Spare a thought for the coloniser

"Do you think this is fun for us," asked Tom Barrack, the US special envoy for Syria, addressing a group of Lebanese journalists after a meeting with President Joseph Aoun in Beirut on 26 August.

- Prabath Sirisena

Speaking what appears to be the only language he knows-that of finance and referring to his deputy Morgan Ortagus, he further added, "Do you think this is economically beneficial for Morgan and I to be here putting up with this insanity?" What had caused such grief to the benevolent envoy was the way the journalists had started peppering him with questions when he entered the room. Having graced Lebanon with his presence, even though it made no financial sense apparently, Barrack had to admonish his audience before answering any questions: "The moment this starts becoming chaotic, like animalistic, we're gone. So you want to know what's happening, act civilised, act kind, act tolerant, because this is the problem with what's happening in the region." When he's not busy advising people of "the region" how to be civilised, Barrack attends to his duties as the billionaire founder and executive chairman of Colony Capital (which has been renamed as DigitalBridge). What the renaming of his company had tried to conceal, Barrack managed to blurt out in the open that day. I found the whole spectacle rather refreshing. Here was an almost comically archetypal coloniser, standing in public, in front of a mic, speaking his mind, without restraint or pretence, revealing to the world what he truly thinks.

And since it cannot be that the billionaire envoy from the US is mistaken, I had to adjust some of my own ways of seeing things. Through this new interpretive lens (which, I admit, might not exactly be what Barrack had intended), I could see some incidents in Gaza in the past few days where the chaotic, animalistic, uncivilised, unkind, and intolerant ways of the natives were on display.

Chaotic grace