The Braindead Megaphone Read Online Free PDF Page B

sold but bolts of cloth. There’s a mind-blowing gold section—two or three hundred gold shops on one street, with mysterious doors leading to four-story mini-malls holding still more gold shops, each overflowing with the yellow high-end gold that, in storybooks and Disney movies, comes pouring out of pirate chests.
    As I walk through, a kind of amazed mantra starts running through my head: There is no end to the making and selling of things there is no end to the making and selling of things there is no end…
    Man, it occurs to me, is a joyful, buying-and-selling piece of work. I have been wrong, dead wrong, when I’ve decried consumerism. Consumerism is what we are. It is, in a sense, a holy impulse. A human being is someone who joyfully goes in pursuit of things, brings them home, then immediately starts planning how to get more.
    A human being is someone who wishes to improve his lot.
    SPEAKING OF IMPROVING ONE’S LOT: THE GREAT DUBAI QUANDARY
    Dubai raises the questions raised by any apparent utopia: What’s the downside? At whose expense has this nirvana been built? On whose backs are these pearly gates being raised?
    Dubai is, in essence, capitalism on steroids: a small, insanely wealthy group of capital-controlling Haves supported by a huge group of overworked and underpaid Have-Nots, with, in Dubai’s case, the gap between Haves and Have-Nots so wide as to indicate different species.
    But any attempt to reduce this to some sort of sci-fi Masters and ’Droids scenario gets complicated. Relative to their brethren back home (working for next to nothing or not working at all), Dubai’s South Asian workers have it great; likewise, relative to their brethren working in nearby Saudi Arabia. An American I met, who has spent the last fifteen years working in the Saudi oil industry, told me about seeing new South Indian workers getting off the plane in Riyadh, in their pathetic new clothes, clutching cardboard suitcases. On arrival, as in a scene out of The Grapes of Wrath , they are informed (for the first time) that they will have to pay for their flight over, their lodging, their food (which must be bought from the company), and, in advance, their flight home. In this way, they essentially work the first two years for free.
    Dubai is not, in structure, much different: the workers surrender their passports to their employer; there are no labor unions, no organizing, no protests. And yet in Dubai, the workers tell you again and again how happy they are to be here. Even the poorest, most overworked laborer considers himself lucky—he is making more, much more, than he would be back home. In Saudi, the windfall profits from skyrocketing oil prices have shot directly upstairs, to the five thousand or so members of the royal family, and from there to investments (new jets, real estate in London). In Dubai, the leaders have plowed the profits back into the national dream of the New Dubai—reliant not on oil revenue (the Dubai oil will be gone by 2010) but on global tourism. Whatever complaints you hear about the Emirati ruling class—they buy $250,000 falcons, squash all dissent, tolerate the financial presence of questionable organizations (Al Qaeda, various national Mafias)—they seem to be universally respected, even loved, because, unlike the Saudi rulers, they are perceived to put the interests of the people first.
    On the other hand, relative to Western standards, Dubai is so antilabor as to seem medieval. In the local paper, I read about the following case: A group of foreign workers in Dubai quit their jobs in protest over millions of dirhams in unpaid wages. Since by law they weren’t allowed to work for another company, these men couldn’t afford plane tickets back home and were thus stuck in a kind of Kafka loop. After two years, the government finally stepped in and helped send the men home. This story indicates both the potential brutality of the system—so skewed toward the employer—and its