Are we a boring nation? This might sound like an odd question, but it has been eating at me lately. I see signs and I react to them. It is nice to sulk every once in a while, but on the whole, a healthy life is measured by how your brain electrons race and collide inside your skull.
Our language is precise and rich. One word can be a sentence in any other language. As someone who does translation, I can tell you that three pages of English make up two paragraphs in Arabic. Yet we yap endlessly using clichés and redundant metaphors. Every journalist who visited the US since 9/11 thinks he has to tell us how good or bad he was treated at the airports. Who cares? Why don’t they tell us about the journey from plane to terminal in Jeddah that can take longer than the flight itself? Why not wax poetic about the endless lines at our immigration that can make an American fingerprinting process look like a stroll down Main Street at Disney?
We transcend language in our effort to be boring and jump into the realm of music. Take this example: The newscast music played over news items when the words have finished but not the pictures, have been the same since I was ten years old. The words too, I might add, have not changed.
The world is bored with Arafat. Now the Palestinians themselves are bored with him; yet we find in the news and the papers nothing but panegyrics about the doddering old man as the symbol of God knows what. Great nations hide their misfortunes while we flaunt them. Reagan was kept out of the public eye for nine years. When he died, everyone remembered him as he once was.
Expatriate Arabs who live and work in this country complain about “not having a life around here.”
They don’t see much fun in shopping malls they can’t afford, harassment by police to show their papers whenever they move for more than ten paces, and not-so-subtle jibes by some about them being second class citizens-indeed, second class humans. They are always talking about their next vacation and “going” home. Saudis do the same, but do it more spectacularly: They leave en masse every summer. That is most disturbing if you think about it. Better not to.
Boredom is a very dangerous condition. The pictures of the horrific rape making the rounds on the Net and cell phones were a good example of this malaise.
Money, power, and an education that leaves much to be desired conspire to make the three men use their computer for this purpose rather than surf the Net for information or sit down and try to figure out how this lovely sand of ours could be made into crystal that would put Waterford out of business
The bitter truth, however, is that we might be a boring nation because we do not read. A reader is never alone and never bored. That is a joy not known around here yet.
