6/8/93

Gripe, Gripe, Gripe

Weג€™re so close to being the perfect society...

    Look, I hate to complain, but this country is still not perfect. Since I come from Quebec, I don't really have the right to find fault with any other society, but on the other hand, since I'm a newspaperperson, I just can't resist.
We're close, really we are, except for ...
-- Sidewalks. We're gonna park there anyway, so why don't they just tear 'em up and be a little more considerate to our shock absorbers?
-- The car alarm. It's our national anthem.
-- Matches. It's got to be the worst thing we produce in this country. It's not smoking that can kill us, it's lighting up. While much of the rest of our industry is on a mad dash to build a better mousetrap, the nation's matches are exactly as execrable as they were before we signed up (a little late) for the Industrial Revolution, maybe even since fire was first struck. Our lone Zionist matchmaker's idea of our being a light unto the nations is to create a product that sends up a flare of flames when the business-end of the matchstick suddenly rockets off on its own, shedding light on your pants, your bed, your hair. Excuse me, I err; there has been dramatic improvement: Now, some of the rickety little matchboxes have color photos of soccer players pasted on them.
-- The number of MKs. There shouldn't be any. The prime minister can make all the decisions and the president can take care of the paperwork. The guard can turn the lights on and off.
-- We need new occupied territories where we can do Saturday afternoon shopping.
-- Those white road markings that never made it out of the municipal paint cans.
-- The brilliant solution to invisible road markings: those little reflective "cat's eyes." This is a special consideration for blind drivers. When you drive over them you feel like you're being spanked.
-- The unmarked crosswalk. It's a Jerusalem original.
-- Keep the Golan? Are we nuts? Nobody lives there, nobody ever visits more than once, nobody passes through the place on the way to somewhere else. It doesn't have a Hilton. What has the Golan to show for 26 years under Zionism? A ski slope. The Golan is to Israel what Alaska is to America, what Scotland is to Britain, what the South Bronx is to New York. We need it like a bullet-hole in the head.
-- Return the Golan? Are we nuts? Why are we even talking about it? There are 200 known reasons why we should give the Syrians the finger on this issue. If we really must give away the territory, we should give it to Walt Disney.
-- There is something very wrong with a country in which one side of a critical national issue does not even print up bumper stickers. Pro-Golan messages outnumber anti-Golan expressions something like 2,380,000-0.
-- Never mind the Golan; more infuriating is deodorant. Deodorant in this country costs about as much as an armpit transplant. Every time someone raises his arms to put on the stuff it's like he's being held up.
-- Something should be done about the coffee lady where I work.
-- The distance to the nearest English-speaking country. There is a good reason why there are so few Jews left in Cyprus and so many in, say, America. Because you can immigrate from Larnaca and then, any time you want, spend a lunch hour visiting your hometown. When you make aliya from America, that's it, you're gone. Zionism cannot possibly succeed this way. It should set up branches overseas.
-- The army. We don't really need one, it just crowds the buses. Switzerland doesn't have a real army and the Arabs don't bother them, so I think it's worth a try.
-- Two-day weekends should not include a weekday. Who needs Friday off when it's already messed up by Sabbath eve? The solution is for Shabbat to start on Shabbat.
-- The future. If it is true that everything comes to Israel 20 years after it has hit America, then 20 years from now this is gonna be a very disturbed country.
-- This is a serious one: Buses here are death traps. Lots of buses elsewhere are designed so that passengers can push out the side windows by flicking a lever. Ours are designed to accommodate terrorists.
-- My plumber. He knows what I mean.
-- Packaged chips. The other day I bought a couple of bags. I chucked them into the car. But the car door wouldn't close. I couldn't fit two family-size bags of chips into one family-size car. I solved the problem only when I thought to spear a gash in each of the bags, releasing most of the contents of my purchase, nothingness. Five shekels a pop, it cost me. I think we should export these potato-chip bags, market them as "Holy Land Air" with a "FREE BONUS INSIDE: A CHIP."
-- The banks. They think they're doing you a favor.
-- The banks. Every hour they're closed you save a fortune.
-- The banks. Someone gives you a bad check and you have to pay a fine.
-- The banks. They own the government, the country, you and me and they know it. Privatizing the banks is not going to change things: It's their customers that should be privatized.
-- The banks advertise themselves like they're your lovable Uncle Max, rich and always happy to help. Well, it just ain't so. Our banks are the Khmer Rouge of the financial world.
-- The banks. I mean, they even charge for deposits, for heaven's sake.
-- The people. We have too many Arabs and Jews. Everywhere you look, Arabs and Jews, Jews and Arabs. We need some Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians. With a million Protestant-Israelis the rest of us would behave better because we'd always be worried about what the goyim would think.
-- The dumb system of having an inspector wade through a bus checking everyone's tickets. Have you ever seen a cheater caught? And if they ever catch one, does the fine make up for the combined salaries of an army of inspectors?
-- People who come all the way here to learn at an ulpan. They shouldn't come here unless they speak the language already.
-- The mortgage-guarantor system. I don't even want to talk about it.
-- Stores that apply unremovable super-glued price tags to such things as full-length mirrors, each dish of a set of fine bone china, sunglasses and antiques.
-- Taxis. The reek of vanilla air fresheners is so pungent you can't even smell the stale cigarette smoke.
-- Taxis. In this country, the driver tells you where to go.
-- Taxis that go out of your way to scoop up stray fares while the meter is running on your dime. You can indignantly remind the driver that you're paying for a "private" and not a bus, but all you can do is get out, give him the finger, and hope the next taxi picks you up (even if he already has a fare).
-- Honking. What we should do is print up bumper stickers that say "Honk if you love Jesus" and slap 'em on every second car in the country.
ג€“ Complainers.