Without exception, regardless of nationality, each of us makes the same sound as we disappear: a thrilled little self-forgetting Whoop.
WE BUY, THEREFORE WE AM
After two full days of blissfully farting around inside the Madinat, I reluctantly venture forth out of the resort bubble, downtown, into the actual city, to the Deira souk. This is the real Middle East, the dark
Indiana Jones
–ish Middle East I’d preimagined: an exotic, cramped, hot, chaotic, labyrinthine, canopied street bazaar, crowded with room-size, even closet-size stalls, selling everything there is in the world to buy, and more than a few things you can’t imagine anyone ever wanting to buy, or even accepting for free.
Here is the stall of Plastic Flowers That Light Up; the stall of Tall Thin Blond Dolls in Miniskirts with Improbably Huge Eyes; the stall of Toy Semiautomatic Weapons; the stall of Every Spice Known to Man (
SARON BUKHOR, BAHRAT, MEDICAL HERBS, NATURAL VIAGRA
); the stall of Coffee-Grinding Machines in Parts on the Floor; the stall of Hindi Prayer Cards; the stall of Spangled Kashmiri Slippers; of Air Rifles; Halloween Masks; Oversize Bright-Colored Toy Ships and Trucks; a stall whose walls and ceiling are completely covered with hundreds of cooking pots. There is a Pashtun-dominated section, a hidden Hindi temple, a section that suddenly goes Chinese, entire streets where nothing is sold but bolts of cloth. There’s a mind-blowing gold section—two or three hundred gold shops on one street, with mysterious doors leading to four-story mini-malls holding still more gold shops, each overflowing with the yellow high-end gold that, in storybooks and Disney movies, comes pouring out of pirate chests.
As I walk through, a kind of amazed mantra starts running through my head:
There is no end to the making and selling of things there is no end to the making and selling of things there is no end…
Man, it occurs to me, is a joyful, buying-and-selling piece of work. I have been wrong, dead wrong, when I’ve decried consumerism. Consumerism is what we are. It is, in a sense, a holy impulse. A human being is someone who joyfully goes in pursuit of things, brings them home, then immediately starts planning how to get more.
A human being is someone who wishes to improve his lot.
SPEAKING OF IMPROVING ONE’S LOT: THE GREAT DUBAI QUANDARY
Dubai raises the questions raised by any apparent utopia: What’s the downside? At whose expense has this nirvana been built? On whose backs are these pearly gates being raised?
Dubai is, in essence, capitalism on steroids: a small, insanely wealthy group of capital-controlling Haves supported by a huge group of overworked and underpaid Have-Nots, with, in Dubai’s case, the gap between Haves and Have-Nots so wide as to indicate different species.
But any attempt to reduce this to some sort of sci-fi Masters and ’Droids scenario gets complicated. Relative to their brethren back home (working for next to nothing or not working at all), Dubai’s South Asian workers have it great; likewise, relative to their brethren working in nearby Saudi Arabia. An American I met, who has spent the last fifteen years working in the Saudi oil industry, told me about seeing new South Indian workers getting off the plane in Riyadh, in their pathetic new clothes, clutching cardboard suitcases. On arrival, as in a scene out of
The Grapes of Wrath
, they are informed (for the first time) that they will have to pay for their flight over, their lodging, their food (which must be bought from the company), and, in advance, their flight home. In this way, they essentially work the first two years for free.
Dubai is not, in structure, much different: the workers surrender their passports to their employer; there are no labor unions, no organizing, no protests. And yet in Dubai, the workers tell you again and again how happy they are to be here. Even the poorest, most overworked laborer considers himself lucky—he is making more, much more, than he would be back home. In Saudi, the windfall profits from skyrocketing oil prices have shot directly upstairs, to the five thousand or so members of the royal family, and from there to investments (new jets, real estate in London). In Dubai, the leaders have plowed the profits back into the national dream of the New Dubai—reliant not on oil revenue (the Dubai oil will be gone by 2010) but on global tourism. Whatever complaints you hear about the Emirati ruling class—they buy $250,000 falcons, squash all dissent, tolerate the financial presence of questionable organizations (Al Qaeda, various national Mafias)—they seem to be universally respected, even loved, because, unlike the Saudi rulers, they are perceived to put the interests of the people first.
