet Khalil Hawi (who committed suicide on June 6, 1982, on the eve of the day of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon):

A cultural tide had carried Hawi from his village and his manual labor to university life in Beirut and Cambridge. A vast world had opened up to him. In his early years as an academic, he wrote of the cultural tide, of the educational awakening among Arabs, with painstaking detail and veritable awe. He had been attentive and respectful, perhaps bedazzled, by what the pioneers in Arabic letters and thought had accomplished, but this faith deserted him toward the end. The tradition that had sustained him--the literary tradition he had chronicled, the Islamic philosophy he had come to master--had been unable to prevent the culture's descent into hell; he became increasingly dismissive of what the preceding century in Arabic culture and political thought produced. He had exalted the modernists in Arabic letters and politics and had labored in their shadow. He now wrote off what they had brought from the West and tried to graft onto indigenous culture as nothing but mimicry, the stale effort of those who had carried from the West only 'those things that were superficial and easy to carry.' That whole Arab awakening, he was to write in an essay two years before his death, had been a pretense that had 'covered up the total backwardness of Arab society.' The modernists, he said, had not understood the West itself, let alone laid foundations for a viable Arab renaissance. From distant Western shores these claimants had brought only those 'colored empty sea-shells that the tide brings to shore.' The society had traded its old forms of backwardness for new ones. Old habits of domination, old ways of political thinking, had simply donned new masks. And political men and women had become good at taqiyya, dissimulation, hiding what they really thought, in the process hiding their society from genuine scrutiny and assessment. In the 'modern' political movements littering the landscape, he saw nothing but the hold of old 'tribal, sectarian, and clannish loyalties.'

Uh-oh.