In Ashrafieh, next to a garbage dump, on the barricade surrounding a construction site, a spray-painted slogan reading "Long Live Lebanon". All the political and nationalistic slogans in Lebanon hit me as meaningless, half-ass spoken and fake. Zorba the Greek annihilated in me the illusion of nationalism and this winter, with all the disgust, hopelessness, and the absurd that I saw in Lebanon, it sunk deep... It even occured to me that nationalism can have negative effects, in the sense that a human being might believe that he is superior because of his nationality as it happened to me when I first went to the USA.

Rami E. Cremesti BS, MS