Pajama Party in Beirut

Because I was away in Damascus last weekend, I missed out on an exciting new development in Lebanese demonstrations. Instead of the usual Hizballah supporters, or anti-Syrian activists commemorating the death of one or another martyr, this one consisted entirely of people dressed in their pajamas.

Last Saturday night, the residents of Gemayzeh blocked off the main street into their East Beirut neighborhood to protest the noise and traffic that has accompanied the transformation of their once quiet, historic district into the center of the city's nightlife. The demonstrators came armed with pillows and placards with slogans like "We need sleep!"

Such civic activism is rare in Lebanon, which has a weak notion of shared public space. Also unusually, the government acted quickly. This week, it closed some 20 Gemayzeh watering-holes that had parking or noise violations. But the government's commitment to peace and quiet is unlikely to last for long: there's just too much money at stake for the party not to continue.

The wild success of the Gemayzeh nightclub scene is one of the best examples of Lebanon's bizarre economy. Despite the fact that the country is still rebuilding from a war in 2006, is hugely in debt, in the middle of a political crisis, and that tourists have been scared away by an ongoing terror campaign, pockets of society are awash with money thanks to investment from wealthy overseas Lebanese and those few locals who can afford to eat, drink and be merry.

But in many ways, such economic froth makes life that much more difficult for average people struggling in hard times. Almost every week, some lovely old building in East Beirut (which probably once housed working-class tenants on rent control) is destroyed to make way for a luxury condo high rise with apartments that will be empty for three quarters of the year while their owners are in London or Paris or wherever. Add to that the rising cost of energy, food and other commodities, inflation caused by the drop in the Lebanese Lira (which is backed by the sinking dollar) and you have enough class resentment to pose a serious threat to the American-backed government here. Though Lebanon has become a battleground in the Cold War for regional supremacy, its fate just might be determined by such seemingly small matters as the price of bread and power cuts. Even in the Middle East, all politics is local

--Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut