Last American in Damascus

To many of us, Syrians are only the latest problem of the day, and the same goes for Europeans as they try to deal with the Syrians trying to get around the barriers put up at every crossing point on the continent. Their futile hope: to somehow make it to some port that will afford them access to the ocean wide, and from there to America, America, which still beckons like a torch held aloft.

From one European city to another, Athens to Calais, the debate rages over how to deal with these people, who were reduced to an indiscriminate mass long ago in the popular mind—the influx, the tide, the flood. The first step toward eliminating any people is to dehumanize them, not think of them as people at all but just refuse that must be got rid of. Maybe even a source of infection and disease if not worse.

Yet to Thomas Webber, Damascus is home sweet home, and he’s not about to leave. The man is easy enough to spot at six-feet-four with silver-gray hair, attired as always in bespoke suits complete with pocket squares. Great comfort, good tailoring. Friendly cops wave him through dangerous intersection after intersection as he proceeds to some of his favorite haunts, like the cafe atop the city’s botanical gardens, where all is peace, and which offers him a panoramic view of the old citadel. It’s said to be to be the oldest continuously inhabited human community in the world.

Couched between a bend in the Barada River River and the entrance to the old Omayyad Mosque, the gardens offer birdsong for music and a sense of peace in the very heart of the war-torn city far below. Any violence is way below, out of sight and out of mind. A lot of things have happened on the road to Damascus, and Thomas Webber is there to observe it all. And he refuses to stay neutral between right and wrong, a dispassionate observer of the passion of the Syrian people.

Maybe you had to grow up on Texas Avenue in Shreveport, La., to appreciate Mr. Webber’s attachment to Syria and the Syrian people. And get to know them as individuals—like the Ferrises and Bodrons and Naders—to understand his point of view. Born in Orchard Park, N.Y., a suburb of Buffalo, he was the son of a German railyard master and a Polish nurse. Then, having flunked out of dental school, he missed the Vietnam War thanks to a clerical oversight and, having got lost in the shuffle, went job-hunting. And found one in Damascus when he accepted a post at the Damascus Community School, a private American academy. And stayed on and on. His considered judgment after all those years:

“The Syrian people are just the most beautiful people in the world. There is no way I’m going to leave this country. They’ll have to carry me out.” The cops wave him through every checkpoint with a nod and smile. They know him as well as he does them. He may have to duck the occasional mortar shell or artillery round fired from the city’s center, but such are the hazards of being a good citizen in a city like Damascus. One such missile hit about three meters (some 10 feet) “in front of our door [and] wiped out seven cars.” He took it in stride, as we might the usual city traffic. A gentleman just buckles his safety belt and carries on, thank you.

No matter. He and Mrs. Webber just took “precautionary measures,” like making sure each knew where and when the other left home. What’s more, he adds, “I am very observant of cars around me. We started doing a lot more things together, which is good for our relationship.” The family that stays together stays . . . alive. Which is a pretty good argument for family unity.

“I have the choice of any country,” says this last American in Damascus, “and I choose to stay here. It’s part of my heart now.”

That’s clear enough. For home is where the heart is, and in Thomas Webber’s case, where it’s been for years. Peace, fragile as it is, be with him, inshallah.

—––––– v –––––—

Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

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