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CBC
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- CBC
Montreal writer Chris Bergeron highlights the power of transgender storytelling as revolutionary
Social Sharing Set in Montreal in 2050, Valid is an eight-hour monologue by Christelle, a trans woman who is forced to live as a man to stay alive. At 70-years-old, she's held captive by an AI and sets off on her own revolution — a revelation of her true self. Written by Montreal writer Chris Bergeron and translated by Natalia Hero, Valid was chosen for the One eRead Canada campaign by The Canadian Urban Libraries Council. This means that through the month of this past April, the novel was available in both e-book and audiobook formats in English and French to all patrons of participating libraries. For Bergeron, who first published the novel in French in 2021, this recognition is all the more important in the current political climate. "The conversation around queer literature in libraries and the presence that it should or shouldn't have in public libraries wasn't as fraught with very difficult debates as it is today," said Bergeron on Bookends with Mattea Roach. "The fact that librarians from across the country decided to give a nod to my book and share it to their audiences and their communities is a great sign of open mindedness and it reminds me of what this country is about." She joined Roach to discuss the inspiration behind her novel, her portrayal of the city of Montreal and her approach to trans revolution. Mattea Roach: Christelle is a 70-year-old trans woman who is in a situation where she's forced to live as a man. What are the circumstances that have led her to closet herself and live as Christian when we first meet her? Chris Bergeron: One of the things I was noticing during the pandemic when I was writing most of the book, was that people were talking about the safety and the well-being of a majority of people and not so much about the particulars in terms of health. So, I imagined if we lived in a world that went from crisis to crisis or at least if that was the public message. The rights and the needs of minority groups would be ignored. In fact, it's what we are seeing today as political discourse. It's almost a way to get elected today. So in that world, in that extrapolation of the world we're seeing today, I imagine a world where essentially not only were rights not validated, but actually removed. Anything that stood out of this average or common point of view of what should be a perfect citizen would be erased. In order to survive and actually be on the good side of whatever authority is in the book, my character has to detransition. It's something that exists in today's world — for example, somebody who is trans right now living in Russia, where it's essentially been criminalized to be trans. It's a reality that has existed in the past and exists today and will probably continue to exist in the future. Valid is written in this monologue style where most of it is essentially your main character, Christelle, telling her life story from her childhood into her adulthood as now, an elderly closeted trans woman. Why did you choose to craft the narrative in this way? It comes back to how the book actually started. I was giving and I still give talks across the country talking about what it's like to be trans and what that experience is and what the experience is at work and some of the challenges I faced, all of that. My publisher actually came to one of these talks and we chatted after and said, "Oh, you should write a book about all that." So I started with this autobiography and very quickly realized that that book had been written before: the story of a trans person and a coming of age story, how I came out of the closet and this and that. And I thought, "What's the point of that book if it's been done before?" I figured that it would be more interesting if I used the book as an opportunity to exercise my fears and tackle the big question, which is how will I age and is there a possibility of a happy old age for a trans person when the world is going to hell? How will I age and is there a possibility of a happy old age for a trans person when the world is going to hell? - Chris Bergeron That's where I thought I might have something new here with this notion of dystopian autofiction. Projecting myself into the future and asking myself how would I react? And obviously, I position myself as a coward because very few of us are actual heroes. The city of Montreal feels to me like a character in this story. You've actually said that you feel that Montreal is a transgender city, which is really interesting. What did you mean by that? First of all, nobody can figure out what it is. It's French. It's a large French metropolis. But then it's got 800,000 anglophones. On top of that, it has another third of the population that comes from elsewhere in the world, first or second generation immigrants. Some would say it's a high tech hub where there's a lot of AI labs and aviation research, but then it's also one of the poorest places in Canada — and it's all these things at the same time. Of course, the fact that it's always a giant construction site. It's literally always transitioning. It's always going from one identity to another. I saw it when it was back in the 90s, an indie, quiet town with a lot of artists. And then it became sort of a revolutionary left wing hub back when we had the carrés rouges. So it's always trying to be something it's not and it can't quite figure out what it is. It's always a bit of a loser compared to all the other cities — and that also makes it a bit trans. We're the sort of eternal teenager with gender issues and identity issues that are like, what am I? Who am I? Who am I today? And there'll probably never be an answer to that question, which is wonderful. We reach this breaking point at the end of your novel, where it becomes a novel about revolution. What does revolution mean for you as a trans person in 2025? Resist and resist by existing is the message. Using words, using our stories and telling our stories, no matter the risk, because the risk is going to be there. The system collapses under the weight of the words of people who are in marginalized communities. - Chris Bergeron The system collapses under the weight of the words of people who are in marginalized communities. In my book, that's how the revolution happened. People telling their stories to this AI who can't process these things. I think today, our words are just as powerful.
