Miss Israel is not, of course, an actual emissary of that state - but since she walks around with the word "Israel" plastered to her T-shirt, a little conflation is to be expected.
So, if you're Miss Lebanon, taking a selfie with her is maybe not the wisest of social-media moves. Not quite as unforgivable as a pizza brand hijacking a domestic violence hashtag, maybe, or comparing your dumb sports team to the legacy of MLK, but still not a good look for your #personal #brand... or the brand of the 4.5 million people who live in your country, it would seem.
See, this is the important thing to remember about this type of risible social media "incident": Whenever any seemingly stupid, superficial Internet issue combusts like a cluster bomb, we're never actually talking about a bad tweet, or an ill-advised meme, or the abstract niceties of international politics. We're talking about identity, personal identity: that one, closely guarded thing that reliably riles up comments sections each and every time it is even tangentially threatened. Everything else - the tweets, the memes, the embattled selfies - is just symbolism. And that explains everything.
Bear with me for a minute here, because we're about to get a little academic. Heralds of the highbrow set are fond of acting like Internet phenomena are somehow vapid or narcissistic or - to sum it nicely - "meaningless." That would be a fair criticism, if it didn't apply to virtually every other cultural output, as well. What do these stripes of paint "mean," exactly, without the social realism of the 1930s or the legacy of the World Wars? What do songs objectively amount to, besides a series of pretty notes?
The words you're reading are symbols for things; without those things, the actual shapes of these words don't mean anything. The letters within the words are symbols for sounds. The Miss Universe pageant - superficial and outdated though it may be - makes its contestants literal, physical embodiments of their countries, and the selfie is, by wide cross-cultural consensus, a deliberate, autonomous statement of self.
These designations are not nothing; they succinctly communicate something fundamental about the identities of several million people. If that seems silly or inflated, well - so is everything. We operate according to a framework of symbols. That's how we pull meaning from a world that, welp, actually means nothing.
Unfortunately, it appears easy for many people (perhaps particularly for people who concern themselves with serious subjects like the Israeli-Lebanon conflict), to dismiss or condescend to the types of symbols the Internet deals in, though they'll readily accept the same sort of arbitrary symbolism in music or literature or fine art.
But if you orient yourself to the Internet that way, it becomes a bigger, richer, more interesting place. For starters, the Miss Lebanon selfie isn't just a social media gaffe: It's about the difficulties of embodying a self and a country simultaneously. It's about the politics of personal identity and vice versa. It's about the unwieldiness of semiotics itself.
Even the Miss Universe Organization has interpreted it that way - if accidentally.
"It is unfortunate to know," the group said in a statement, "(that) a photo of four smiling women from different parts of the world, working together at an event, could be misconstrued as anything other than what it is, a celebration of universal friendship."
But that's the thing about symbols, right? They can be construed many equally meaningful ways.
