Niceness (Seasonally Adjusted) Is A11
ALLAN, RAY
Euro vista BY RAY ALAN Niceness (Seasonally Adjusted) Is AU Four or five times a century, the earth shakes, the heavens flash, and someone raises mid snow and ice a banner with a strange...
...Despite undercurrents of fanaticism in Syria, I came to no harm—even when an English airline pilot and I were accosted by plainclothes police while photographing a street beside the Omayyad mosque...
...I felt sure this was the prologue to a breathless adventure...
...Even so, in its broad "pleasant" sense, it is useful, and "niceness" is lighter than "pleasantness...
...The two main communities, Greek-Orthodox Christians and Turkish Moslems, coexisted peacefully...
...In the Shiite south, the uneducated were, as in most countries, xenophobic...
...smuggled Israeli goods were on sale in their village markets...
...As he brought it, a Syrian rushed over from his triktrak game to give me a silvery mouthpiece and fit it into the plastic mouthpiece of the narghileh...
...Nobody locked things up...
...Niceness on something like a countrywide scale I first met in Cyprus...
...Outside the capital, though, Lebanese were generally friendly and hospitable...
...As we celebrated quietly in a café I noticed that the pilot had on his keyring a medallion inscribed in Hebrew "Medinat Israel," which he had bought during a recent stopover in Tel Aviv...
...He laughed...
...I didn't risk the experiment, but most non-Cypriots I met gave the islanders the same kind of testimonial...
...Wordsworth inclined me to believe that most people were nice until corrupted by society, though some of my relatives excluded the working class and the inhabitants of London—"a mean lot," I was warned before going to work there, "and they rarely have a bath...
...Access to a seasonally adjusted NI might have spared Spaniards that unpleasant encounter...
...Sure enough, my first London landlady was dishonest, and most of the district, not a slum area, was innocent of bathrooms (I went on Saturdays to a Turkish bath, my first contact with the exotic Orient...
...Afflictions like crime, AIDS and economics have however caught up with sport...
...It was an old Leica, worth little but expensive to replace...
...European football clubs have renewed their ban on English teams because of the "bestiality" of English fans in Spain in February...
...Thanks to a friendly doctor, I was able to see and publish an account of the violent Ashura ceremony re-enacting the battle of Kerbala, where their Imam was defeated...
...It is not a static quality...
...Everyone churns them out, from the UN to the village barman...
...Webster would approve...
...My own experiences in Spain, years later, confirmed the impression thisstorymadeonme...
...The man said: "You ought to be ashamed, adopting Wog customs...
...The majority of Beirut hotels I stayed in tried to overcharge me (the exceptions were at opposite ends of the scale: the Hotel Normandie and a rambling Moslem fonduk which charged about a dollar a night), and shopping was haggling...
...I've never used it...
...In France, too, after the exuberance of the late 1940s, the '50s were an anticlimax: the electoral system produced political crises, and that famous joie de vivre slumped...
...I would upgrade it and even give it the accolade of a place in statistical tables...
...they were just hard up and culturally deprived...
...In Damascus, I often sat in an openair café late at night absorbing atmosphere and studying Arabic...
...A Spanish farmer and his sons worked for nearly two hours to get it on the road again and mend something...
...They refused payment...
...Since then it had several, politics has been dedramatized, and its NI has risen...
...We live in a whirl of statistics...
...In a hysterical procession afterward, young men slash themselves with knives...
...both were helpful to the outsider...
...My only serious complaint against them was that they spoke such vile English...
...Theboorishness of too many Northern tourists has cooled the enthusiasm of some Mediterranean people for helping foreigners...
...In British pubs, football and horseracing statistics have long been a staple of conversation...
...My inspiration, though, was Greek (Arato), and I think that nice Mr...
...This is my spare," he said...
...Although I found niceness in Cyprus, Lebanon and Syria, all three countries were later harrowed by violence— provoked partly by outsiders, but mainly by the gullibility of local people and the deviousness of political and religious leaders (see my "Business as Usual in Lebanon," NL, April 16, 1984...
...Wait...
...In all except the poorest villages, Christians and Sunnis would invite one to a meal and sometimes offer abed...
...Fortunately, a photo I had taken of a Tunis mosque was on the cover of a leading Cairo magazine that week, and the photo credits named me, so we were soon released without being searched...
...Callologjsts should not find it difficult to come up with areliable Niceness Index, though they will have to feed a lot of variables into their computers...
...Druse peasants were shy of foreigners, but their leaders were hospitable...
...unfortunately, most Shiites were uneducated...
...Having been in Egypt, where everything one didn't bolt down vanished, I asked the hotel manager, an Englishman, to keep my camera in his safe until I needed it...
...To survive in Beirut, you needed a calculator, not a kalashnikov...
...And communities about to receive tourists and sports fans like to know what to expect...
...A formula for compiling an individual niceness score might be devised too, usable in conjunction with the IQ, a concept invented by a French schoolteacher a century ago and in need of a retread...
