It has been a while, I will admit, since I have posted. It turns out that teaching children, especially children who speak a different language, operate under different cultural rules, and have insane amounts of energy, is exhausting! I probably should have expected this, but it has had a heavy toll on my ability to piece together a thought or even a sentence by the time classes end. That said, sometimes a story is just so good that, like a robotic chinese heart that requires intermittent electric shocks to remain functional, it can bring me right back to life.It is no mystery to anyone that knows me that Dubai sits high on my list of countries that should not exist and whose existence proves bad things about humanity - just below Belgium, just above Switzerland. I was delighted, then, to learn that the vehicle that has driven virtually all of Dubai's disgusting, Caligula-esque excess over the last few years, the Dubai Investment Authority, is 59 billion dollars in the hole. How you like them apples!
Just like how California is America, but more so, Dubai is the world economy, but more so. A hyper-elite that shuffles vast sums of money around for appalling real estate schemes, a massive underclass struggling and failing to be treated as actual human beings, a political/economic system that rewards the idea of giant country-shaped islands but denies basic rights to those who are actually stuck with the shitty job of making them. You know, for all I hate about Belgium, they do have Jean-Claude Van Damme, and I can at least envision a scenario where I could go to Belgium and not want to take a long shower afterward. Dubai, though, is a moral nightmare, the kind of thing that historians will study incredulously years from now, like the Spanish inquisition or Romans lining their aquifers with lead. I know it's real knee-jerk lefty of me to try and interpret our current recession as a cleansing, purifying agent, and of course we never really learn anything from recessions and all the folks who got the ball rolling on this nonsense are up to their old tricks anyway, but if a couple years from now, Dubai just sank into the sand, never to be seen again, it would almost, almost, be worth it.
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http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/28/goodbye-dubai/?8dpc
ReplyDeleteThe Times has a take on the story, too. They seem mostly to be balancing overwrought doom-and-gloomism against some genuine fear that a default by Dubai would knock the wind out of investor confidence. Personally, none of this really worries me. Since the stock market apparently in no way reflects economic indicators that have something to do with my life--like, say, job creation or growth in real wages--I could care less if a bunch of Goldman people lose their asses on the latest snake oil construction project in Dubai. I coo myself to sleep at night at the thought of the city's ruling class crowding the elevators of the vapid leviathans that were all their Caligulan greed was capable of dreaming up, riding to the top floor, and then, as if in a trance, walking single file over the edge and into oblivion.
That having been said, some people who you'd think otherwise of seem to be as blase as myself. I'll admit that I'm shocked. Paul Krugman actually concluded a post on Dubai's debt crisis by saying "Anyway, we continue to live in interesting times." I feel like he slapped that out while getting a squeezer from one of his students. Maybe it's his way of savoring the moment without suffering the charge of schadenfreude? Interesting times, indeed.