The Guardian
13-06-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Thatcher, Farage and toe-sucking: Adam Curtis on how Britain came to the brink of civil war
The mood is very fragile. There is a feeling of global disorder and growing chaos. The threat of war edges ever closer. Some people are even predicting revolution in the UK. Two weeks ago, Dominic Cummings gave an interview to Sky News prophesying violent uprising, then wrote on his blog that there is 'Whitehall terror of widespread white-English mobs turning political … Parts of the system increasingly fear this could spin out of control into their worst nightmare.' I think something much deeper is going on beneath the surface of Britain today. Two years ago, a historian called Christopher Clark wrote a book that makes you look at your own time in a completely different way. Called Revolutionary Spring, it tells the story of the unrest that swept Europe in 1848. In a few weeks, uprisings spread like ferocious brushfire – from Paris to Berlin to Vienna, Prague and Milan. Thousands of demonstrators stormed national assemblies and kings fled their countries, caught up in a wave of violent upheaval never seen before. Clark's book inspired me to make Shifty, my new series of films, because the world he describes feels so similar to today. One in which 'the political horizon was dark. Neither nations nor governments knew where they were going. 'Everyone had surrendered to doubt and anxiety. All forms of belief were enfeebled, all forms of authority shaken, social bonds had reached breaking point. The political horizon was dark. Neither nations nor governments knew where they were going. There was a sense of being 'on the eve of bloody wars and internal strife'.' All the revolutions failed in their original aim. But out of them came the bourgeois class that was going to run society in the future. Fascinatingly, Clark showed how from that came all the ways of ordering the world that we today accept as eternal – not just the political structures of left and right but fundamental ideas of our time, like social class. But he is clear that they may be temporary. 'They belonged to the world that had not yet encountered the great disciplining identities of modern politics. We belong to one in which those identities are swiftly dissolving.' I wanted to make a series set in Britain over the past 45 years that shows how all our political certainties dissolved. It is built of hundreds of moments that try to evoke what it has felt like to live through this age. The mood is that strange twilight zone between history and memory; fragments that have not yet been fixed into a formal version of the past. From intersex dogs and fat-shaming ventriloquists to avant-garde hair. Leeks by moonlight. Ken Dodd's suitcase. Nuns playing ping pong. Margaret Thatcher's handbag. A scanner from Maplin. Netto. And dark moments – racist attacks, suspicion of others and modern paranoia about conspiracies in Britain's past. Above all, I wanted to trace the rise of the thing that has destroyed the confidence of our age: distrust – not just of those in power, and of 'truth', but of everything and everyone around us and, ultimately, of ourselves. It didn't start like that. Thatcher believed that if you liberated people from state control they would become better and more confident. But to do this, she turned to radical rightwing economic thinkers – some of whom were very odd. About 15 years ago, I went to see a US economist called James Buchanan. I had to drive for hours deep into the mountains of Virginia to his farm. He told me that you couldn't trust anyone in any position of power. Everyone, he insisted, is driven by self-interest. We sat in a darkened room, with a thunderstorm raging outside, as he told me firmly that human beings didn't just follow their own self-interest when they were buying and selling stuff; they were driven by it all the time. So when people in power talked of being motivated by 'public duty', they were lying. He called this 'public choice theory', and it had an enormous effect on the advisers around Thatcher. It explained to them why all the bureaucrats that ran Britain were so useless. The economists invented a system called New Public Management (NPM) to control them. NPM said it was dangerous to leave people to motivate themselves through fuzzy notions such as 'doing good'. Instead, you created systems that monitored everyone through targets and incentives. Constantly watching and rewarding or punishing. It was the birth of modern HR. Anyone who has ever dealt with HR and their monitoring systems knows instinctively that they don't trust you. There is a very good moment that was captured on a documentary about London Zoo in 1993 made by Molly Dineen. The zoo had brought in a new HR expert who explains to the mild-mannered zookeepers how incentives and targets work. 