Maybe I Do Need A Weather Man…

The weather in Beirut has been undergoing some significant changes lately. The temperature has gotten cooler, the days are often overcast, and sometimes there’s even rain. It could be my imagination, but it’s even starting to smell like fall. This is somewhat exciting; a welcome reprieve from from several months of sun, heat, and humidity. However, it also makes me feel kind of melancholy. It makes be miss the cool, crisp autumns spent living in New York and New England. (I have no such memories of Montreal, where it seems like “fall” is a euphemism for 3 weeks of pleasant 20° C weather that occurs before everything is plunged into a subzero purgatory for 5 months*.)

And on the topic of weather of the figurative kind, the UN report on the assassination of former PM Rafik Hariri is being handed over to Kofi Annan today. Amy has already posted about this a couple of times, but for those of you coming into class with a late pass, you can get the broad strokes by reading BBC’s latest. To put it very mildly, this is a pretty hot topic here, but I am finding it hard to figure out what I feel that it all means. To give some context, there was so much drama leading up to the elections, but then nothing happened. Political leaders get assassinated, political prisoners get freed, and what it all amounts to in the public forum is one, maybe two, days of people honking their horns and waving the old militia flags. So, part of me feels like the report will come out and, as expected, it will name prominent Syrian (and possibly Hezbollah) leaders. There will be a couple days of horn-honking and flag-waving and that will be it.

Another part of me wonders if I’m being completely foolish and arrogant, assuming a few months’ experience is adequate in predicting changes in climate in a country with such a, shall say, historically vibrant political meteorology. Amy and I have had some brief discussions about what sort of hypothetical aftermath could possibly get us to leave. The principal UN spokesman for the investigation has apparently left Lebanon due to concerns “for his own safety.” However, it’s really hard for me to feel any real sense of gravity or muster the imagination for worst-case scenarios or even guess which way the wind is going to blow**. Naturally, I expect that the next couple of days will inform my attitude.

* I realize this is something of an exaggeration as well as a trick of my memory, because at least two of the four years I was living in Montreal, the first snow was on or around my birthday, which is in late October. However, it is still fair to say that any fond memories of my college days are most certainly not weather-related.

** BAM! Consider this post book-ended. But seriously, I apologize for the corny, extended, Bob Dylan-inspired weather metaphor. When I started typing this post, I really was just going to write about cool breezes and the scent of autumn.