...most of the solid Norman families have moved on...
...In Iseo, Italy, a postal clerk stamped my letters and paid out of his own pocket because I didn't have enough lire on me and the banks were closed...
...I had an introduction to the head of the political police, but I decided not to use it because the new government was rumored to have fired him...
...The publication of NI tables could transform international affairs, with affability earning greater prestige than aggressivity...
...In Algeria, Israel, Portugal, even ill-reputed Port Said...
...I first heard of Spanish niceness when, as a teenager, I met H.G...
...but if we can't achieve that, let us at least insist that member states have a decent niceness rating, that arms be sold only to nice dictatorships and desert despots, and that only nice terrorists and religious fanatics be tolerated, that...
...Callology is here...
...By present standards, soccer fans were civilized: They often threatened to "bash" the referee, but rarely did so...
...Callologists will study niceness...
...still in Provence not long ago, unknown village youths left their football game and ran half a mile to help me in the same spirit as Wells' Spanish farmer...
...Wells briefly inafriend'shouse.Hetoldus that, during a tour of Spain, his car skidded into a ditch...
...You're not in Cairo or London...
...Most countries would need regional NIs, since conditions and the public mood differ from one region to another...
...Michael Foot, the former Labor Prime Minister, once told me that Brits of all classes and regions had never been nicer than during World War II...
...Among the few people I met in Damascus who rated a low NI rating were an English couple who passed by while I was smoking a narghileh and reading a London periodical...
...It used to mean ignorant and pernickety, and it still irritates purists...
...I soon discovered that most Londoners were not mean...
...Nice" is, Iknow, atripwireof aword...
...An English friend received aletter from his son describing his public (i.e., private) school and including such statistics as sporting successes and an estimate of the percentage of "homos" among pupils and staff...
...Hispanicists may take this to mean "the study of tripe" (callas), and they could be right...
...The question journalists, diplomats, tourists, and sun-seeking emigrants want answered is not how much coaltar or coleslaw the citizens of Nice consume but how nice they are...
...but there was no follow-up, no curvy Circassian odalisque, and no bank in Syria that accepted rubles...
...Lebanon's many communities were no less tranquil...
...The farmer said: "If I were a foreigner in difficulties in England, wouldn't someone do the same forme...
...but I am not compiling a catalog...
...Fellow drinks a glass too many, has an argument with a friend over a girl, and one of them sticks a knife into the other—that's all...
...Last summer, I heard a silly man boring a sizzling girlfriend with his knowledge of six decades of cricket scores and batting averages...
...Even Whitehall typing pools smelled fetid...
...Cornwall is Jamaica Inn: You can imagine them still setting lights on the rocks to lure ships and loot the wrecks...
...Such a moment is now upon us...
...Only murder...
...The NI of any country would fluctuate like the Dow-Jones index...
...Much of Sussex is stockbroker settlement, expensive and dull...
...Ups and Downs Niceness has nothing to do with that idiot's delight "national character...
...In Aleppo an anonymous philanthropist emptied a big paper bag full of ruble banknotes through the bars of my groundfloor window...
...Euro vista BY RAY ALAN Niceness (Seasonally Adjusted) Is AU Four or five times a century, the earth shakes, the heavens flash, and someone raises mid snow and ice a banner with a strange device: Psychoanalysis or Existentialism or (heaven help us) Semiology...
...In a sane world, membership in the UN would be limited to democracies...
...I annoyed Michel Debré, the first Gaullist Premier, by writing in a London weekly that what France needed to boost its morale was a major technological breakthrough...
...If you leave that camera on the doorstep it will still be there tomorrow...
...The world was a simpler place when I was a schoolboy in the north of England...
...There's not much crime here," an English police superintendent told me...
...Another pub voice I overheard was saying: "In theory, the Italians' GDP per head is only level with ours, yet they own four times more dishwashers than we do and 16per cent more cars...
...The Druses are not Moslems, and when I knew them they were not hostile to Jews ("fellowunitarians...
...People are nice here...
...He bought a house in Devon...
...After the War, British niceness was eroded by economic mismanagement and social alienation...
...Obviously their underground economy...
...I was staying at a Nicosia hotel where the doorlocks were a joke...
...Devon, Dorset and Hampshire are fine old peasant country—the countryfolk are just like Cypriots...
...yet what humanity really needs is a reliable Niceness Index (NI...
...One night I asked a waiter for a narghileh...
...An English Guards officer who was looking for a property in southern England gave me this rundown of his findings: "The southeast is Cockney overspill and unstable lower-middle...
...Some statistics and indexes can be useful, once you've identified their bias, and compiling them keeps a lot of people off the street...
...In Northanger Abbey, when Catherine speaks sloppily of a "nice book," Henry exclaims: "And this is a nice day, we are taking a nice walk, and you are nice young ladies...
...Use it always, then you won't pick up a disease...
...It had a courtyard with a fountain and a tame duck that clients insisted on dunking in the water...
Vol. 70 • April 1987 • No. 5
