I'm sympathetic to the view that most of this wealth was stolen, in the sense that it rightfully belonged to the Arab people as a whole, not to the princes of the states created by British colonialism. The money that fueled this conspicuous consumption should have been paying for education and health care in Cairo, Beirut, Amman, Gaza, Damascus...
On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 1:57 PM, raghu <[email protected]> wrote: > If this article is right, good riddance to this abomination! > > > http://smashingtelly.com/2009/02/15/bye-bye-dubai/ > -------------------------------------------snip > Short of opening a Radio Shack in an Amish town, Dubai is the world's > worst business idea, and there isn't even any oil. Imagine proposing > to build Vegas in a place where sex and drugs and rock and roll are an > anathema. This is effectively the proposition that created Dubai - it > was a stupid idea before the crash, and now it is dangerous. > > Dubai threatens to become an instant ruin, an emblematic hybrid of the > worst of both the West and the Middle-East and a dangerous totem for > those who would mistakenly interpret this as the de facto product of a > secular driven culture. > > The opening shot of this clip shows 200 skyscrapers that were built in > the last 5 years. It looks like Manhattan except that it isn't the > place that made Mingus or Van Allen or Kerouac or Wolfe or Warhol or > Reed or Bernstein or any one of the 1001 other cultural icons from Bob > Dylan to Dylan Thomas that form the core spirit of what is needed, in > the absence of extreme toleration of vice, to infuse such edifices > with purpose and create a self-sustaining culture that will prevent > them crumbling into the empty desert that surrounds them. > > Dubai is a place for the shallow and fickle. Tabloid celebrities and > worn out sports stars are sponsored by swollen faced, botox injected, > perma-tanned European property developers to encourage the type of > people who are impressed by fame itself, rather than what originated > it, to inhabit pastiche Mediterranean villas on fake islands. Its a > grotesquely leveraged version of time-share where people are sold a > life in the same way as being peddled a set of steak knives. Funny > shaped towers smatter empty neighborhoods, based on designs with > unsubtle, eye-catching envelopes but bland floor plans and churned out > by the dozen by anonymous minions in brand name architects offices and > signed by the boss, unseen, as they fly through the door. This > architecture, a three dimensional solidified version of a synthesized > musical jingle, consists of ever more preposterous gimmickry - an > underwater, revolving, white leather fuck pad or a marina skyscraper > with a product placement name that would normally only appeal to > teenage boys, such as the preposterous Michael Schumacher World > Champion Tower. > > > > -raghu. > > -- > Floggings will continue until morale improves. > _______________________________________________ > pen-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l > -- Robert Naiman Just Foreign Policy www.justforeignpolicy.org [email protected] _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
