This has been a very busy season for shows and fairs all across the Middle East. Two weeks ago a car show opened in Beirut, Lebanon, with the most comprehensive car stocks you could imagine. By all accounts, the show was a success. I am not a car man, so I really can’t tell much about the vehicles on show. But there was an item in the local press about the most expensive car (one million plus dollars) being “bought” by a Saudi.

Earlier this summer, a jewelry show in Switzerland netted another Saudi first place. I researched the numbers and was told that more than four thousand Saudis visited the show.

I thought I’d carry on this “research” and asked for official numbers at the Frankfurt book fair, the biggest in the world. The official number for Saudi visitors, not counting the hangers-on who were sent officially to peddle one thing or another, was fourteen.

Now the Beirut book fair is in its second week and hardly a dozen Saudis have visited. This in spite of the fact that you see them in all the wrong places about town.

There is a pattern here; a very disturbing one. If nothing else, we cannot come face to face with our desires and behavioral patterns. Though generalization is usually not accurate in academic circles, in social and anthropological disciplines, it is the end result of a long and laborious process. If a majority in a given society eats ants, for example, the anthropologist would label such a society as ant-eaters. The ones who abstain are simply the exception; and exceptions don’t make rules.

Our intellectualism as we fan it in newspapers and self-serving manifestos is simply a non-starter. The few who are actually learned cannot and do not control anything. The behavioral pattern is stark: Cars, jewelry, fancy clothes, trash magazines, and putting on airs that do not fit. Frankly, the Saudi character around the world (Arab and otherwise) is becoming more obnoxious and less tolerated.

Ours is a different sort of materialism than the West has. We deny it, the West revels in it. Yet you go into a bookstore in London and find it packed. You go to a bookstore in Jeddah and find all the customers either buying magazines or shopping for school. Newspaper editors read “reviews” of books read by their minions. Schoolmasters stopped reading when they graduated from university. Moms read gossip magazines. Fathers read guides to you know what in you know where. The rest never bother to put on the show of reading at all.

Yet we have writers — plenty of them. Goethe said that if you want to be read for one hour, you have to read for eight yourself. Enter plagiarism to fill the gap. There has been a rash of lifted articles and “borrowed” ideas that would shut down the biggest newspaper in the world. Ours survive like a cat that has a zillion lives. If you are wondering why, the theory is that the top people do it, so why not the rest?

Logically, this behavior follows the pattern of cars and jewels: If I like something I will buy it. If it is not for sale, I will take it nonetheless. Since everyone is either above the law or thinks of him or herself as such, why ever not?

I for one could possibly live with this if only those who peddle this behavior would stop acting holier than thou and learn a bit of humility. I know it is a tall order.