'Once you do that,' he says, 'you've got them in the Grinder.' That's Buchanan's theories at work. And it was a terrible virus that was going to spread. But the roots of distrust didn't just come from the right. The patrician liberals in Britain were completely shocked that large sections of the working class voted for Thatcher. They had always drawn their influence and prestige from the idea that they cared for the 'little people' and the 'less well-off'. Now they turned on them in fury. I found a clip of the novelist Martin Amis promoting his book Money. Dripping with disdain, he says the working class have been seduced by the vulgar allure of money. They are, he said, stupid. It was at that moment the influence of liberal intellectuals began to slip. Power was shifting. There was one institution Thatcher still trusted, though: the security services. Even that crumbled with the case of Geoffrey Prime who worked at GCHQ. It started when Prime's wife came home to find him being questioned about the assault of a local girl. After the police left, he told her that he was the man they were looking for. She asked him if there was anything else she should know. He said yes: he'd also been spying for the Russians for the past 17 years. Thatcher was stunned. MI5 had vetted Prime five times and hadn't noticed anything. Even the Russians knew he was a paedophile. It became clear MI5 was hopeless. And when it failed to prevent the siege of the Libyan embassy in 1984, she ordered the home secretary, Leon Brittan, to reform it. MI5 fought back – spreading rumours through journalists that Brittan was a predatory paedophile, part of a secret ring of paedophile MPs in Westminster. Thirty years later, those rumours would burst to the surface as part of Operation Midland. None of it was true. By the end of the 80s the belief that you couldn't trust anyone in public life, which Buchanan started, finally came round to the politicians themselves. It was basic logic. If you believed public duty was a fiction, and all public servants were lying when they spoke of public duty, weren't the politicians also public servants? Which meant they must also be lying when they proclaimed they were working for the public good. One of the key figures in this process was the infamous publicist Max Clifford. He had picked up on the groundswell of distrust and found a way to monetise it. Clifford specialised in putting two or three of his clients together and cooking up stories from which they all benefited. He started in the late 80s with a famous radical leftwinger called Derek Hatton. He took him to a nightclub – which Clifford also represented. He photographed Hatton next to an heiress of the Baring bank family – whom he also represented – and cooked up a passionate romance between them. Then he turned to the Tories. When a government minister called David Mellor was revealed to be having an affair, his mistress – Antonia de Sancha – came to Clifford. He took her to meet the press in restaurants he represented, then told them stories about Mellor making love in a Chelsea shirt while toe-sucking and spanking. All invented. Sign up to What's On Get the best TV reviews, news and features in your inbox every Monday after newsletter promotion Clifford had opened the floodgates. In the early 90s, MP after MP was revealed to be a sleazy hypocrite who seemed far more concerned with his own weird sex life than governing the country and serving the people. The one I love is the story of David Ashby MP. He sued the Sunday Times in 1995 when they accused him of being a homosexual. He admitted he had shared a bed with another man, but said it was purely to save money on holiday. He admitted that his wife did call him 'Queenie' and 'Poofter', but said that was only because she was lonely in the marriage. He had bought her a dog to make her feel better. But it didn't work. Ashby told the court she threw plates and kitchen knives at him. She threatened to 'kick him in the bollocks to stop him having sex with anyone', and broke his glasses. Ashby lost the case, which put paid to his career. Soon, he was deselected by his local Tories as their parliamentary candidate. He later said of his ex-colleagues, on live radio: 'They're a bunch of shits, aren't they, and we know they are.' The early 90s saw an extraordinary collapse in trust in politicians. Created not just by Clifford, but also by Mohamed Al-Fayed, who said that he regularly paid MPs with cash in brown paper envelopes to ask questions for him in the Commons. It seemed to prove everything Buchanan had been saying: you couldn't trust anyone in public service. After I interviewed Buchanan in the Virginia mountains, I asked him about his life. He told me about how when he was training as an officer in the US Navy, he was constantly patronised by pompous officers from posh Ivy League universities. He was still angry about it – he knew they were all phoneys, he said, you could feel it. As I drove back I wondered if that was his real motivation. Dressed up in academic language, but beneath it was simply revenge. He was going to destroy that smug patrician class. And he succeeded. Big time. By the second half of the 90s, even the politicians came to believe they were bad. And they did the most extraordinary thing: they gave away power. They did it partly because they knew they couldn't fight against the rising tide of public doubt. But they were also persuaded by another force they felt they could no longer fight against: the markets. The first to go was Bill Clinton. His secretary of the treasury, Robert Rubin, persuaded him to pull back from public spending. Instead, he should cut the deficit and allow the markets to create a financial boom. Clinton agreed – and the US boomed throughout the 90s. But it also led directly to the global crash of 2008. ƒ And behind the markets was a whole academic industry that had taken Buchanan's ideas and run with them. They wrote articles that bluntly said the role of politicians in society should be marginalised because so much of what they did was 'sub-optimal'. Journalists picked up these ideas and put them in simpler terms. Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International wrote: 'What we need in politics today is not more democracy – but less'. In the face of this undermining of politics, New Labour also gave in. The day after their victory in 1997, the new chancellor, Gordon Brown, dramatically announced that he was giving power over the setting of interest rates to the Bank of England. It was an extraordinary move. Labour MPs were aghast. One, Bryan Gould, exclaimed: 'What then is the role of the chancellor? Or more simply, what is the role of democracy?' Brown later admitted the truth: that it was because politicians were now seen as dangerous. We did it, he said, 'not for any fundamental economic reasons', but because we weren't trusted. Born out of a weird self-hate, that single act was largely responsible for the present powerlessness of politicians. It was also helped on by a new phenomenon – because liberal culture too caught the disease. The Thick of It was a comedy series based around a government minister and their advisers. They live in a constant state of self-interested hysteria. Reacting to events and having no control over the real world outside. It was seen as liberal satire – but it can also be seen as a very powerful expression of Buchanan's idea that all politicians are completely venal, driven only by dark emotions. But that wasn't the end of it. Because a new kind of politician rose up, bred in the swamp of distrust. They saw that playing bad in an over-the-top way would give you a great deal of power. Because in a world of disenchantment, where no one believed that politicians could be good, being bad meant you must be authentic. I give you Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and Donald Trump: pantomime villains who are locked together with us in a feedback loop of shock-outrage-badness repeating endlessly. Outside this theatre, really bad people do really bad things – but we are distracted by the pantomime. Meanwhile, the classes that once made up society fractured. The liberals turned on those who voted for Brexit, using with one voice the word Amis had spat out 30 years before: 'stupid'. It may be that Britain – and much of Europe – is in a similar moment to that described by Clark just before 1848: on the edge of a new kind of society we don't yet have the language to describe. It feels frightening because without that language it is impossible to have coherent dreams of the future. To build a better world, you need an idea of what should change and how. And one of the things preventing that may be our obsession with constantly replaying the past. In the present age, the fog of experience has been thickened by the mass of recorded data that allows the recent past to be endlessly replayed, refusing to fade away. A constant loop of nostalgia – music, images, films and dreams from the past. It is another block to the future. And it is also the way this series is made. My bad. Shifty in on BBC iPlayer from Saturday 14 June.
The Guardian
12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Boos, cheers and a heavy dose of irony as Trump takes in Les Mis against backdrop of LA protests
'Do you hear the people sing? / Singing the song of angry men? / It is the music of a people who will not be slaves again!' When the rousing anthem of revolution filled the Kennedy Center on Wednesday night, Donald Trump may have had a Pavlovian response along the lines of 'Get me Stephen Miller' or 'Send in the marines'. We will never know. The tuxedo-clad US president had stood on a red carpet, accompanied by first lady Melania in a long black dress, promising a 'golden era' for America before attending the musical Les Misérables, which translates as The Miserable Ones or The Wretched. The story of Les Mis is inspired by the June Rebellion, an 1832 insurrection by republicans against the authoritarianism of a newly established French king. No one is expecting a replay from Republicans in June 2025. Characters include Jean Valjean, who is imprisoned for stealing a loaf of bread then seeks redemption, and Inspector Javert, who is obsessed with law and order and hunts Valjean without mercy. One reporter asked Trump whether he identifies more with Valjean or Javert. 'Oh, that's a tough one,' chuckled the wannabe strongman who sent troops to crush immigration protests in Los Angeles and is about to stage a tank parade on his birthday. 'You better answer that one, honey,' he deflected to Melania. 