The Braindead Megaphone Read Online Free PDF

out over the entire city—the miles of stone-white villas, the Burj Al Arab (sail-shaped, iconic, the world’s only seven-star hotel) out in the green-blue bay—just before you fly down so fast that you momentarily fear the next morning’s headline will read “Middle-aged American Dies in Freak Waterslide Mishap; Bathing Suit Found Far Up Ass.”
    Afterward, I reconvene with my former line mates in a sort of faux river bend. Becalmed, traffic-jammed, we bob around in our tubes, trying to keep off one another via impotent little hand-flips, bare feet accidentally touching (“Ha, wope, sorry, heh…”), legs splayed, belly-up in the blinding 112-degree Arabian sun, self-conscious and expectant, as in: “Are we, like, stuck here? Will we go soon? I hope I’m not the one who drifts under that dang waterfall over there!”
    No one is glowering or muttering now. We’re sated, enjoying that little dopey buzz of quasi-accomplishment you feel after a surprisingly intense theme-park ride. One of the Arab kids, the one with the Chico hair, passes a drenched cigarette to me, to pass to his friend, and then a lighter, and suddenly everybody’s smiling—me, the Arab Marxes, the sunburned German girls, the U.S. Navy.
    A disclaimer: it may be that, when you’re forty-six and pearl white and wearing a new bathing suit at a theme park on your first full day in Arabia, you’re especially prone to Big Naive Philosophical Realizations.
    Be that as it may, in my tube at Wild Wadi, I have a mini-epiphany: given enough time, I realize, statistically, despite what it may look like at any given moment, we will all be brothers. All differences will be bred out. There will be no pure Arab, no pure Jew, no pure American American. The old dividers—nation, race, religion—will be overpowered by crossbreeding and by our mass media, our world Culture o’ Enjoyment.
    Look what just happened here: hatred and tension were defused by Sudden Fun.
    Still bobbing around (three days before the resort bombings in Cairo, two weeks after the London bombings), I think-mumble a little prayer for the great homogenizing effect of pop culture: same us out, Lord MTV! Even if, in the process, we are left a little dumber, please proceed. Let us, brothers and sisters, leave the intolerant, the ideologues, the religious Islamist Bolsheviks, our own solvers-of-problems-with-troops behind, fully clothed, on the banks of Wild Wadi. We, the New People, desire Fun and the Good Things of Life, and through Fun, we will be saved.
    Then the logjam breaks, and we surge forward, down a mini-waterfall.
    Without exception, regardless of nationality, each of us makes the same sound as we disappear: a thrilled little self-forgetting Whoop.
    WE BUY, THEREFORE WE AM
    After two full days of blissfully farting around inside the Madinat, I reluctantly venture forth out of the resort bubble, downtown, into the actual city, to the Deira souk. This is the real Middle East, the dark Indiana Jones –ish Middle East I’d preimagined: an exotic, cramped, hot, chaotic, labyrinthine, canopied street bazaar, crowded with room-size, even closet-size stalls, selling everything there is in the world to buy, and more than a few things you can’t imagine anyone ever wanting to buy, or even accepting for free.
    Here is the stall of Plastic Flowers That Light Up; the stall of Tall Thin Blond Dolls in Miniskirts with Improbably Huge Eyes; the stall of Toy Semiautomatic Weapons; the stall of Every Spice Known to Man ( SARON BUKHOR, BAHRAT, MEDICAL HERBS, NATURAL VIAGRA ); the stall of Coffee-Grinding Machines in Parts on the Floor; the stall of Hindi Prayer Cards; the stall of Spangled Kashmiri Slippers; of Air Rifles; Halloween Masks; Oversize Bright-Colored Toy Ships and Trucks; a stall whose walls and ceiling are completely covered with hundreds of cooking pots. There is a Pashtun-dominated section, a hidden Hindi temple, a section that suddenly goes Chinese, entire streets where nothing is