June 2025: MAD? Have some wine.
Because it fixes everything.
In my high school history class, we covered the Cold War for a big chunk of 11th grade. I remember “nuclear war anxiety” being worth mentioning in debates and essays because of how peoples’ state of mind affected so much of the mid-20th century. MAD, or the Mutually Assured Destruction that would result from two nuclear powers pressing big red buttons, felt very possible then, especially after the U.S. had dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities in 1945. Less than a hundred years later, we have two states playing pew pew ping pong while the rest of us must let chips fall where they may. Again.
It’s weird for Lebanon to be a spectator underneath the fiery trails of ballistic missiles. I don’t miss making the playoffs - and we’re not out of the woods yet - but I don’t know what’s in store for us when one of these teams is disqualified. I’m still surprised by how steady I feel about more impending doom™. It’s not submission or delusion, it feels more like I’ve been hardened. I’ve become my civil-war-generation father.
In a way, I understand the aforementioned MADness better today as I look at the impact radii of nuclear explosions in southern Iran but, at the same time, I’ve become so accustomed to doomsday preparation that it feels like my factory setting. On the eve of Eid el Adha, Israeli airstrikes brought down eight buildings in Beirut just a couple kilometers away from my house. Beirut is a tiny tin of fish. Beautiful, but still a tightly-packed tin can where the sardines feel every dent. Ever since that night, I periodically pause in my hallway as an Israeli drone buzzes overhead and I think, what if they hit us right now? Then I shake it off and unclench. I know this hypervigilance isn’t “normal” but it is our normal here in Lebanon. It has been our normal when Israel is always in our skies, in our devices, in our lands. We need to be on guard, all of us, at all times.
Is it a skill to be able to feed that anxiety inside me and also be the one to rub its back for comfort?
When I look at the rest of the crumbling world, I wonder why our normal isn’t the standard. I wonder why people outside the hotzone can laugh about WW3 before scarfing down boycotted Big Macs. When I look at the rest of the crumbling world and see how the evils are connected, I’m grateful for this expertise. Lebanon is a broken system bootcamp. Like Kim Ghattas said in “America’s Future Might Be Lebanon” back in 2020, “we know that waiting for the end of something, anything, does not truly provide a fresh start, and certainly not a return to the way things were before.”
In late September 2023, I launched The Wine Down which was supposed to be the first of many monthly wine hangs on Kalei’s rooftop. We decided to use it to debut Chateau Cana’s Comète Rouge, a new red blend featuring an illustration by
.As mass death in Gaza quickly took over our feeds, the Kalei team & I decided to cancel the following event that October. It felt wrong to pour wine while our neighbors were being murdered and our South was getting pummeled. The concept has been dormant ever since because Israel’s radius of impact keeps expanding and now they’ve moved onto Iran, another ancient foil character to their invented history.
“There’s nothing that a glass of wine can’t fix,” says the somm removing the cork from a bottle while a blazing comet is about to bust through the window behind him. At the time, the illustration on the bottle’s label was a tongue-in-cheek joke after years of shit getting shittier in Lebanon. Almost two years later, that same illustration feels prophetic and reflective of the current level of global concern, sans satire. Should we tackle the catapult flinging U.S. fireballs all over southwest Asia or should we just have this super crunchy Carricante? Let it burn.
Once again, we wait for the West to decide how much of our countries they will pillage, pilfer, pity as they seesaw corks out of our “war-zone wines” because there’s nothing that a glass can’t fix. Cheers.
AT LEAST 10 LITTLE LINKS
“Crack Your Windows” and Other Drugs: How Lebanon Outsourced Survival to Its People by Jasmin Lilian Diab from Al Rawiya
”Coping with trauma in Lebanon, when the war never really ends” by Tamara Saade for The New Humanitarian
I saw a David Lynch quote in the preview of Remember to Dream!: 100 Artists, 100 Notes by Hans Ulrich Obrist: “Keep your eye on the donut and not the hole.”
“On Italian food and identity. Who gets to tell the story?” by
If you’ve been here a while, you know I’m a sucker for stationery but Blackwing pencils are something else. I want to tuck the new “culinary” edition behind my ear so I can take notes while watching Season 4 of The Bear. If you want to try a Blackwing in Beirut, 910papers sells them individually or in a pack.
“From Mouneh to Takeout: How Beirut Ate My Teta’s Recipes” by Layla Yammine for The Public Source
”this is what 80 looks like.” by
Japan has 72 microseasons. What season are you in where you live? For Beirut, I’d say June is when the royal poinciana trees’ flowers blossom and create a red canopy over the streets, most noticeable on the street from Mathaf to USJ. It’s also when these velvety, pink bell-shaped flowers carpet the sidewalks (they drop overnight) and the ones still on the branches get filled with happy bees:
I hate to admit it but I used ChatGPT to identify the tree after going through pages and pages of pink flowering trees and getting nowhere. It managed to narrow it down to the right answer within 3 minutes of me listing the defining features. It’s a Brachychiton discolor, or a pink flame tree.
PENNY FOR YOUR THOUGHTS
THE LAST MONTH OF AANAB NEWS
🚨The Q2 bulletin of Aanab News is coming out later this month. It’s a round-up of news items relating to Lebanese wine paired with my brief, hot take. That’s for paid subs only so you know what to do!
🍇Check out Q1 bulletin here.
So many good links Farrah! Thank you. I particularly loved Layla Yammine's essay.