whose interests?

Posted on January 26, 2005 by Mark Rossiter

Drawing on a 2004 Pentagon report, Michael Byers writes this about Climate Change in the London Review of Books, 6th January 2005:

“This past summer, while wealthy Floridians survived a succession of hurricanes relatively unscathed, millions of impoverished Bangladeshis and Chinese lost their crops and homes to cyclones…Donald Rumsfeld and others like him have apparently calculated that climate change will enhance rather than detract from [America’s] long-term security. The US, with its flexible economy, temperate location, low population density and access to Canadian water, oil, natural gas and agriculture, would suffer less than other major countries as a result of climate change. In comparison, China and India would struggle to cope with severe storms, decreasing agricultural production, energy shortfalls and mass population displacements, while the EU is ill prepared for the Siberian climate that would follow the collapse of the Gulf Stream, not to mention the waves of environmental refugees from North Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East that would hit European shores. If the weakness of one’s opponents is as important as one’s own strength, the emissions generated in the US by SUVs and climate-controlled houses could be conceived as an insidious weapon in a ruthless struggle for power.”

If this is true, it would almost be banal to say that it’s further illustration of the Strangelove idiocy of our rulers; but it’s also outrageously, pathetically sad. Watch Rumsfeld and his successors in the Pentagon congratulating themselves that they’ve won the game, too puffed up and myopic to see that their victory only means their grandchildren will be the last to die when the planet becomes uninhabitable…

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colonials, natives & gas chambers

Posted on January 25, 2005 by Mark Rossiter

What raised my eyebrow about the Prince Harry story was not that he went to a party wearing a Nazi uniform adorned with a swastika armband; nothing surprising about that in a social system that puts an irresponsible thick rich kid on a cushy lifetime sinecure, while thousands of much smarter poor kids will have to struggle very hard to escape their circumstances, if they do so at all. It’s also no surprise that someone who can go through the finest education in England and emerge with one GCSE would be oblivious to the horror of what the Nazis did, let alone the Nazi-friendly skeletons (Duke of Windsor; perhaps Queen Mother, though nobody’s talking about that) in his own family’s gold-plated cupboards.

No doubt we have plenty of similar entertainment to come from this quarter, as the Windsors continue to prove their complete disconnect with most of the rest of Britain, as the generations who can remember the generation who fondly remember the Queen Mum during the blitz begin to pass into history, and as it becomes ever clearer that the only reason for keeping their mummified presence in national life is the tourist dollar (or euro).

No, the thing that surprised me (though perhaps it shouldn’t have) was that the rump of the old English ruling class still has fancy dress parties along the theme of “colonials and natives” – and apparently thinks it normal, or fun, to live in the 21st century and be stuck so far up the back end of history….

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teddy bears and toothpaste

Posted on January 22, 2005 by Mark Rossiter

According to Borzou Daragahi in The Indpendent on 10th January, “American officials insist they are winning Iraqi ‘hearts and minds’ by building infrastructure and venturing off their bases to hand out footballs, teddy bears and toothpaste.”

So we attack your country, kill perhaps 100,000 civilians, destroy your infrastructure to the point where water and power are less available than they were under Saddam, patrol your cities with jittery GIs who open fire on the violent and the peaceful alike out of sheer nerves, and irradiate the place for thousands of years to come with a gene-mutant and carcinogen weapon of mass destruction (depleted uranium) – but hey, we give you teddy bears! That’s all right then – it proves it, we’re nice people really.

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twice the difference

Posted on January 21, 2005 by Mark Rossiter

Dubai Shopping Festival is under way. This, as far as I’m aware, seems to be the only instance of a society having its main yearly festival explicitly devoted to commerce, rather than at least paying lip service to something else, like religion. The future?

To celebrate, Carrefour, a hypermarket in the City Centre mall, has come up with a nice example of extreme consumerism: FIND IT CHEAPER & GET TWICE THE DIFFERENCE! In normal times, the place is an unruly tangle of shoppers playing dodgem with giant trolleys on weekend afternoons and evenings, but now the scrum starts as early as eleven in the morning. When I was a kid, crowd comparison used to benchmark upwards to Oxford Street on the last Saturday before Christmas, but now London seems rural, almost bovine, in comparison; the only place I’ve been where normal movement is so impaired is the Shibuya district of Tokyo. Or parts of Calcutta.