'I don't know.' It was Trump's first production at the Kennedy Center, the performing arts complex where he pulled a Viktor Orbán and seized control in February. He pushed out the centre's former chair, fired its longtime president and pledged to overhaul an institution that he criticized as too woke. But ticket sales have fallen since and some performers have cancelled shows. On Wednesday, as he took his seat, 78-year-old Trump was greeted with a high-octane mix of cheers and boos that stopped after a round of 'USA' chants. Several drag queens in full regalia sat in the audience, presumably in response to Trump's criticism of the venue for hosting drag shows. One person shouted 'Viva Los Angeles!' as Trump stepped out of the presidential box at the intermission. The president's appearance was meant to boost fundraising for the Kennedy Center and he said donors raised more than $10m. But Maga's efforts to break into the thespian world went about as well as Napoleon's invasion of Russia. Red carpet arrivals for the show were a far cry from the glamour of Cannes, Hollywood or London's West End. Instead of crowds of fans clamouring for autographs and selfies, Trump and his allies walked through an eerily deserted Hall of Nations and looked unsure whether to answer questions yelled by the media. Those who did revelled in cultural ignorance. First came Corey Lewandowski, a former Trump campaign manager who has faced allegations of sexual harassment. He said: 'What's amazing is, out of all the years I've been in Washington DC, I've never been in this building.' JD Vance, the vice-president, walked the red carpet with wife Usha, now on the Kennedy Center's board of trustees, and denied that Trump had staged a 'hostile takeover'. He then tweeted: 'About to see Les Miserables with POTUS at the Kennedy Center. Me to Usha: so what's this about? A barber who kills people? Usha; [hysterical laughter].' Accompanied by his wife, the actor Cheryl Hines, Robert F Kennedy Jr recalled how his uncle, President John F Kennedy – whose giant bust looms in the atrium – used to say the Greeks were remembered for their architecture, sculpture, plays and poetry. 'A civilisation ultimately is judged based upon its culture and its art. He wanted to make sure that American civilisation would be judged by that and President Trump shares that vision.' Trump spent last Saturday night with Mike Tyson watching people beat the hell out of each other behind a chain-link fence in the Ultimate Fighting Championship, which is quite possibly how American civilisation will actually be judged. Indeed, on his watch, the Kennedy Center no longer feels very Kennedy-esque. The atmosphere is different from the days when Democrats Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi glided in for the annual Kennedy Center Honors. Framed portraits of the Trumps and the Vances are mounted on a marble wall and, on Wednesday, were bathed in holy light. Washington is now a city under occupation. The president, who reportedly once derided 'shithole countries' in Africa, walked in beneath national flags that include Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe and past the opera house stage door. His impromptu press conference was a surreal combination of theatre and geopolitics, veering from his favourite musicals one moment to the prospect of Middle East war the next. 'I love Les Mis,' Trump said. 'We've seen it many times. We love it. One of my favourites.' He was untroubled by reports that understudies may perform due to boycotts by cast members. 'I couldn't care less,' he said. 'Honestly, I couldn't. All I do is run the country well.' Then on Iran: 'They can't have a nuclear weapon. Very simple. They can't have a nuclear weapon. We're not going to allow that.' Then back to showbiz. Brian Glenn of Real America's Voice, who is congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene's boyfriend, proclaimed: 'Mr President, we're making theatre great again, aren't we tonight?… You're bringing class back. The golden era of theatre!' Trump lapped it up as a cat does milk. 'And we have a golden era here in the country,' he said. 'We're bringing the country back fast and I'm very proud to have helped Los Angeles survive. Los Angeles right now, if we didn't do what we did, would be burning to the ground.' Glenn wasn't done. 'You're a New Yorker. You've been to a million theatres. Do you remember your first theatre production that you attended?' Trump looked pensive, as if mulling over countless nights absorbing the works of Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Tom Stoppard, Tennessee Williams and August Wilson. 'A long time ago,' he mused. 'I would say maybe it was Cats.' Glenn put the same question to Melania, who had held Trump's hand while maintaining a sphinx-like expression. She cited The Phantom of the Opera, which must have been music to the ears of man whose cultural hinterland runs the gamut from 1980 to 1989. But on the night that Maga stormed America's citadel of culture, one man was nowhere to be seen. Elon Musk's banishment continues despite his recent attempts to end his feud with the president. Perhaps the tech bro was out there somewhere in the gloomy streets of Washington, channelling Les Mis's Éponine: On my own Pretending he's beside me All alone I walk with him 'til morning … Without me His world will go on turning A world that's full of happiness That I have never known
Washington Post
11-06-2025
- General
- Washington Post
Revolutionary War veterans fought for the nation and pushed for a pension
Ichabod Beckwith was a 24-year-old patriot who heard the call for revolution in 1775 and set off with a company of battle-ready Minutemen on a march toward Lexington. That's where Beckwith's record as one of America's first veterans begins. And it ends in 1820, when the town overseers in Ludlow, Massachusetts, described the 69-year-old war veteran as 'a pauper disabled in body and mind' with no means of support other than the charity of friends and his town.
Asharq Al-Awsat
09-06-2025
- Politics
- Asharq Al-Awsat
Lebanon... Where Are Things Headed?
