Jim Clancy was in Beirut the other day. This is the same Jim Clancy who lived in a hotel in East Beirut back in the 1980s during the civil war in Lebanon. He was a CNN correspondent then, a good one. In fact, he just recently retired from CNN, and he was in Lebanon to lecture at the Lebanese American University.
The reason I find his visit something to remark about is that the good man (who never saw or heard of me) helped me out.
So often I have a problem. Increasingly during the years I lived in Lebanon, I had to deal with the truth that most Americans thought I was crazy. Once, while home on a furlough, I arrived in Richmond, Va, where I was scheduled to speak at the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board. When my hostess met me at the airport she handed me a cartoon that had appeared that day in the local newspaper. In the cartoon, a man has struggled up a rugged slope to reach a guru of some kind who lived at the top of a mountain. The wise man is attempting to answer a question for the puzzled pilgrim. He says, “I can answer all questions, except: Why would any sane American remain in Beirut?”
I loved this cartoon, because it took me immediately into the subject of my speech. But my audience that day was a rather specialized elite group of people who were prepared to believe that I was doing the right thing there in Lebanon. They wanted to hear my explanation, not because they were critics or doubters but because they wanted to believe and needed some evidence to support their position. They meant to pass it on to those who might wonder.
Until today I have this problem that most people don’t quite understand. A few weeks ago I attended the meeting of a book club whose members had just read In Borrowed Houses. They confessed that they didn’t understand. They asked, “Really, why did you stay through all of that?” I thought I had made that clear in my stories, but they had read my book already, and they were asking. Their question tended to paralyze my tongue.
But now I have help from Jim Clancy himself. On the occasion of that recent lecture at the LAU, he told the students that CNN had given him a choice back in 1982. He could cover politics at the White House or go back to Beirut where he had already witnessed the Israeli invasion. He said it took him, “about one minute” to choose Beirut.
Why? It was the people, he said. The Lebanese people were “compelling. They were worth risking your life for.” Clancy said that. Not some missionary type with a life-time commitment. A journalist. He just liked the Lebanese!
Clancy didn’t tell any stories like mine about dedicated co-workers and hospitable neighbors and brave church members and eccentric friends. So far as I know, he mentioned only one trait of the Lebanese. He said, “The war in Lebanon was my last experience where there was any respect for journalists. Both the Muslims and the Christians knew that we had to go to the other side; we had to cross over to get to the other side of the story.”
Well, Lebanon is a very small, diverse country. Until the 80s most Lebanese had lived very close to multiple views of the world, and they were aware of ways they were dependent on the world. It made them smart.
Clancy went on to use his observation as a comment on the changing world culture. He explained that most people he has worked with since want to manipulate the media. They want the journalist to be a propagandist for their side. He liked remembering that back during their civil war the Lebanese on all sides had the good sense to know that their view was not the only one, and that the journalist had not come to promote their side but to find the truth. That was a great compliment to the Lebanese.
In contrast to Lebanon, America is a very big, diverse country. It is easy in America to find a comfortable group and stay in it; and it is easy to feel that the country can survive without the rest of the world. None of this has made us smart. For instance, huge segments of our media are openly supporters of one political position, even while claiming to be unbiased. We the people have let journalism deteriorate into propaganda or entertainment, because apparently that is what we want it to be.
So how did Jim Clancy actually help me just a few days ago? Only by pointing out a genuine truth: that the Lebanese are uniquely smart and aware of who they are. Living with them is always interesting, challenging, thought-provoking, educational, often irritating, but never dull. Like the beauty of the country, this gets under one’s skin. You get hooked.
Those people who read my book and still wonder why I stayed, may read this and still wonder. But I have Jim Clancy, a very smart man, on my side. He said the Lebanese were worth risking his life for.