Dubai Upon First Seeing Dubai, Saunders Marvels

Dubai

Upon first seeing Dubai, Saunders marvels at the humor of the place. He finds most things about the place ironic, especially as Saunders contemplates the process of "Theming" that consumes much of Dubai's development. Like a theme park, Dubai creates an artificial atmosphere. Dubai is a city in a bubble. It is also full of the contradictions that make Dubai titillating, including the sharp differential created between ancient and modern. This differential between ancient and modern is, ironically, manifest in the Theming of the city as the ancient nomadic customs and aesthetics are turned into as much a caricature of themselves as Dubai's malls are caricatures of Western-style consumerism.

Dubai is "capitalism on steroids" because like an athlete on steroids, it is strong, powerful, and resilient with the help of artificial performance enhancers. This is why Saunders refers to the "Misconception from Afar." The reality of Dubai and the facade occupy two different realms. The reality feeds the facade, provides the facade with cheap labor, and hides in the background like the oompah-loompahs at Willie Wonka's chocolate factory. Saunders interacts with several of Dubai's oompah-loompahs: everyone from South Indian laborers to Thai prostitutes. The cogs that make the machine work are invisible, and they are also segregated. To see the poor laborers who built Dubai would undermine the mirage, and expose the man, or men, behind the curtain. Male laborers from Bangladesh and Sri Lanka cannot enter the hotels they built with their own hands. The irony ceases to become humorous, and becomes a crushing reality shining light in the crack between the conceptual and the real. The crack reveals the potential for anger and schism between rich and poor, and is the potential place from where aggression can emerge. Brewing beneath the surface in Dubai, and also most places in the Gulf region and throughout the Middle East, is anger and aggression at the growing chasm between rich and poor. That chasm is made potently visible in Dubai, on the level of practical mockery.

Unfortunately for the workers, their future depends on suppressing that aggression, or at least deferring it until a more opportune moment. To shake things up and loosen the fault lines in Dubai now would indeed mean returning home to…nothing. A mirage is better than nothing, particularly when it pays many times more than what could be earned at home and arguably with greater benefits. "Of course, somewhere in India is a guy who'd kill to do some stair-washing in Dubai," (Saunders 2). The temporary worker system in Dubai grants workers no actual rights, and indentures many of them to near-slavery, but the world has become so messed up, Saunders notes, that Dubai proves to be the good option. After all, when they return to where they came, the workers do not gaze upon the storied skyline of one of the world's miracle cities. The women in the sex trade likewise have no prospects, or prospects that would be far bleaker than those in the Laurentian desert.

Irony permeates Saunders' visit, as when he observes the man hand-washing the stairs and states, "My job is to observe him hand-washing the stairs, then go inside the air-conditioned lobby and order a cold beer and take notes about his stair-washing so I can go home and write about it, making more for writing about it than he'll make in many, many years of doing it," (2). In Dubai, everyone has a role, a part to play. All the world's a stage. "It's a big world, and I really like it," Saunders states," (2). Saunders locates the common ground bonding together people as disparate as he and the stair cleaner from India.

Dubai's fault lines create tremors in Saunders' consciousness, triggering cognitions about concepts that extend beyond the borders of the city. After all, Dubai is a global city, it belongs to the world, and is a microcosm thereof. It is the real, live Epcot Center come to life on the world stage. When Saunders muses about the interconnectedness of American military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, the commentary flows like the water through Dubai's canals. Saunders points out that the West had once been held to a high standard, as if "the poor, simple people of the world admire us, are enamored of our boldness, are hopeful that the insanely positive values we espouse can be actualized in the world," (9). All this is changing. America has disappointed them "bitterly," and they are turning away from the West and towards the new mecca. Dubai therefore symbolizes the failure of the West to provide a concrete way forward.

Thus, Dubai reveals yet another schism in the world: the schism between East and West, between the forces of terrorism and annihilation and the forces of capitalist playground building. Dubai has readily welcomed its role as being the "place needed by everyone." It is like "Switzerland during World War II," Saunders states, because like Switzerland during World War II, Dubai will take Nazi money. It keeps both sides happy. To do so, it must erode the universal truths of ethical behavior. Dubai pretends to be neutral like Switzerland, but in doing so, creates complicity. Its neutrality is as illusory as the snow it creates in its shopping malls, ironically to make Dubai look a little more like Switzerland. The snow, like many things in Dubai, is "a Themed evocation of a reality that has never existed," (Saunders 6).

In the "externalized fantasy of Affluence" that is Dubai, one comes into contact with the central paradoxes of the world (6). The wealthy prey upon the poor, who have just enough to eat to prevent them from revolting. Everyone resides in a massive, illusory theme park, but finds the illusion more tenable than reality. In some cases, reality beyond Dubai's borders is just as ironic, fake, and meaningless, making it necessary to laugh at the entire human enterprise. In Dubai, one can see and perceive at once everything and nothing. The Burj has its gold-plated columns and $12,000 per night suites, but one woman visiting notes, "There wasn't, she said sadly, that much to see, really, was there?" (6).