Pity the (beautiful) Nation

I was in Lebanon a few weeks ago and saw a lot, learned a lot (through meeting Parliamentary representatives of Hezbollah, etc.), and was disturbed a lot. A few weeks after I got back, new violence broke out, and I keep thinking of this poem by Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran, whose museum we visited in Bsharre, in the north of the country. It's a somewhat cynical poem, written in the midst of Lebanon's civil war (1975-1990) and does not exactly display the love of the Lebanese for their country, a love which has kept many of them there throughout the relative hell of the last few decades. It does, however, show a lot of the complexities of such a tiny country - one of the most politically complex and religiously divided countries in the Middle East, and one which author Fouad Ajami called the "Dream Palace of the Arabs."

"Pity the Nation"

Pity the nation that is full of beliefs and empty of religion.
Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave, eats a bread it
does not harvest, and drinks a wine that flows not from its own wine-press.
Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero, and that deems
the glittering conqueror bountiful.
Pity a nation that despises a passion in its dream,
yet submits in its awakening.
Pity the nation that raises not its voice save
when it walks in a funeral, boasts not except among its ruins,
and will rebel not save when its neck is laid between the sword and the block.
Pity the nation whose statesman is a fox, whose philosopher is a juggler,
and whose art is the art of patching and mimicking.
Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpeting,
and farewells him with hooting, only to welcome another with trumpeting again.
Pity the nation whose sages are dumb with years and whose strong men are yet in the cradle. Pity the nation divided into fragments, each fragment deeming itself a nation.