Letter from Saudi Arabia: Jeddah Knights and the Nadir of Existence

It’s 15 hours of flying time to Saudi Arabia.

As usual, it’s two o’clock in the morning when the plane approaches–a sterile, flat dustbowl streaked with streetlights that from the air look like endless threads of yellow beads.

And then I’m back in the classroom.

“Teacher, you go corniche last night?”

“No, why?”

“Why you don’t go to corniche? Veddy beautiful.”

‘You think so? I don’t. I find it kind of dirty and smelly, don’t you?”

“Teacher, corniche veddy nice, with many fat boy.”

“Fat boy?”

“Ha ha! Man good, woman no good, but I like young fat boy, every night I go corniche and chase the fat boys, believe me, last night I running veddy fast and I get veddy beautiful fat boy,” – smack goes his fist – “he look same-same baby doll, like Toys-R-Us baby, he have the fat cheek and I running down the corniche to catch him but he run veddy slow because he fat boy so I catch him no problem and” – smack -”believe me teacher!”

“Let me get this straight. You chase little fat boys down the corniche?”

“Believe me, nice fat boy spending the time.”

“And you-”

Smack. “Yes, believe me, teacher, every Thursday night go corniche, find the fat boys!”

“This is the nadir of existence,” another teacher declares. He declares that every day after classes. Nadir indeed. With the usual Office griping continuing as backdrop, I write a mock financial news article while my own classroom encounter is still fresh in my mind. It’s a form of catharsis.

JEDDAH-April 17 (Corniche News Agency). Japanese electronics giants Hitachi and Nintendo today jointly unveiled a new pocket video game designed for the Saudi market.

“In the past, our famous Gameboy has enjoyed tremendous popularity worldwide,” Nomuro Wahdukahodicu [Workaholic-get it?], vice president for marketing at Nintendo, said. “This includes the Arab world.” Wahdukahodicu said the joint project has taken pocket video games a step further. “The new game is not only more sophisticated, it is also market-specific to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. So, after our success with Gameboy, I am pleased to announce Fatboy, the pocket game for the man of the corniche.”

Wahdukahodicu said the new game is more challenging and claimed the graphics are almost “Spielbahg-like.” He said the software graphics depict realistic little Technicolor fat boys running down the Jeddah corniche being pursued by men in thobes and gutras flapping in the wind. The object is to rescue ten little fat boys by plucking them from the sea wall and cramming them into your Land Cruiser before they hurl themselves into the waves.

“It is most diverting,” Takeio Samuraya, sales manager at Hitachi, said, “and clearly suited to the local culture. We would not market Fatboy in Japan, for instance, where the homosexual culture is far less pervasive and overt. So for the Japanese market of mostly straight men, we have developed Groperboy and Molest Man for the male who enjoys vicarious sexual harassment on subway trains.”

For the future, Nintendo will keep an eye on sales in Jeddah. If Fatboy the game takes off like the little fat boys in its graphics, the company has ambitions to market-test a full-sized Virtual Fatboy video game for the more affluent Saudi.

Kenji Companyman [get it?], a software engineer, explained. “The software scenario for this game will be truly interactive,” he said. “Players can cruise the corniche in a new Caprice in search of fresh and sassy fat boys without leaving the comfort of their tea rooms. The object, of course, is to capture a juicy one, but it won’t be easy. Dangerous obstacles abound. At one point, the Caprice’s accelerator sticks to the floor and the car takes off like a rocket. So the driver has to swerve to avoid Pakistani pedestrians, who are everywhere except on the sidewalk. And only a world-class driver can avoid crashing into the police car.”

If the driver does crash, however, there is still a 50/50 chance that the police officer will be tired from Ramadan.

Once the car is back under control, the player can triple-park it and pursue fat boys along the sea walk. But perils persist: some striplings turn out to be Royal Family runaways, others are “not clean,” and still others play hard to get.

