Some rocks, some sand, some Islam, some flies
Rod Liddle's "The joke's on us as Bling Central loses its sparkle" in yesterday's Sunday Times is one of the most powerful pieces of newspaper comment of recent times. It burns with a rage that is wholly understandable when one thinks of how Dubai came to symbolize something worthy of admiration. But let's hear the great Liddle give this hellish place its just desserts:
"And the sea will wash away those hideous palm-shaped islands where our cheaper celebs spend spring weekends, the expat apartment blocks will crumble into dust, the scorpions will return and Dubai will be what it was in the 1960s, a frowsy fishing port in a scorched and very backward Third World country, with a moral code for the indigenous population drawn from AD 1335. And the rest of us will look on and wonder: what powerful but unrecorded race / Once dwelt in this annihilated place? Well, hell, you can hope this might happen. Better that than what it has been these past 15 years.
Dubai is wrecked but, like an old tart with a kiss-and-tell contract from the red-tops, threatens to drag the rest of us down with it. In a sense it is merely Britain writ much larger: a despised, criminally underpaid and perpetually ill-treated underclass of imported foreign labourers on top of which squats a fat, indigenous population which cannot believe its luck, doing absolutely nothing other than spending money.
A property boom so absurd in its assumptions and aspirations that its imminent implosion was evident to everyone — except, of course, the bankers who mindlessly bought into the deal and funded it.
And then there's the over-remunerated elite of western European expats who are now trying to get the hell out, binning their Porsches at the airport, kissing goodbye to their obliging Filipino slaves. What's Dubai, without its money? Some rocks, some sand, some Islam, some flies."
Two damning images stand out in that passage: "a fat, indigenous population which cannot believe its luck, doing absolutely nothing other than spending money" and "kissing goodbye to their obliging Filipino slaves." Come sand! Come scorpions! Finish the job.
