The explosion in the port of Beirut on August 4, 2020, was certainly an eye-opener. (USA Today’s collection of videos of the explosion from different angles is available here.) Approximately 2750 tons of ammonium nitrate exploded. The stuff had been hanging around in the port after being seized in 2013. The explosion obliterated 85% of Lebanon’s grain supply.
The cause seems to have been corruption and negligence. Despite multiple warnings from various officials, nobody bothered to move the ammonium nitrate out of the port, which is known as “The Cave of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.” Since the ammonium nitrate had been seized by the Lebanese government, there would have been nothing wrong with distributing it to Lebanese farmers to use as fertilizer, or selling the stuff to other countries. That would have provided some hard currency for Lebanon, which needs all the hard currency it can get thanks to the rapid inflation of the Lebanese pound, which was caused by – you guessed it – corruption and negligence.
The economic crisis plus the explosion have put the Lebanese public in a string-‘em-up mood. There were protests before the explosion. Now there are more protests; a mob of protesters, including veterans of the Lebanese military, stormed the Lebanese Foreign Ministry before being expelled by Lebanese security forces. If this goes on, people will believe they have nothing to lose – and those who believe they have nothing to lose are the most dangerous fighters.
At first glance, there wouldn’t seem to be any parallels between the United States and Lebanon. The United States is not dependent on grain imports; we have enough territory to feed ourselves and to export food worldwide. And even if there was a large explosion at a U.S. port, there are many other major ports in the U.S. which could take up the slack. The tap water is safe (mostly), and the power is usually on 24-7. Such is not the case in Lebanon.
Geography isn’t the problem here. Corruption exists, but it is not completely out of control the way it is in Lebanon. Nor is sectarianism, which paralyzes Lebanon. The Lebanese government apportions positions based on religion. The Lebanese president must be a Maronite Christian; the Lebanese prime minister must be a Sunni Muslim, and the speaker of the Lebanese parliament must be a Shi’ite Muslim. By contrast, Article VI of the U.S. Constitution forbids religious eligibility tests for public office.
The problem in the United States is political paralysis. The United States is not split on religious lines; the United States is split on racial and political lines. Take the Covid-19 situation: If you wear a mask most of the time (even when driving by yourself in your own car!), you are probably a liberal. If you only wear it when you have to, you are probably a conservative. If you voted for President Trump, you’re a racist; if you didn’t, you’re woke – the new way of being virtuous. There is a noisy screaming match about whether hydroxychloroquine is, or is not, a cure for Covid-19. (Free advice – eating healthy food and getting enough exercise and sleep will do a lot more to keep you healthy than waiting for a Covid-19 vaccine or waiting for the government and its corporate masters to make up their minds about hydroxychloroquine.) People are impoverished because they are told that their jobs are “not essential” by overzealous state and local officials – just sit at home and collect “stimulus” checks that are funded by recklessly adding to the already huge national debt. (If stimulus checks are supposed to stimulate the economy, how can that happen with so many restrictions on what can be open?) People are even being encouraged to tattle on each other for running their own businesses. Anyone who says anything which deviates from what is considered “woke” is branded racist, or sexist, or some other sort of –ist or –ism, and is mercilessly hounded and cancelled by zealous social justice warriors fighting the good fight via social media.
Meanwhile, the national debt grows, the dollar inflates (which makes it harder for people, especially those who were cynically and insultingly deemed “nonessential”, to buy anything), the roads are crappy, and the U.S. is absurdly vulnerable to a natural or artificial electromagnetic pulse. Nothing has really been done to address this. An electromagnetic pulse frying the infrastructure which all of us – gay or straight, religious or secular, liberal or conservative, woke or sleepy – depend on would require people to quickly learn to fend for themselves.
So is the United States like Lebanon? Not quite, but there are some disturbing similarities. We have work to do.