The two Japanese companies are also tailoring various new games to specific national markets. “Even now, our software creators are developing fresh new products for familiar markets,” Samuraya said. “Next year in France we expect to market Insecureboy and Culture Controlboy.”

Competing giants are not taking all this lying down. Sony also has plans to penetrate the Saudi market with its own game, called Lazyboy, featuring adventures for the Saudi man of leisure in a recliner.

Sex Scandals and Politics: A New Norm?

In light of David Vitter’s political survival and the apparent political comeback of Eliot Spitzer written on the wall, I began to think back to a simpler time, a time when sex was taboo and charlatans claimed a 100,000 Dow was possible.

When thinking about such a time, I also remembered chuckling a few years back when I saw a particularly astute bumper sticker that read:

When Clinton Lied, Nobody Died

In the midst of the many abuses of power by the Bush administration, not seen since Watergate (and probably Teapot Dome before that), it seemed funny in retrospect how obsessed many had been in the late 1990s, just a few years before, about President Clinton’s zipper problem with the infamous Ms. Lewinsky.

Many of the popular defenses of Bill Clinton’s behaviors during the aftermath of the Lewinsky affair seemed to be based on two lines of thought:

1. This sort of behavior was nothing new among American Presidents.

Popular icons such as FDR and JFK were anything but faithful during their days in the White House. While no evidence exists about oral favors in the Oval Office per se, speculation about JFK makes Clinton’s behavior look like an ABC Family Special. Granted the press also conveniently never mentioned that FDR was in a wheel chair or that Kennedy was in ill health. In addition, for anyone who has watched the television series Mad Men knows, it was a different time. It was before the sexual revolution, it was before Watergate and the loss of trust between the public and its politicians, and most importantly, it was before the rise of the popular press and cable news (not to mention the internet). There wasn’t the competition we see today, and those in power were good friends with those in the media. For good or bad, it was a good old boys club with respected boundaries.

2 . This sort of thing was not a big deal elsewhere in the world.

This line of thought was especially interesting to me as at the time when I was studying European politics. It seemed that all of the institutional factors that had arisen in the US, such as the popular press, the internet, and the devolution of the good old boys club, had all occurred in Europe as well. However, unlike the US, despite the fact that the public now knew about the personal faults of their leaders, it seemed that the public didn’t give a damn. The easy explanation for this at the time was that Europe didn’t have the same evangelical and fundamentalist tradition as the US and was far more secular. As such, they didn’t see their politicians as moral role models and therefore could properly separate their actions as individuals from their policies which actually affected their pocketbooks.

As I read a Newsweek snippet that claimed that Bill Clinton’s survival was the exception to the rule of death by sex scandal, I began to wonder whether or not Bill Clinton’s scandal was not an exception, but rather an inflection point in the ethos of the politics of sex scandals. The more I thought about this hypothesis, the more it seemed to make sense. If this were true, what then could be the reasons for this new dynamic?

The Moral Crusaders Went Too Far

This argument goes on the assumption that politics works like a pendulum in the sense that one side often goes too far, which then causes a big backlash that moves the pendulum swinging back in the other direction. From a cultural perspective, this argument would start somewhere back in the middle of the 20th century. Out of the economic and war torn family unit of the Great Depression and World War II emerged a period from the late 1940s to the early 1960s that is sometimes referred to as the neo-Victorian era. This period of unprecedented economic prosperity enabled a return the one worker per family norm that hadn’t been seen in several generations. However, “hi honey, I’m home” had run its course by the mid-1960s, and the pendulum swung far back to the cultural left with the rise of the sexual revolution, the flower children, and a general destruction, for good or bad, of the morals and cultural norms of the previous period. This period in turn ran its course with the excesses of the 1970s, and by the early 1980s the new “moral majority” had risen to power and catapulted conservative California governor Ronald Reagan (who was once deemed far too conservative to ever be elected president) to power. This backlash/pendulum argument would then speculate that this moral majority movement had gone too far, starting with the Lewinsky affair and ending with the assault on homosexuals and immigrants in the years to follow.

