"The scene has become routine: day and night, in small, run-down teahouses all over this teeming city, men sit quietly smoking harsh tobacco from water pipes with their eyes glued to television news from Lebanon. And around the city, there is a similar reaction: despair. Not despair over Lebanon — that provokes anger. The hopelessness has begun to boil over as Egyptians see their own country’s problems in the mirror of Lebanon. They are feeling the powerlessness of living under an autocratic system, and confronting the poverty and corruption of their third-world economy. "