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Don’t wait, order today and become the talk of Lebanon!”
So might read an advertisement aimed at the pitiable souls who drive all day and night up and down Lebanon’s highways, enraging thousands of residents. Modifying their expensive sports cars to make as much noise as possible, they race them against each other as well as the general traffic, endangering people’s lives and disturbing the peace for kilometres around.
These inconsiderate, anti-social men – and it is only men – view Lebanese roads as their personal, attention grabbing racetrack. Why they drive aggressively at high speeds, weaving in and out of traffic, is not difficult to guess, and any standard text book on evolutionary psychology will shed further light on it. What is more interesting is who are they? How do they pay for the expensive luxury sports cars they race at dangerous speeds and risk of killing someone, as well as the equipment necessary to make them generate high levels of noise?
It would not be a surprise if they turn out to be the sons of the rich and corrupt who control Lebanon as their cash cow: judges, politicians, military personal, police chiefs and others, for whom a different system of law to that of an ordinary Lebanese applies, and whose children feel entitled to do as they please without consequence.
I speculate on their identity of course, as I have never yet met one at rest and at eye level to be absolutely sure, though a very revealing study on the car in Lebanon by anthropologist Jacob Cassini (The rules of the road: spectacle, performance and power in Lebanese car culture) gives some credence to this wild speculation:
“The car itself is an object from which one can read extensive socio-political information about a driver in Lebanon – it is a key means by which drivers demonstrate power in Lebanese everyday life… By examining the language embodied by automobiles, the Lebanese road becomes a dense landscape of symbolic power. A car is more than a means of transport – it is an identity, a marker of social status and relationship to the Lebanese state.”
Cassini further notes that whilst we see similar types of “performative political and social practices” in other car cultures throughout the world, in Lebanon they are far more complex and serve “as a microcosm for the way that power and privilege operate in everyday life in the country.”
Notwithstanding the dysfunctional Lebanese police force, the signalling by anti-social car racers of their possession of power, or at least their proximity to power in the form of a rich or politically connected parent, may explain why there are no acts of road rage against them by other drivers who suffer their noise, inexperienced driving, and dangerous antics as they declare their entitlement both on the roads and in the general society of Lebanon. It is simply too risky to show even meek disapproval of one of these anti-social drivers, perhaps through a hand gesture or by honking your horn, given the potential risk of aggressive retaliation or later repercussion through powerful connections. As the author observes, “Individuals operate in a thick and changing web of social relations, and while driving they must constantly calculate their relative position in the hierarchy, as they decide whether or not to cut someone off or double park.” Or when feeling the compulsion to raise a fist or show the finger.
Plato once said that “Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something.” And just as toddlers will bang and rattle anything that makes a loud, impossible-to-ignore noise to attract everyone’s attention, the pitiable men who race and endanger people’s lives and wreck their peace, desperately seek to do the same. Look at me. Love me. Please!
In some parts of the world people enraged by the noise made by the anti-social have taken the law into their own hands. However, this is never advisable for anything less than a revolution, and in Lebanon is unlikely to happen without starting a war.
Whilst such reaction and retaliation is understandable, it is neither helpful nor safe. We should, rather, work towards the day this problem will be solved through legal enforcement, following the example of societies that have begun to legally crack down on such anti-social behavior. Until then we may need to carry on letting these needy, anti-social types think we love them.