Joseph O’Neill - The Dog

Ah, here are the huskies.

Each has its own portrait. Husky Tresor, Husky Wolk, Husky Vida. They have pensive, trusting faces. This makes one sad, inevitably.

And here are the humans.

C.S. Wright on return from the barrier, Jan. 1912.

Portrait of B. Day on return from the barrier, Dec. 21st, 1911.

These men are clearly in shock. What happened to them? What is the ‘barrier’?

There’s a book of writing for sale, The Worst Journey in the World , by Apsley Cherry-Garrard. This is a fine name for an explorer. However, the book is enclosed in cling wrap and I cannot leaf through it. I must go back to the photographs on the walls.

Capt. Scott, Apr. 13th, 1911.

The great/flawed man himself, with one foot on a sled. The face is emotionally ajar, and discloses a slippery modern soul — self-absorbed, ambivalent, newly metaphysically brave. It’s a face you see a lot. Walk into any DIFC office and you’ll spot a Bob Scott.

Portrait of C.H. Meares on his return from the barrier, Jan. 1912.

Again the barrier? They had to keep making the men go there?

Portrait of Dimitri on return from the barrier, Jan. 29th, 1912.

It is much too much for me. Out I go.

It must have been a day or two after my non-meeting with Mrs Ted Wilson that I ran into Brett Hutchinson in a DIFC parking lot and accepted his invitation to Friday brunch. I felt like I had to. A few months before, I’d loaned Brett twenty thousand AED. As soon as he’d been fired, his bank accounts had been automatically frozen in accordance with the local law, and the guy was up to his neck in liabilities and tied to the UAE for personal reasons and unable to make a run for it. Talk about being in a tough spot. Now that he was bravely back on his feet and relatively liquid (he’d repaid me fifteen thousand AED and promised the balance in short order), he wanted to signal his gratitude and reclaim some lost acre of honour. It must be said, I didn’t know Brett that well. I loaned him the money because he approached me as one American to another. I had misgivings about whether shared nationality was a valid reason for assisting co-national A rather than alter-national B, particularly where B’s needs might be as great as, indeed greater than, those of A; yet I said yes to Brett without hesitation. It was striking how, when the shit hit the fan and people suddenly if temporarily found themselves in the same tight corner, loyalties of country were rediscovered in the matter of asking for help and giving it. Which isn’t to say that there was an abrupt territorial reorganization of moral feelings; there were many who were kind without reference to kindredness, and in this sense may be said to have admirably rescued the language of goodness from its primal dirt. I might add that I feel more cleanly American than ever. Leaving the USA has resulted in a purification of nationality. By this I mean that my relationship to the US Constitution is no longer subject to distortion by residence and I am more appreciative than ever of the great ideals that make the United States special. I pay my federal taxes to the last dime, and, without in any way devaluing citizenship to a business of cash registers, I can assert that I am well in the black with my country.

Anyhow, Brett was a proud man from Little Rock. If he needed to buy me brunch to look himself in the eye, I wasn’t going to stand in his way, even if the thought of another all-you-can-eat-and-drink Friday afternoon shindig was basically worrying. It didn’t help that the event had as its stated theme, ‘F*** the F****** Financial Crisis’.

The venue for the brunch was the subject of debate between a dozen or so of the brunchers. Some were in favour of the One & Only, others Al Qasr, others the Park Hyatt, others the Fairmont, others The Address (in Downtown Dubai, not The Address Dubai Marina). I would guess that two hundred messages went into circulation. The initial volley straightforwardly considered the hotels’ relative merits (in the matters of value for money, lobsters, cigar-availability, ambiance, house champagne brands, etc.); but this give-and-take quickly frayed into off-topic threads, the most popular of which, this being Dubai, inevitably concerned the question of service. To be fair, I suppose it’s theoretically possible that the affluent expat population largely consists of people who arrived with bees already in their bonnets about the performance of waiters, lackeys and help. But most of us here would shamefacedly agree that something about the local gradient eventually means that pretty much everyone who’s white and/or well-to-do slides into bossiness and haughtiness in relation to pretty much everyone who’s not white and not well-to-do. According to some commentators, our domineering cadre is essentially drawn from the same stock of provincial, socially second- or third-tier Europeans who, in the days of empire, populated the lesser despotic positions — policemen, clerks, overseers — and it’s far from surprising, therefore, that members of what was once the taskmaster or slave-driver class should be given to pushing people around and looking down their lower-middle- or middle-middle-class noses at their supposed social and/or racial inferiors. Maybe this holds some truth; there’s no denying I’ve seen repellently de haut en bas behaviour here from men and women about whom it might in all neutrality be said that in their own homeland they might not be widely perceived as having the socio-economic status to as it were plausibly claim for themselves a relative superiority. I have to wonder, though, if the negative critique of these individuals is a function of the critics’ care for the well-being of the dominated persons or if it is, rather, self-serving viciousness and snobbery about persons who the critics feel have no entitlement of their own to viciousness and snobbery, a feeling that’s detestable on the intellectual level among others, since, unless I have been thoroughly misinformed, the so-called top or upper or upper-middle societal tiers cannot be said to have brought glory on themselves, whether historically or contemporarily, in the matter of the kindly or just treatment of less powerful others, e.g., serfs, peasants, defenceless foreign populations. It’s ugly, however you look at it. It’s not uplifting or entertaining to read, as I did on the aforementioned thread about the imbecilities of the servant classes,

I got one. Our cleaning lady whose from Indonesia and a very nice young lady, put away some books with the spines facing INSIDE.

Think I can beat that. I was at Starbucks yesterday and the Indian gentleman waiter tried to ‘tidy away’ the newspaper I was reading. He had no idea that the whole point of sitting down was to read the newspaper. He didn’t know what reading a newspaper was!

Try explaining that L socks go with R socks! Never works. They always think L goes with L because it looks the same. Drives me potty.

Normally, I would never think of intervening. On this occasion, I don’t know why, I was prompted to write, it must be said hesitantly,

I think that here in Dubai, there’s a widespread confusion of the notions of service and servility. Restaurant/hotel service focuses on fawning and obsequiousness rather than efficiency. The question is whether this is due to the customer expectations (i.e., we demand servility), or inexperienced management, or both. We know that it cannot only be due to the imported culture of the staff, because Indian waiters who work in New York, London, etc., are highly competent and resourceful. Ditto cabdrivers. Btw, has anyone noticed how disenchanted the taxi drivers here are, compared with those in New York, say? What is our role in this, I wonder?

Nobody responded to my wonderment, either online or at Yalumba, the restaurant at Le Méridien where the brunch was, in due course, held.