Posted by Dan Ewert : 4/02/2002 10:59:00 PM (Archive Link)
Speaking of the Arab Street earlier, I still don’t know why we’re so concerned about it. Shouldn’t they be more concerned about the American Main Street? I think we have street issues. It’s like we’re trying to keep up with the Joneses even though the Jones property is a dilapidated house with a sewage plant next door.

I just had a stunning and humorous thought. Now before I get started, I’ll warn you of an upcoming analogy. My fiancée often rolls her eyes at them, but I will continue. The Middle East is like the Beverly Hillbillies. Stay with me. Jed and Co., you will recall, lived in a run-down old shack on some wilderness property. They lived a rather simple uncomplicated life. And then one day Jed was shootin’ at some food and up through the ground come a bubblin’ crude. Oil that is. Black gold. Texas tea. With their newfound wealth, they built a fancy new mansion and enjoyed all the niceties modern life had to offer. However, they were still the fish-out-of-water. The nice big house and the new interaction with the world at large still didn’t change who they were. They continued to be the same simple, out of touch people. To (ab)use another platitude, you can take the boy out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the boy.

Well, here we are with the Middle East. The Arab and Persian societies were largely feudal and often violent. They were also very much behind the rest of the world in terms of technology and civilization. Then, however, it was discovered that the region was floating on oil. (History doesn’t record who it was that happened to accidentally shoot the ground to find it.) Suddenly, there was money. And yes, yes, most of it went to foreign oil concerns and nations who dominated the countries until they got kicked out. Let’s pretend Jed was manipulated by Exxon before he chased them off his land with a Springer rifle and a Remington shotgun. So the region was awash in new cash. With this, they took care of many longstanding problems. They improved infrastructure, housing, public works, utilities, military… basically brought the place into the modern age in the material sense. However, they were still the same people. They were still the same feudal, violent people they were before the oil and didn’t blend into the rest of the world at all. In fact, they were quite at odds with it. However, we were forced to reckon with them. Like a fawning Mr. Drysdale, we had to be nice because of the economic power they held over us.

You may be more offended at my comparison of the lovable Beverly Hillbillies to the Middle East rather than the other way around. However, picture the Hillbillies where most of them are like Granny in the hot-tempered shotgun-toting mode. Now imagine that there are neighbors next door to them who have a smaller house but are far better people (better educated, better functioning household, the rich guy in the big house downtown looks after them) and the Hillbillies are hell-bent on getting rid of the house and the neighbors. They wouldn’t be so benign then.