I always find myself thinking in existential terms when faced with the absurd and the pathetic. It is not a matter of belief. Rather, I think it a defensive mechanism to protect one’s senses (and sanity) from the onslaught of madness.
Airports are jammed these days with vacationers coming back home. It is not easy to find a seat on any moving or flying machine that would get you home. If you haven’t planned ahead, you are stuck. Needless to say, most of us think we are too important to plan and the exercise is way beneath our social status. What we want we shall get, regardless of time and circumstance.
One such Saudi lady came to Beirut airport without reservations. She was put on standby. Somehow, she was given a seat. At the aircraft door, she stood shouting her head off when she realized she was given a seat in economy. The passengers were in their seats, the flight ready to go, but she would not budge. “I have never traveled in economy in my life,” she remonstrated. Then she started screaming as if sitting in economy would infect her with commoner breath.
The agents, far too tolerant for my taste, explained to her that she was lucky enough to find a seat let alone demand a bigger one. She insisted and demanded that they remove a passenger from the higher classes and put her in it. The pitch of her voice and her Hijazi accent were making people nervous and angry. Her “hadas” and “eash shiklou” were booming monstrously annoying. Someone, with a wicked sense of humor turned on the PA system on low and the whole aircraft could hear her.
An hour later, we managed to push back for the two-hour flight. Most of us were not amused, but the tens of children going back home for school with their families were having a field day with it all. Throughout the flight, the silly lady was subjected to those children mimicking her cries of protestations. She got home safely, albeit an hour late.
What sort of social culture produced this woman and many like her? I know a man who makes pennies from his job yet refuses to travel from Jeddah to Riyadh except in First Class. He at times has to borrow money from friends. The domestic flight is one hour long, yet they fight for status even on that short leg.
Albert Camus said that “man is always a prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.” That woman’s “truth” is obvious, and even in pathetically public situations she could not free herself from such bondage and sit tight in a seat wide enough to accommodate “normal” behinds.
She had to make a scene, delay three hundred passengers, cost the airline another bundle, and make her point. She needed to make that point in order for her to go back home and “explain” to her peers how she got to travel in an “economy” seat. The scene compensates for the perceived lost “honor” of a lady full of herself without justification.
The more I see, the more convinced I am that we are not a pretty sight in public.
