Forever Tainted

And this is how I'll start it...

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An observation - all that is and could be Dubai

D is for Dubai...

There seems to be a fad of books being published with the layout alphabetic, one letter per essay as part of the overall theme of the book. Well, this book is about Dubai and I’m not nearly organized enough to actually follow an A through Z theme on the things that inspire me, enlighten me, or down right out piss me off about this booming Middle Eastern oasis. None the less, letters make for a great chapter titles and I’m too lazy to think up something original, so I’m ripping off that idea. And like any good start I guess I’ll start at the beginning.

A is for Assholes...

Whether you’re in Dubai on vacation or as an expatriate resident you’re bound to run into one constant there and it’s the assholes. Assholes on the roads, assholes in the clubs, assholes writing to papers, assholes on UAE blogs, assholes in the malls, assholes you pay your rent to, assholes begging for change, assholes jaywalking across the ten-lane highways with no regard for their lives or yours, assholes trying to scam you, assholes charging you more for products depending on your race, assholes being assholes, and assholes raping assholes in the front page news. Assholes, assholes everywhere!

There’s something about the transitional nature that is Dubai that transforms people into assholes. On the roads, there’s no consideration for life, period. It’s not uncommon to watch road rage take control of the sanest of people, causing street fights at red lights, or drag-racer-wannabes on the main highways. As of 2008, the second leading cause of death in the emirate, were road accidents; the first cause cardiovascular disease*1. At the rate of any in habitant seeing at least one car accident per day every day, this comes as no surprise. The roads are well paved and predominantly strait; the cars are more often than not new luxury models so there’s only one explanation to this anomaly – Assholes being assholes behind the wheel.

Late one night I left my girlfriends place and stopped at a red light at the intersection on my way home. I found myself whiteness to some of the biggest assholes of them all. In the middle of the intersection, plastered on the road was an Asian man, his head crushed under his helmet, blood seeping from what seemed like every inch of his being. His arms and legs twitched constantly and you just knew he was taking his last breaths of air. He may have been the erratic asshole motorbike driver just prior to getting his ass whipped off his bike by some even bigger asshole of a driver, who had since disappeared, but neither of the two could possibly beat the asshole-ishness, when compared with the spectators of this man’s demise.

Standing in the middle of the road, not a single meter from a dying man was a crowd of men; some watching this man with morbid curiosity, some sipping tea and smoking cigarettes, but the majority of them just gabbing away like death wasn’t staring any of them in the face. Not one person went to hold this man’s hand, not one person attempted to offer him assurance, hope, nor whispered a word of encouragement in this man’s ear while he waited in vain for the ambulance to arrive. There is nothing else you can use to describe such a group of heartless bastards who could idly stand by and watch a man die, other than ‘asshole’.

In fact, there pretty much only one group of people in Dubai in my mind, that measure so closely on the asshole scale as the group of bystanders who could watch a man die without flinching, and those would be the suicide-for-cash types. Up until recently the laws in Dubai said if you were driving a car and some dipshit jumped out in front of you and died, you would not only face a jail sentence but you’d have to pay obscene amounts of blood money to the deceased’s family. Not long ago, it was discovered that a number of lower-class labourers who found themselves not meeting their idea’s of wealth while actually working to send home to their family, decided the quickest way to get rich quick was to commit suicide by killing themselves in an effort to weasel the living driver out of thousands of dollars. This tactic worked for a number of years. Only an asshole would destroy his life, and that of another person’s for cash. Thank God the authorities caught on and are now revising that law.

In the shopping malls and clubs you have assholes of a different sort. You have the ignorant expatriates walking around like new money, dressed to the nines in designer fashion clothing, as if that somehow covers up that they’re soulless no-ones craving attention and acceptance of others. They’re the very same assholes you find abusing their domestic help in the line ups of supermarkets, screaming obscenities like, “I thought I told you to grab the Lite, not Low Fat mayonnaise!” They’re the very same ignorant twits that park across two parking spaces, because for the first time in their life they have a semi-luxury car and they fear someone should park beside them and scratch their paint opening a car door in the obtuse manner that they themselves would, had they still been driving their shit Datsun, or Toyota Corola.

These same assholes seem to migrate to the nightclubs, and once you add alcohol to the equation you get a whole dimension of the assholes that they are. Take said assholes above, add sluttiness and no inhibitions about being a racist, egotistical, dumb-as-a-board-self-importance twat to the conclusion and you’ve defined night life in Dubai. Assholes I tell you, all of them!

If you’re into a larger than life cinema experience, over the drunkenness that is a nightclub don’t fool yourself into believing you’ll find fewer assholes during the show. UAE nationals cannot live without their cell phones. And though this trait once only belonged to this small percentage of the population, it’s catching on and UAE nationals or not in the movie, you’re going to hear more phones ringing and full-fledged conversations during the show, then actual dialog you paid to see. And if the phones aren’t enough to ruin your night, you can bet your asshole at least one asshole thought it appropriate to bring screaming children along for the show. Enjoy the cinematic experience that only Dubai has to offer.

In the “Letters to the Editor” section of local news papers, you find the same assholes writing the same bullshit that can be found of the majority of UAE based blogs. The complaints about rising rents, the horrible traffic, the commentaries and critics of locals, the locals bashing the expatriates, at the end of the day it’s all the same, over and over and over and over again. Nauseating repetition is the theme in any written media composed by the general public. Thus, it’s only fit to close this with the reality that I’m an asshole too. Stay there long enough and you can join the club!

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What do you think? Would it sell?