On the other hand, relative to Western standards, Dubai is so antilabor as to seem medieval. In the local paper, I read about the following case: A group of foreign workers in Dubai quit their jobs in protest over millions of dirhams in unpaid wages. Since by law they weren’t allowed to work for another company, these men couldn’t afford plane tickets back home and were thus stuck in a kind of Kafka loop. After two years, the government finally stepped in and helped send the men home. This story indicates both the potential brutality of the system—so skewed toward the employer—and its flexibility relative to the Saudi system, its general right-heartedness, I think you could say, or at least its awareness of, and concern with, Western opinion: the situation was allowed to be reported and, once reported, was corrected.
Complicated.
Because you see these low-level foreign workers working two or three jobs, twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours a day, longing for home (a waiter shows me exactly how he likes to hold his two-year-old, or did like to hold her, last time he was home, eight months ago), and think: Couldn’t you Haves cut loose with just a little more?
But ask the workers, in your intrusive Western way, about their Possible Feelings of Oppression, and they model a level of stoic noble determination that makes the Ayn Rand in you think, Good, good for you, sir, best of luck in your professional endeavors!
Only later, back in your room, having waded in through a lobby full of high rollers—beautifully dressed European/Lebanese/Russian expats, conferring Emir atis, all smoking, chatting, the expats occasionally making a scene, berating a waitress—thinking of some cabdriver in the thirteenth hour of his fourteen-hour shift, worrying about his distant grandchild; thinking of some lonely young Katmandu husband, sleeping fitfully in his sweltering rented room—do you get a sudden urge to move to Dubai and start a chapter of the Wobblies.
On the other hand:
A Kenyan security guard who works fourteen-hour days at Wild Wadi, euphoric about his new earning power, says to me: “I expect, in your writing, you will try to find the dark side of Dubai? Some positive, some negative? Isn’t that the Western way? But I must say: I have found Dubai to be nearly perfect.”
Complicated.
THE UNIVERSITY OF THE BACK OF THE CAB
A partial list of wise things cabdrivers said to me in Dubai:
1)
“If you good Muslim, you go straight, no talking talking, bomb blast! No. You go to mosque, to talk. You go straight!”
2)
“This, all you see? So new! All new within! Within one year! Within within within! That building there? New within three year! All built within! Before, no! Only sand.”
3)
“You won’t see any Dubai Arab man driving cab. Big boss only.”
4)
Re: the Taliban: “If you put a man into a room with no way out, he will fight his way out. But if you leave him one way out, he will take it.”
5)
“The Cyclone Club? Please to not go there. It is a disco known for too many fuck-girls.”
One night my driver is an elderly Iranian, a fan of George W. Bush who hates the Iranian government. He tells me the story of his spiritual life. When young, he says, he was a donkey: a donkey of Islam. Then a professor said to him: You are so religious, so sure of yourself, and yet you know absolutely nothing. And this professor gave him books to read, from his personal library. “I read one, then more, more,” he says, nearly moving himself to tears with the memory.
After two years, the driver had a revelation: All religious knowledge comes from the hand of man. God does not talk to us directly. One can trust only one’s own mind, one’s own intelligence. He has five kids, four grandkids, still works fourteen-hour days at sixty-five years old. But he stays in Dubai because in Iran, there are two classes: The Religious and The Not. And The Religious get all the privileges, all the money, all the best jobs. And if you, part of The Not Religious, say something against them, he says, they take you against a wall and…
He turns to me, shoots himself in the head with his finger.
As I get out, he says, “We are not different, all men are…” and struggles to remember the word.
“Brothers?” I say.
“No,” he says.
“Unified?” I say.
“No,” he says.
