La historia me absolvera mein kampf, yes, history will do justice to our
struggles, like it did to Fidel’s and Adolf’s and Dubya’s, because our beliefs,
like those women who hate Dorothy Allison, have “God on their right shoul-
der, righteousness on their left,”
Because we are crusaders with neo-concubines out to rid the world from
non-existent Iranian homosexuals, and why should we send our troops to the
American South, after all, “there has been no report,”
Yet intrepid Brownie did one heck of a job fighting darkness alongside Yu-
Gi-Oh and his cute little friends, in acts of violence that Lebanese Surete
Generale deems suitable for all ages (SG1),
In dug trenches surrounding vestiges of 5-star Beirut hotels, tanning on the
sides of the now-emptied Phoenicia pool that used to give way to the under-
ground bar,
While the hooded fighter, immortalized by Joseph Chami, plays accompag-
nateur to Julio Eglesias as he sang in private parties to the newly wed 1971
Miss Universe Georgina Rizk and Arafat’s senior intelligence officer Ali
Hassan Salame,
Paving the way to Stavro Jabra’s macabre live executions, while everyone
was trying to change – not only history, but geography too - as nowadays
the Southern-bound “road to Palestine goes through Jounieh” a city north of
Beirut,
With nightclubbing crowds going hysteric while DJs save lives and not only
“from a broken heart”, as they frantically look for a proper OST to dark al-
leys fights where “there’s you, and the enemy, and a cat – and you don’t even
know on whose side the cat is on,” like that soldier told me,
A cat with nine lives, oh let John Lennon rock and roll in his tomb, and just
imagine:
A Phalangist cat (A Chritisan Maronite, Ini’zali – an isolationist to some),
A Progressist Socialist Party Cat (A Druze as it turns out),
A Communist cat (Most likely dubbed as infidel by all others),
An Afwaj al Moukawama al Lubnania (Amal) cat (A Shiite – one of the
“Mahroumin” – the deprived ones),
A Lebanese Forces cat (Another Christian Maronite, albeit more hardcore),
A Mourabitoun cat (A Sunnite who is a trader by day),
A Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) cat,
A Persian cat (Pedigreed and called “Snoopy”),

And Garfield added for equal measure that had just been belched out from
the “New Jersey” destroyer – or as cartoonist Pierre Sadek put it, the “New
Jersa” – the new pathetic act, they were “self-righteous and incompetent, a
truly American combination” as Steve Almond dubbed himself,
One of those typical Kim Wilde boys from East California: yes, I know,
“they came in peace” as their memorial says, and the only thing Lance Cor-
poral Eddie DiFranco remembered about the kamikaze is that he had a smile
on his face as he crashed the gate of the compound with his loaded truck, just
one day before my 9th birthday,
It is said that one of the dead Marines was the brother of Lisa, the woman
who works in the American Embassy in Damascus, and that she then became
“Lisa, No Visa,”
And us?
We were Joe Galloway soldiers once… And young, watching Transtel
Cologne documentaries as we played Tom and Jerry (Yes, that’s another cat
for you!) with snipers in the Murr Tower in Maroun Baghdadi little wars of
karr wa farr – advance and retreat, with John Lawrence cats from Hué as our
furry little pets, feeding them with the rat that gnaws inside of us, signing
our everyday final acts with the Robin Mannock trademarked “Life’s a bitch,
ain’t it?”
But no, life is not a bitch, it is a cat’o’nine tails – one for every life we have
lived to the full as we never knew if we would survive to see REO Speed-
wagon’s “every sunrise being the promise of a sunny day, oh a sunny day”,
In places where the weather is fixated on the Stranglers’ “Always the sun”,
and not only on TV like A-ha’s, and Falco still plays “Rock me Amadeus”
from the grave of unknown soldiers,
Oh, and would you “please be nice to the guests, they’re the ones paying
your salaries” and your wages of fear, and after you finish, please be kind
to just empty the sand bags of the barricades and use their contents as litter
boxes for the cat’o’nine tails,
After all, we live in a country where history has done justice to our struggles.

*The narrow corner, the narrow margin