Ghost of a flea

Never trust people who've only got one fucking book.

Those who used to sing the praises of the Arabs, of the vast starlit desert, and the presumed effect of that vast starlit desert on the leather-faced noble Bedu, hawk on hand, standing barefoot on an outcrop of rock (see Freya Stark, see Wilfred Thesiger, see Lawrence, see them all) did not live to see what, with the unmerited wealth that came from an accident of geology, the Arabs have managed to do -- in Riyadh, in Jiddah, in Dubai -- with their vulgar pleasure-palaces out-topping one another, the xanadus that mimic Western buildings, and then some.

Dubai may be an offense to Muslim sensibilities, but for other reasons, it is an offense to good taste and a sense not only of aesthetic, but moral proportion. The whole project of modern, empty Dubai, hollow Dubai, nothing Dubai, where each building represents an attempt to outdo another with gimmicks (this building turns with the sun, and that one can stand on stilts, and this one prostrates itself five times a day) and the most grotesque and unappealing luxury (Warren Buffett won't be impressed), merely put on display all the comic bad taste of the Arabs and Iranians much of Dubai real estate is owned by Iranian) who, with the money they do not spend on mosques and madrasas around the world, on weapons purchaes and weapons projects, and on buying armies of Western hirelings, use to build the kind of thing, more or less, on display in the picture above.

In the rich Muslim states, the best of the West --which has nothing to do with money, but with intellect and the imagination -- is not being emulated. Instead, much as they denounce that West, it is the worst of that West that in the rich Arab and Muslim states is being sedulously aped.

The luxury of Dubai is nauseating to contemplate. There is nothing there but that. No art, no science, no thought. Luxury, money, gold in the souks. Perhaps the locals will rent some paintings for display from the Louvre, rent a succursale or two of Western universities looking for loot, in order to pretend there are minds to be cultivated and something like civilization to be found in Dubai. But it's not to be found. All of Dubai is not worth a single star in your personal Michelin. Dubai is merely a cheesy holiday resort with elephantiasis, the result of the hundreds of billions that are so freely spent because they have been not earned, but merely accidentally acquired.

The photograph above tells you all you need to know, not only about Dubai, but all the other pleasure-towns that the Arabs have built up with the oil money lavished upon them.

Civilizationally, they remind me of the story -- a true story, told to be by a former member of the staff-- about the famous London bookseller Hatchard's. One day a rich Arab entered the store. It seems he had bought a country estate, with a large library, and he asked that that library now be filled -- he motioned around the vast bookstore --with "one of each."