Everything Else
newleftreview.org
newleftreview.org
1. It's all so clean and shiny. Coming home through New York City was a wild experience because I had never noticed how utterly filthy NYC is. It only became obvious to me after spending so long immersed in the very clean streets of Dubai. The luxury-as-default was something I had heard about but I wasn't prepared for how true it was.
2. You're waited on all the time, everywhere. You shouldn't take your tray to the garbage bin at the mall food court because someone needs that job, for example. My job provided me with a driver and housing and a crew to clean my house. They were as close to slaves as it gets. Her observation that "Being served makes us cruel infants" really hits me hard. The exploitation was not just unavoidable, it was virtually mandatory.
I would never go back, not to visit, and certainly not to live there again. Her statement "...in Dubai there is nothing to do, and I mean nothing, other than to feel rich and be waited upon." is incredibly true.
First - Dubai is notable having grown from a fishing village to making money on oil to - wisely - finding a way to move beyond oil into something that's sustainable and beneficial. That's admirable even on its own.
It is notable that very few people you see in Dubai are "natives." Most people you see are either foreigners there on business/vacation, or imported labor. The author takes issue with something related to that in a weird way - the more straight forward story would be that without the opportunities created in Dubai, both the business folks and the laborers would be doing something else - in both case less appealing to them. So whatever judgement you have on it, in practice everyone involved is better off than they would have been.
The author then can't avoid but take a dig at Israel and Zionism - her point/connection is a bit hard to understand but also feels warped. The Emirates being part of the Abraham accords was one of the greatest signs of the possibility of cross-religious existence and cooperation in the region - symbolic that mutual benefit can be a stronger motivator than historical division. This should be celebrated.
It's a sign of little more than that the United States will throw its weight around on behalf of the Israeli regime, no matter how racist it is, even when doing so is diametrically opposed to the interests of the United States (which these days is almost always the case).
In the case of the Abraham accords, Trump's son in law traded normalization of ties with the regime for an (empty as it turns out) promise to the UAE that further colonial annexation of the West Bank was off the table. The accords led to a dramatic uptick (https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2021/11/un-experts-a...) in colonialist violence against Palestinians in the West Bank in the run up to Oct 7th.
I think one of the main points of the article is that what they are doing is only sustainable because it is sustained on the backs of exploited, disposable, imported labor. Just because it's slightly better than not being employed at all doesn't make it right.
What a terrible day to be literate and be able to read into the ugly belly of self-righteousness disguised as morality.
There are genuinely bad places in the world even factoring out "American exceptionalism/egocentrism". Dubai seems to be one of them.
Are there moralities worth entertaining that place no value on human life or its enslavement?
The take here is very much Brave New World, going to visit the savages, and complaining about it. And then contrasting it with the "normal" sterilized life that the author leads.
It is neither self righteousness or morality: It is an abject lack of self awareness and of sheltered existence.
Obviously there's humanity and real lives everywhere, she's just advocating for those lives to be valued. With, ya know, human rights protected by the government.
I understand this passage and can relate, "self-evidently awful to them only" seems a bit of a stretch. There are places on Earth where "being employed for tourism" means job security, worker rights and social protections, where staff is treated with respect and are allowed dignity.
The explanation of that phrase is in... the very next three sentences.
I would think, however, that there is no rich cultural heritage to be expected from a relatively new city of the rich.. it's not Paris or Rome after all.
And finally, anecdotal, I know a family that went there with their kids and they loved that holiday.
I went to Dubai wrongheaded. I learnt nothing and left nauseated.
She arrived on Friday evening, caught the performance on Saturday, and presumably left a day or two after?
Dubai seems at the extreme of inequality, corruption, and ostentatiousness of the few ultra-rich. Also an extreme caste system with very few citizens (about 92% of Dubai is non-citizens, and you cannot obtain citizenship either as far as I know: you're born into it). It's a luxurious place built on the labor and exploitation of a second-class of people that can never become citizens, by design.
It's not "just human nature" that "nobody can change".
Being "condescending" against the ultra-rich is not something that should make anyone lose their sleep. It's punching up, not down.