The Braindead Megaphone Read Online Free PDF Page A

time he enters and finds it hard to believe that, three years ago, it was all just sand.
    A WORD ABOUT THE HELP
    UAE nationals comprise about 20 percent of the city’s population. Until three years ago, only nationals were allowed to own property in Dubai, and they still own essentially all of it. Visually identifiable by their dress—the men wear the traditional white dishdashas; the women, long black gowns and abayas—these nationals occupy the top rung of a rigid social hierarchy: imagine Hollywood, if everyone who’d been wildly successful in the movie business had to wear a distinctive costume.
    A rung down from the Emiratis are some two hundred thousand expats (mostly Brits but also other Europeans, Russians, Lebanese, Indians) who comprise a kind of managerial class: the marketing people, the hotel managers, the human-resource gurus, the accountants, the lawyers, etc. But the vast majority of Dubai’s expat population—roughly two-thirds of it—comes from poorer countries all around the world, mainly South Asia or Africa. They built Dubai, they run it with their labor but can’t afford to own homes or raise their families here. They take their dirhams home and cash them in for local currency, in this way increasing their wealth by as much as tenfold. They live here for two years, five years, fifteen years; take home-leaves as often as every three months or as infrequently as never.
    And even within this class there are stratifications. The hotel workers I met at the Madinat, for example, having been handpicked by Jumeirah scouts from the finest hotels in their native countries, are a class, or two, or three, above the scores of South Asian laborers who do the heavy construction work, who live in labor camps on the outskirts of town where they sleep ten to a room, and whose social life, according to one British expat I met, consists of “a thrilling evening once a month of sitting in a circle popping their bulbs out so some bloody Russian chickie can race around hand-jobbing them all in a mob.”
    You see these construction guys all over town: somewhat darker-complexioned, wearing blue jumpsuits, averting their eyes when you try to say hello, squatting outside a work site at three in the morning because Dubai construction crews work twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
    There is much to be done.
    THE WILD WADI EPIPHANY
    A short, complimentary golf-cart ride down the beach from the Madinat is Wild Wadi, a sprawling, themed water park whose theme is: a wadi is flooding! Once an hour, the sound of thunder/cracking trees/rushing waves blares through the facility-wide PA, and a waterfall begins dropping a thousand gallons of water a minute into an empty pond, which then violently overflows down the pedestrian walkways, past the gift shop.
    Waiting in line, I’m part of a sort of United Nations of partial nudity: me, a couple of sunburned German women, three angry-looking Arab teens, kind of like the Marx Brothers if the Marx Brothers were Arabs in bathing suits with cigarettes behind their ears, who, I notice, are muttering to one another while glowering. Then I see what they’re muttering/glowering about: several (like, fifteen) members of the United States Navy, on shore leave. You can tell they’re Navy because they’re huge and tattooed and innocently happy and keep bellowing things like, “Dude, fuck that, I am all about dancing!” while punching each other lovingly in the tattoos and shooting what I recognize as Rural Smiles of Shyness and Apprehension at all the people staring at them because they’re so freaking loud.
    Then the Navy Guys notice the Glowering Muttering Arabs, and it gets weirdly tense there in line. Luckily, it’s my turn to awkwardly blop into a tube, and off I go.
    This ride involves a series of tremendous water jets that blast you, on your tube, to the top of Wild Wadi, where, your recently purchased swim trunks having been driven up your rear by the jets, you pause, looking