Thursday, July 1, 2010

Guess who I like better

Maureen Dowd?
The idea of seeing Saudi Arabia with the welcome mat out was irresistible...even when the wary Saudis kept resisting.
Or Zunguzungu, writing about Maureen Dowd?
The first thing to say, then, is this is how Orientalism works: we know what pictures of the Orient we want, and so we go out and get them. ...

It tells us a great deal about her and what she went to Saudi Arabia to find (and did find), in other words: confirmation. After all, look back at that quote: the fact that they’re selling her exactly the image she wants to buy — a slowly modernizing puritanical society — passes completely under her radar; she wants images of burkas next to swimming pools and they’re happy to give them to her, happy to cater to her belief that social justice is a sort of natural outgrowth of luxury. But this business of “wary Saudis” is preposterous; it would be hard for a trip to be more fundamentally state sponsored trip than hers was, and the image of “wary Saudis” was just one of the images they provided her to pose next to.

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