When I was growing up in Maryland in the 1980s, the highlights of existence included visits to a gaudy family entertainment centre with a compelling whack-a-mole game.
Nowadays, whenever a certain Palestinian-Israeli video blogger who goes by the brand Nas Daily pops up on my Facebook feed, I feel a similar physical compulsion.
The 28-year-old Harvard graduate, whose real name is Nuseir Yassin and who hails from the town of Arraba in the Galilee, shot to internet stardom in 2016 when he left his $120,000-a-year high-tech job in New York to travel the world posting daily 60-second videos oozing with cliche and orchestrated cheer.
His Facebook page currently boasts 17 million followers, which does not inspire enormous confidence in the human race. Video topics have ranged from "The Most Lovable Country!" (the Philippines) to “Serbian Food Heaven!” to “AFRICA’S SECRET COUNTRY!”, Swaziland, where Yassin documented "half naked" dancers and, as Steven Salaita writes, it all "looked like a research trip for a 1940s Disney feature".
It gets more problematic, of course, when Yassin takes a break from revelling exuberantly in superficiality and engages in blatantly political commentary - like the time he explained, in one minute, the mass slaughter, destruction, and expulsion of Palestinians that attended the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948: "Some Palestinians left, some got killed, and some stayed in their land. My people stayed."
Stating that he had opted to "accept the borders of Israel" and to "move on", Yassin lectured his audience that "in life there are better and bigger things to focus on than the name of a piece of land!"
This is a fine and dandy sentiment, to be sure, unless the land in question continues to make life hell for millions of Palestinians more than seven decades after it was forcibly renamed.
It’s not quite clear how residents of the Gaza Strip, for example, are to "move on" in the midst of a blockade and regular Israeli military massacres of civilians. The vast majority of Palestinians - not to mention the vast majority of humans on this planet - don’t have the option to move from Harvard to a $120,000 salary to a career of international gallivanting that entails being lodged for free in executive suites in exchange for a mention on Instagram. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.