It has its advantages, though, if you travel light and raid: two years ago I picked up a printer and scanner, and last year a colour TV and DVD player. This year’s prize should be a digital video camera, to record the arrival of the baby girl next month.

The downside to all this, which I hear in a slow rumble from those who’ve been here a long time, is that for all the shopping and other business opportunities, the heart has gone out of Dubai. I had dinner the other night with a middle-aged Syrian whose family moved here when he was six, and who has lived here on and off (though also near Toronto) since then. In those days, he said, Dubai was two villages, one on either side of the creek, and everybody got along and helped each other. Then it grew, and it was exciting for a while; but now, in the last two or three years, nobody calls unless they want to do business with you.

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random amnesia

Posted on January 20, 2005 by Mark Rossiter

Why do some things survive and not others?

Some say there’s an order to memory: you keep what’s allowed, or joyous even, and let go what screwed you up. Well, sure, I remember my wedding day – but I also remember, quite clearly, my parents’ divorce. If it was all about psychological survival, why didn’t I blank that one, along with all the other traumas of infidelity and lost love?

Or is it that we retain what’s significant, and let go what’s trivial? Why then, from my childhood, do I remember my father splitting a coconut, and my mother standing in the kitchen telling me about the days when a third of the map was coloured pink? Why not other more important things they did, loving or harsh?

Down to adulthood: friends remind of things that sound memorable, but they’re gone without a trace. For all I know, they might be making them up. Yet I still recall, vividly and for no apparent reason, stepping, in the early 1980s, out of a record shop in Oxford into the bright sunshine of the street, clutching an album that didn’t last long in my collection, and that means nothing to me today. Why?

So how do we select the bits that we represent to ourselves as us? If there is an underlying pattern, it seems an inescapable part of individual experience that it isn’t apparent. On a public scale, what is it that makes up the bits we call our civilization, our history? The dishonest will select to agenda; but for those of us who try to be fair, why those few particular fragments of papyrus that didn’t get chucked in the rubbish? The structure that didn’t get looted or eaten by the jungle, while the rest all around crumbled and went to rot? Or for the future, some random grabs of thought in a weblog, that could have been this, or could have been something else, but are here and now what they were there and then, even though the parameters have shifted…

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how to treat the vulnerable (Dubai driving style)

Posted on December 27, 2004 by Mark Rossiter

Allison was recently on her way to drop Ian off at the babysitter, running late, fiercely hungry and eating a piece of cold pizza as she drove. She pulled into the main road that runs through our suburb of Dubai, and moved into the left lane (the UAE drives on the right), signalling to make the u-turn she needed. A large Mercedes, doing something in the region of 120kph (in a 60kph school zone),  came barrelling up behind her, flashing its lights. Since her u-turn was imminent, she declined to move out of the way, figuring that if he was so desperate to get where he was going at such speed, he could go around her on the inside.

Which is exactly what he did – except that he then sped, shaking his fists and otherwise gesticulating, into the u-turn lane in front of her, and came slamming to a halt in order to block her path. He turned out to be an Emirati man (not that all dangerous drivers are Emirati, by any means), with his wife in full abeya and shayla (the black covering the local women wear). He buzzed down his window and continued to shout and make threatening gestures, while his wife joined in. Allison visibly shrugged her shoulders, and put another piece of pizza in her mouth. This seemed to particularly inflame the driver’s wife, who began scoffing  in angry imitation.

Having no time to spare, and scared that the man and/or his wife were about to get out of their expensive machine and attack her, Allison moved to turn back into the road, thinking that she would go along to the next traffic light and make her turn there. Once again, the man moved to cut her off, and continued to shout  what was presumably (in Arabic) abuse.

When he had finally had his fill, he pulled the wheel around and sped off into the distance; it turned out that he hadn’t wanted to make the u-turn at all, merely to punish Allison for her temerity in not getting out of his way directly upon demand, at whatever inconvenience to herself. That she was a woman no doubt doubled the offence, as well as the licence.

When Allison told me this, I had a number of feelings, but among them  was one of pity for the couple’s family. If they can behave like that in public, what do they do to their kids?

Posted in driving in Dubai | Leave a comment