“Part of the same, uh…transcendent…”
“No,” he says. He can’t remember the word. He is old, very old, he says, sorry, sorry.
We say good-bye, promising to pray for our respective governments, and for each other.
CLEANING AMONG THE MAYHEM
Dubai is a city of people who come from elsewhere and are going back there soon. To start a good conversation—with a fellow tourist, with the help, with just about anybody—simply ask, “Where are you from?” Everyone wants to tell you. If white, they are usually from England, South Africa, or Ukraine. If not, they are from Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Kenya, Nepal, or India.
One hotel seems to hire only Nepalese. One bar has only Ukrainians. You discover a pocket of Sri Lankan golf-cart drivers, all anxious to talk about the tsunami.
One day, inexplicably, everyone you meet, wherever you go, is from the Philippines.
“Where are you from?” you say all day, and all day people brightly answer, “Philippines!”
That night, at a club called Boudoir, I meet L, an employee of Ford in Dubai, a manic, funny, Stanley Tucci–looking guy from Detroit, who welcomes me into his party, gets me free champagne, mourns the circa-1990 state of inner-city Detroit: feral dogs roaming the streets, trees growing out of the upper stories of skyscrapers where “you know, formerly, commerce was being done, the real 1960s automobile fucking world-class commerce, man!” The night kind of explodes. This, I think, this is the repressive Arabian Peninsula? Apparently, anything is permitted, as long as it stays within the space within which it is permitted. Here is a Palestinian who lives in L.A. and whose T-shirt says
LAPD
—
WHERE EVERYBODY IS KING
. A couple of blond Russian girls dance on a rail, among balloons. On the dance floor, two other blondes dance alone. A guy comes up behind one and starts passionately grinding her. This goes on awhile. Then he stops, introduces himself, she shakes his hand, he goes back to grinding her. His friend comes up, starts grinding her friend. I don’t get it. Prostitutes? Some new youthful social code? I am possibly too old to be in here? The dance floor is packed, the whole place
becomes
the dance floor, the rails are now packed with dancers, a Lebanese kid petulantly shouts that if this was
fucking Beirut
, the girls would be
stripped off
by now, then gives me a snotty look and stomps away, as if it’s my fault the girls are still dressed. I drop my wallet, look down, and see the tiniest little woman imaginable, with a whisk broom, struggling against the surge of the crowd like some kind of cursed Cleaning Fairy, trying to find a small swath of floor to sweep while being bashed by this teeming mass of gyrating International Hipsters. She’s tiny—I mean
tiny
, like three feet tall, her head barely reaching all the gyrating waists—with thick glasses and bowl-cut hair.
Dear little person! It seems impossible she’s trying to sweep the dance floor at a time like this; she seems uncommonly, heroically dedicated, like some kind of OCD janitor on the
Titanic.
“Where are you from?” I shout.
“Philippines!” she shouts, and goes back to her sweeping.
MY ARRIVAL IN HEAVEN
The Burj Al Arab is the only seven-star hotel in the world, even though the ratings system only goes up to five. The most expensive Burj suite goes for twelve thousand dollars a night. The atrium is 590 feet from floor to ceiling, the largest in the world. As you enter, the staff rushes over with cold towels, rosewater for the hands, dates, incense. The smell, the scale, the level of loving, fascinated attention you are receiving, makes you realize you have never really been in the lap of true luxury before. All the luxury you have previously had—in New York, L.A.—was stale, Burj-imitative crap! Your entire concept of
being inside a building
is being altered in real time. The lobby of the Burj is neither inside nor out. The roof is so far away as to seem like sky. The underbellies of the floors above you grade through countless shades of color from deep blue to, finally, up so high you can barely see it: pale green. Your Guest Services liaison, a humble, pretty Ukrainian, tells you that every gold-colored surface you see during your stay is actual twenty-four-karat gold. Even those four-story columns? Even so, she says. Even the thick fourth-story arcs the size of buses that span the columns? All gold, sir, is correct.