Generational Changes

Tied to this previous explanation is the fact that just as the moral majority was stepping too far, new generations began to come of age who cared little for the wedge politics that defined their parents and grandparents generations. Many in these new generations X and Y had grown up in broken families, had a parent who had strayed, and had had friends of different races and sexual orientations. To many in these new generations, things weren’t as black and white or as us versus them. Simply put, most young people don’t care about consensual adult sex.

Context is Everything

Finally, as hinted at before, in the light of Bush’s abuse of powers and the overall failure of a presidency, all of 1990s’ political scandals seemed so feeble in comparison. Dear God, how naïve were we back in those roaring 90s? This argument is not only the easiest to explain, but is also needed by default to even begin to explain and/or justify the previous arguments. This would also seem to imply that any movement of the past decade in cultural norms is anything but nonreversible. If history is any guide, there is likely to be at least one step backward before we can necessarily begin to move forward. Conservative cultural forces in the United States are too strong and too entrenched to simply fade away.

What’s Next?

Granted, it will be years before we will know for sure whether the recent cases of David Vitter or Eliot Spitzer are evidence of a new dynamic or confirmation that our cultural pendulum has not swung much after all. Perhaps in the context of American evangelical traditions, American politicians with loose zippers can now finally be born again.

Palin Pranked

By popular request, we have decided to post the audio of Sarah Palin being pranked by two French-Canadian disk jockeys pretending to be French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the absurdity that is Sarah Palin:

Darth Vader Endorses McCain

In today’s thanks, but no thanks, endorsement news, Dick Cheney has endorsed John McCain. Here’s the video of Cheney stumping for McCain in Wyoming:

What the heck is Cheney thinking? This is probably the last thing McCain needs right now. Yes, he’s campaigning in the ultra-competitive state of Wyoming. However, as you see here, this was all over the national news today. It’s not the 1950s anymore Dick–news spreads quickly.

What would be the equivalent on the other side? Williams Ayers or Reverend Wright stumping for Obama?

Sarah Palin Set to the Piano

The cacophony that is Governor Palin…set to piano, accordingly:

Wassup for Obama!?!

Remember the Budweiser commercials with the Wassup! guys?

Well, they’re back and taking on this year’s election:

Andy Griffith and the Fonz Endorse Obama

Ron Howard and ghosts of TV past endorse Barack Obama in this creative video.

McCain-Obama Dance Off!

With a surprise appearance from a certain lady

It pains me to admit this, but McCain’s pretty fly for a 72-year old white guy!

Unbelievable McCain Vs. Obama Dance-Off – Watch more free videos

SNL: Palin Rap

It’s not a coincidence that SNL got its highest ratings in fifteen years this week.

More Debate Reactions

Overall, I think Obama won this debate.  McCain’s cantankerous personality, combined with his constant hovering over audience members and pacing around the stage, made me about as nervous as the candidates. While McCain  held his own in the domestic policy segment of the first debate by diverting the conversation to issues like earmarks, tonight he was forced to actually debate real economic issues. In doing so, he failed miserably. He did not even mention the middle class once. Although McCain probably won the last half hour once the debate turned to foreign policy, it was too little too late. Health care was the real zinger in my mind. “John McCain voted against children’s health care!” is the line that I will remember most.

Kevin Van Dyke, Editor

I found it difficult to listen to the whole debate this evening because I became increasingly angry at McCain’s sanctimonious performance full of distorted and often blatantly incorrect facts and statements.

However, while I admired Obama’s calm and the presidential dignity that he maintained throughout the debate, I felt that he could have thrown a few more punches to alter the perception of Obama being on the defense this evening. (Obama, however, was excellent in pointing out that McCain chose to vote down SCHIP!) We definitely don’t want the bully that McCain is, but this is political war, and a few more forensic volleys fired would be well received.

Jessica McAfee, Guest Contributor

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