The Lebanese are obsessed with the machinations of foreign policy. They think their lives are unavoidably controlled, and their destinies shaped, by the decisions of other more powerful nations.
Sixty years ago, the then president Bechara El Khoury, and for reasons I'm still trying to fathom, blamed everything on the Italians.
Today, the Italians sell us reasonably priced gas cookers and have lost what regional clout they may have had, but we are still convinced we are slaves to the whims of the Americans, Russians, Israelis, Saudi Arabians, Iranians and even the dear old French.
Recently, a cousin, a man educated in England and whom I consider to be less paranoid than most Lebanese, leant over and assured me that I shouldn't worry about the country's apparently terminal state of economic decline - this was before Friday's ghastly car bomb in Tripoli and the blast in southern Beirut the previous Thursday. His reasoning? A deal had been brokered by the Americans and the Russians in which it was agreed that the coastline from Israel's southern border to Syria's frontier with Turkey would not be touched by the regional violence.
"It's decided," he said knowingly. "The area will be out of bounds. They don't want to jeopardise the drilling and extraction of the oil and gas. It's too valuable. There are interests".
I had heard a similar theory about the resumption of old Cold War alliances, with Lebanon falling within the America's "zone". "Read Kissinger and you will see what I mean," another friend said conspiratorially.
That we go around believing this nonsense is typical of a country that refuses to take part in any introspection. If, as we think, everything is out of our hands, we don't have to hold ourselves accountable. Handy that, don't you think, especially when we have been adrift in very choppy seas without a government for nearly five months.
But even if the respectable, but utterly powerless prime minister-elect, Tammam Salam is unable to form a cabinet, the superpowers have cut a deal, haven't they?
When the Assad regime eventually falls in Syria - even if it's two years into the revolt and president Bashar Al Assad looking as strong and defiant as ever - Lebanon, riding high from its oil and gas revenues, will be the new Norway. We will all be prosperous and all the new high rise buildings that have gone up, and are still going up in Beirut, will be sold and prices will rise and we will live in the utopian society to which we all knew we were entitled ever since some idiot dubbed Lebanon the Paris of the Middle East.
Well it's not happening anytime soon.
According to reports in the local media, the oil companies, the ones that have apparently lobbied so hard in the corridors of power to create a safe haven for their drilling, that we were all assured were falling over themselves to set up shop in Beirut, are now waiting to see who is going to handle the day-to-day running of the country before they start inking any agreements. And who can blame them?
Cyprus, Greece, Turkey and even the relatively sluggish Israel are busy planning how to exploit their reserves and there is even talk of a shared liquefied natural gas terminal (of which we won't be able to take advantage if Israel signs on). Lebanon still needs to get out of the starting blocks and sell exploration rights.
But before this can happen, decrees delineating offshore parcels and agreeing exploration and production-sharing procedures must be rubber-stamped by, yes that's right, a government.
In the meantime, more than 70 people have died in twin terror outrages and we are looking alarmingly like Iraq, and given the weakness of the state, will probably become like Iraq. And yet at lunch on Saturday, I was assured that it was not all doom and gloom, that after the apparent Syrian chemical weapon outrage in Ghouta, there would be foreign intervention in Syria.
Mr Al Assad would go and the region would be stable and … well you can guess the rest.
Michael Karam is a Beirut-based freelance writer