Fighting shy
James Delingpole
Shy people are evil. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of shy people I actually like. Mostly I agree with my (shy) friend Hugh Massingberd's housemaster who once told him that 'shyness is just a form of rudeness'.
It's not the bad manners aspect of shy people that really bothers me, though. It's the fact that I always feel they're getting one over on me, When I meet someone new — you, say — I'm usually really up front. If I've just contracted syphilis or gone on Prozac or shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, I'll tell you about it. Not in an annoying look-at-me-aren't-I-so-cleverand-interesting way. More out of the innate generosity of character that prevents me from wasting your life and mine on inconsequential small talk. Hey, we're all going to die soon enough — very soon if Osama gets his way — so let's cut to the chase. This is what I'm like. Now what are you like?
Some people respond well to this because it's such a change from the ghastly coyness or wearisome sense of discretion that afflicts so many of my tight-arsed fellow Englishmen. But some — the shy ones mostly—just listen and nod with a sinister smile on their lips, providing no information in return. At the end of my encounters with them, I feel as exhausted as if I've been drained by a vampire. And as scared, too, because while I have revealed to them all my inner workings they in return remain completely unknowable. Perhaps they will use the information against me. In fact, damn it, I'm sure they will, the shy scheming bastards.
You might think I'm being unduly harsh on shy people, but consider this: on I Met Osama bin Laden (BBC2, Sunday), the one fact on which everyone who had ever met him could agree was that he was a very 'shy' man.
Osama bin Laden comes from a family of over 50 children and according to the documentary has been no slouch in the paternity stakes himself. Normally, becoming a parent makes you that much more aware of the miracle of life and the importance of love if we're all going to get along on this increasingly crowded planet. It doesn't seem to have happened with Osama, the chilly loner. Is it too much to suggest, I wonder, that if he'd been a bit less shy, maybe got a bit more ribbing from his bros and sisters, been brought out of his shell, shown a good time, we mightn't all be sleeping in our beds a lot more easily now?
Bin Laden conceived his plan for al
Qa'eda while fund-raising and later fighting for the mujahedin in Afghanistan in the Eighties. As a child he hadn't been especially religious. One of his old teachers, an Englishman, recalled how in Saudi Arabian classrooms there would always be one or two boys who had a stab at converting you to Islam, but that bin Laden was not that type. But all this changed when he went off to fight the Russians, disgusted at the idea of a Muslim country being invaded by infidels.
Of course, at the time, we all cheered at the idea of T72s being funnelled into deadend valleys so that their terrified crews might be picked off with jezails by plucky, bearded warriors, of bristling Hind helicopters being taken out by blowpipes, of hapless Russian conscripts having their balls cut off and stuffed in their mouths, like generations of hapless Englishmen before them. 'Ha ha!' we thought. 'That's one fewer Soviet division left to roll across Luneburg Heath when the third world war starts.'
But what bloody fools we all were to think such things, for we were sowing the seeds of future ruin. If bin Laden had been a bit less successful in his skirmishes with the Russians, he would never have got the 'I've just defeated a superpower and if I can do one, why not the other?' idea in his head which led him to invent al-Qa'eda (which he initially seems to have conceived more as an army of Islamic mercenaries to fight under bin Laden in whatever wars he considered just, rather than as the hydraheaded terrorist organisation we so loathe and fear today).
Back, though, to that shyness business. Suppose that, instead of sitting around brooding and thinking his vile thoughts with that beatific smile on his face, he had been encouraged by his friends round the Afghan campfire to chat a bit more. 'Come on, Sammy, what's on your mind?' one of them could have said. And after he'd told them, someone might have chipped in, 'Sounds a bit harsh, mate, given all the help we've been getting from the Americans."Yeah, come on, Sammy, lighten up,' another might have said. 'I mean I know they're not perfect, these infidels, but for Allah's sake, you can't just blow 'em up willy-nilly. It even says you can't in the Koran.' 'Bugger me. What was I thinking?' °satin might have gone, slapping his forehead. 'If it hadn't been for your timely words of advice. I might have turned into a really nasty piece of work.'
And perhaps he did, in a parallel universe — the one full of lovely, warm, open, generous-spirited people like me. But not, unfortunately, in the one we live in. The one swarming with evil, deadly shy people.
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