There was an atmospheric piece in the UK Times entitled “How Dubai’s burst bubble has left behind the last days of Rome”. It describes grand and deserted concourses, nearly vacant trains, people drinking champagne surrounded by gleaming towers from which a few lights shine — the stragglers left in the aftermath of an abandoned dream.
A mile away at the new Marina Yacht Club, Western expats were also working their way into a party mood. Deferential Filipino staff served a foamy lobster broth as an amuse bouche between courses. Beer and cocktails loosened tongues and a knot of dancers formed in front of the band. Tens of millions of pounds worth of powerboats bobbed at their moorings beneath the revelry on the terrace. Behind the boats a dozen skyscrapers framed the view, a few of the lights in their thousands of flats were on. “It’s so beautiful here,” said a pretty young Anglo-Indian woman clutching a large glass of chilled white wine and taking in the scene.
But the really tragic figures are either invisible men or offstage. The deferential Filipino waiters with no place to go. The investors in those palaces of dreams whose fortunes have evaporated up into the clouds. Their ghosts haunt the pages of the Times article, but they remain unseen. One of the specters is briefly glimpsed “Ross, who asked not to be identified, is one of countless expatriates who have been caught out by the collapse in Dubai’s once-booming property market. … We met at a coffee shop in Dubai’s vast Mall of the Emirates. Around us were some of Britain’s most familiar high street names — Next, Debenhams, Virgin, Costa Coffee and Harvey Nichols. For now trade is still brisk. “I’m struggling to know what to do really,” he said. …
Ross’s options are stark. He must keep working to pay off the bank, borrow from his family, leave Dubai illegally and lose the apartment or go to jail. “The worst-case scenario is that I have to lean on friends or family to get the money together. It’s that or jail — it’s a no-brainer really.”
All around them half-vacant developments stare down — and capacity is planned to double by 2011 — if the money can be found. So why not find the money? Why not keep financing the dream? Why not keep surging voltage through the corpse? Keep it twitching. How much of the activity of the last ten or twenty years has really been about passing little pieces of paper to one another? It is as if somewhere along the line a whole civilization forgot that ultimately there had to be a loaf of bread, a bottle of milk — something tangible at the bottom of the pile — someone to tenant those empty towers. A real living person, capable of taking out the trash or descending in the elevator.
What we got instead was a creative economy. A tomorrow that would always be brighter than today. House prices were going to go up. Today they’re down. But don’t worry, the capacity will double by 2011.
And how much authority does the Western world have to scoff at such fantasy even as it prepares to bind itself to a program of social spending that can’t be sustained by its demography; mothball its reactors, throws away its lightbulbs, cars and even its shoes in the name of something called “climate change”, now so named to hedge against the possibility temperatures may go up or down? What does a civilization which is prepared to put its trust in little pieces of paper called engagements in place of a real man with a real gun standing guard at a real border say to Dubai? How different are the towers being built in Copenhagen or London or Brussels or Washington from Dubai’s?
I fear they are not all that different. And when the last lobster bisque is served and the final glass of champagne is poured, maybe the only constant will be the deferential Filipino waiter, optimistic to the last because optimism is his only defense against despair. That and the closing of the door.
