LITERARY buffs spend their time constructing or deconstructing words. Bored men, who are afraid of facing life, deconstruct others since they see that their road to nirvana needs a libation. Bored humanity, which is the majority, spends its time reading the first type and watching the actions of the latter on television.
True, there is a reductive hue to any system of classification or pigeonholing. Nevertheless, it is a necessity of life that enables us to make order out of chaos. Enter, left stage, the Saudis, who are a “different” breed of elites unrecognized by the rest of humanity — much to humanity’s demise.
We want to be Arabs, but cannot bear to be classified with other Arabs. Contradiction? Of course not. We can see that even within one system, there are tiers. What or who grants us this privilege? Ourselves. And dare anyone question this, we fly into a rage like the man who woke up the whole neighborhood when he had a row with the Syrian carpenter who was doing work on his kitchen cabinets. “These people should not be allowed into the country,” he said to those who gathered to check out the noise. Why? Because “foreigners are not as stable as we are.” I have yet to meet a Saudi carpenter, and I had not recognized that a Syrian was a “foreigner.”
Ensnared by our own mental and social traps, we turn on ourselves chewing the leg or the arm that got caught. We classify ourselves into “intelligentsia” and non-intelligentsia, moderates and conservatives, Hijazi and tribal, urban and Bedu. To me it sounds like a bundle of Halloween horror of very much trick and no treat whatsoever.
Our intellectuals are one of the biggest plagiarists on earth. Someone on the Net put up pages and pages of lifted material that made its way into our newspapers. The funniest part (sad as it was) came from the plagiarized cartoons. I strongly recommend a visit to these sites. So what, pray tell, is the difference here between the intelligentsia and the not so intelligentsia?
Then we have moderates and conservatives. A Saudi moderate is probably someone who smokes a sheesha (hubbly-bubbly) and a conservative is the other who “raves” against such indiscretion to the point of violence. Neither, I am sure, have had the pleasure of reading the theoretical, social, and political thought behind such appellations. I suppose the length of a beard is enough to tell them apart.
Technically speaking, a Hijazi is someone who lives in any of the cities on the Red Sea coast. A tribal person, on the other hand, lives in the hinterland. So what? This distinction is found from the UK to California. Is it a wonder that not all citizens like to go to the beach, and not all like to share space with cows and/or camels?
As for urban and Bedu, the only difference I see is that if they like to keep dogs, the Hijazi will keep a Spaniel and the Bedu will keep a Saluki. Both will tell you they ‘loathe’ dogs. And both, I might add, shop at the same places for the same things, drive massive SUVs, shout insultingly at waiters, and call other Arabs ‘foreigners.’
So much for a distinction when we can’t even deconstruct our own pathetic fallacies in its literal meaning and certainly not in its Keatsian mode.
