"Everyone's lookin' for someone to blame. . ."

Oman? The pay was low, and nobody wanted to take responsibility for making any decisions.

The second part--the no decisions part-- of that sentence was familiar to me when I came back to the Khaleej.

The first part had been introduced after 9/11 for assorted obvious reasons but summed up briefly as a boom in private universities—recruiting students amid a booming market of private universities is a lot harder than hiring teachers. Besides, private universities are owned by trading companies and they have long taken advantage of the scattered-brain drain in India. Indians, Pakistanis, North African-Arabs will work for half the salary and jump through fiery hoops if told to do so.

Oman's Technical Colleges hire mid-twenty something backpackers mostly from Canada. The schools crammed students into classrooms filling all 40 some odd chairs.

What mattered most? Curriculum? (You shittin' me boy?)

What's a Kerr. . .ick. . . q. . .lem?

Fuck kerrickyou whatever, just take attendance so we can free up some seats in the classrooms.

Why? Because the Arabian Gulf's era baby boom has started taking their frustration out on the world—first it was blowing themselves up on buses full of Jews, which wasn't a bad thing as they were encouraged to do this from day one; then they brought down the World Trade Center which was sort of bad, but, well, channel Saudi One television continually ran a bumper clip of some Palestinian woman who was so overcome with joy after hearing the news of the death and destruction in New York she wept for the camera and proclaimed "Praise God! Praise God."

I may be going out on a limb here, but I'd say that constitutes some sort of approval from the grand poo-bahs.

Anyway, I digest.

In Oman, I also worked alongside some easy going sub-continentals and maybe a few Nubians from Africa. I'd been married to the Rose of Teheran for a few months and from courtship through marriage, I began to take hammer and to bust me up a couple of layers of marble veneer. Beneath it was a slightly different and a better informed perspective into the average Arab mind.

My first and long lasting impression made about Arabs (about ten years back that-a-way) was no different from the "I'll carry-it-to-my-grave" impressions I still hear on the bus every morning and every afternoon pouring from the mouths of guys my age. Arabs are lazy bastuds.

Seems as though we have all come here to work for The Firm. It is our Alamo, the only line of defense we have against privatization, shitty contractors and competition from the 20 somethings, the sub-continentals and the northern dark continentals. What I hear now is what I had long ago falsely assumed. No--they're no lazier than your Jose-six pack hard working Meh-hee-can.

The Gulf is a world which has (metaphorically speaking) a thin layer or two of marble which hides a concrete, unspoken truth that only some westerners have rare glimpse into.

Arabs are not lazy.

It is not sloth. It is fear.

Inside the top secretive homes and gardens, children learned a Voltairean philosophy; just at that point towards the end of the novel, when the Turk drills into Voltaire's hapless, clueless Candide, the answer to his quest for the truth:
"In life, we must all tend to our own gardens."
In other words, keep yourself to yourself because if you don't, it's a good way to lose your head. . . or job.

Mind your own business or at least appear to be minding your own business.

There is a reason for the veils, the imbreachable walls surrounding homes, the basement swimming pools shut out from the sun, first cousins marrying first cousin (keeping it in the family)

More to the point: they strictly disagree with Oscar Wilde and his quip, "The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about."

Make a wrong move, let some skeletons out of the extended family-tribal closet and you might just find yourself a bottom feeder, scraping along, attending the diwaniyas where nobody knows anyone who can get things done for you. You will have to live in your own country like an ex-pat. You'd stand in line at the bank, BE allowed only 26 kg of luggage on a flight—economy class ticket.

So, the obvious answer to avoid becoming the topic of any tosic gossip in a place where guilt is assumed before innocence and where some smoke is in the air, somewhere there must be a burning bush, don't stick your neck out.

Remember-- Chop! Chop!

Now, it is accurately assumed that Americans watch too many movies.
The male of the species proudly accepts responsibility when he reaches a position in life where he has becomes an important decision maker: whether it is an officer in the army whose decisions might get himself and his men killed or a businessman with a corner office, windows on the world, making a decision that could either bring in or lose a lot mountain o' money--one path leads down a "that-a-boy", pats on the back path, the other path leads towards humiliation and joblessness.

Still, if he's wrong, with pride, before going to the gallows, he says goodbye to former co-workers and underlings when he enobly announces, "I accept full responsibility for my actions."

If one has to make a decision in this culture, an important decision--and the odds are 95 to 5 that it is a right or wrong decision, live a day at a time. Tomorrow is in God's hands. Maybe He will be merciful and make the situation go away.

My supervisor for example, is a kindly, Desmond Tutu-ish/ Koffi Annanesque, Sudanese chap who is in theory the head teacher and one would think he'd be concerned in up-to-date pedagogical theories being put to the acid test.

Uh uh.

He has one life or death task to perform throughout the day. He must report to the Emirati Wizeera who towers over all of us and waits each hour for a head count. When he gets the head count on both teachers and students sorted out, he's done his job, and he is safe from the one towering above him.

There is a twice-a-decade Gulf Cooperation Council Pow Wow taking place across the street from my temporary c'mpany guest house.

It's also a guess house. Since the answers to my questions might be wrong and traced back to the one who gave them to me, information is as preciously hidden as the face of a thirteen year old bride when she weds her 84 year old Saudi husband/purchaser.

The best answer is no answer. The best position to take in a decision making process is to get oneself out of the process as expeditiously as you can.
Because if there is a person above you, who has as his duty a decision to make—and he can either fire you or forgive you, you're fucked. There's that 5% chance that by showing compassion and being merciful, someone above you will have your head on a pike by sunrise tomorrow.

I mean, they can't blame it all on the Jews.

They've tried that. They've raised a bulging, bloated demographic of baby boys to manhood and girls to womanhood (with plenty more on the way) who are beginning to think that maybe someone behind the palace walls has made a few questionable decisions and those walls might not be as unbreachable as previously believed. So with youthful recklessness working against them, they have made a decision and some have acted upon on that decision.

"tell me again--why is it called Saudi Arabia? It can with some effort be switched back to plain ol'Arabia.