A friend from Sidon yesterday was telling me that poor Syrian workers are afraid to sleep in Sidon; they leave for the night to stay at the Palestinian refugee camp of `Ayn Al-Hilwah. She also was reminding me of how rude, bossy, and authoritarian Rafqiq Hariri was with people, and that it was this humiliation of people that explained the rejection of his candidates in the last municipal election in his own home town. The Hariri propaganda machine is now filling the airwaves with bogus stories of Hariri's modesty and down-to-earth personality.