When General Joseph Aoun was elected President of the Lebanese Republic and Judge Nawaf Salam was named Prime Minister, both developments seemed engulfed in a revolutionary climate. There was a popular mobility expressing itself in all kinds of ways that reflected a broadly shared desire to break with the 'ancien regime' that brought the country misery, with its calamities culminating in a catastrophic war and occupation. As a result, ideas- around the role of the state, rejecting violence and war, and striving toward a new vision for Lebanon- that had long been suppressed exploded onto the surface. However, the people in charge have chosen to defuse this revolutionary climate and allowed a return to business as usual. Accordingly, all that remains of this climate are two documents, which, in the end, are official statements: the president's inaugural address and the government's ministerial statement. However, what we have seen in the (relatively long) interim, suggests that these texts were never meant to be implemented, only to signal positive intent. True, the new cabinet includes competent and respected ministers who have tackled some reforms in an acceptable manner. However, all of that addresses outcomes more than it does causes, with the latter deemed deferrable to a day in the future that may never come. There might be many reasons behind the decision not to take the initiative and deal with the fundamentals: fear of armed clashes that would threaten Lebanon's presumed civic peace, the embarrassment some feel about the fact that the new political situation emerged as the result of the war Israel had waged on the country and their discomfort with seeming like they are finishing the job that the Jewish state had started, or an attachment to what remains of the 'alliance of minorities' theory, especially in light of the recent shift in Syria and the rise of Ahmad al-Sharaa's authority. Another possible reason is that the ruling parties have agreed to leave addressing these matters until after the negotiations between Iran and the US run their course, in the hope that these issues will resolve themselves without the need for intervention. However, this approach risks an ill-fated reiteration of the Chehabist presidency that grew out of an understanding between the US and Egypt. Whatever their considerations, the authorities seem determined to resolve an extremely exceptional situation through extremely conventional means. Here, we find a substantial dose of irrationality that assumes (albeit without saying so) that Lebanon, the weaker party in this equation, is the one in control. While the president's inaugural address and the ministerial statement cry for implementation, the authorities have persistently called for addressing Hezbollah's weapons through 'dialogue,' without managing to compel the party to clearly and unequivocally commit to giving its weapons up following Israel's withdrawal. Moreover, a number of the president's appointments suggest that he is applying the 'no victor, no vanquished' theory, another parallel with the 1958 compromise. For their part, regional and international actors have, with a shared sense of urgency, been pushing Lebanon to take the initiative. It has become clear that the wily cunning the Lebanese are famous for will not convince the world to 'make allowances' without an answer to the question of the state's monopoly on arms. Meanwhile, there is a growing conviction that moving slowly has stalled progress on all fronts amid crushing economic hardship and diminishing hope in a successful summer season. Most critically, Israel's aggression and its interpretation of the ceasefire have imposed sharp polarization that is squeezing the middle of the road that Lebanon's leaders have sought to occupy. Finally, there came the painful strike on Beirut's southern suburb- a humiliating attack that, if it was not a sign that the war would resume, warned of similar strikes becoming a way of life. The state, in turn, could do nothing more than condemn the attack 'in the strongest terms' and denounce the 'cover for it provided by America'. As for the threat to 'suspend cooperation' with the committee monitoring the cessation of hostilities, this sulking will probably have no impact after all balances of power had collapsed. While some have said that Israel is the one implementing the president's speech and the ministerial statement, with iron and fire, Lebanon's despair was apparent as the world paid no attention to the last assault, reaffirming that its objections to Israel's conduct are reserved solely for the genocide in Gaza. Will Lebanon transition to a way of life shaped by strikes Israel carries out whenever it sees fit? Or will the country ultimately opt for a painful surgical operation the rulers of Lebanon who are seeking safe passage- possibly to nowhere- may not survive? What we can say with certainty, in any case, is that ending the current state of affairs must be prioritized. Nothing would do more to achieve this than acting on the victory attained by the principle of a state monopoly on arms, instead of obscuring or circumventing it through talk of national unity and ensuring that no side is victorious nor vanquished. This principle does not call for celebration or triumphalism. However, disregarding it will lead to sorrow and despair that Israel alone decides to inflict on us. This principle will leave Lebanon's national identity with fresh and visible fractures on top of the latent ones. This outcome, painful enough as it is, has been made inevitable by Lebanon's current political and sectarian alignments, which stubbornly refuse to reflect, reconsider, or learn from past bitter experiences. In the final analysis, fracturing Lebanese nationalism remains less harmful than fracturing the Lebanese nation itself in ways that would render the country itself untenable.
