The Infernal Tower

The emirate of Dubai on the Persian Gulf, one of the seven sheikdoms that make up the United Arab Emirates, celebrated the completion of what is now the tallest building in the world. The 160-story Burj Khalifa tower stands at 2717 feet tall, which is roughly half a mile high and nearly a thousand feet taller than the Freedom Tower in New York will be if the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey ever actually builds the darn thing. So, the Port Authority wanted to respond to 9/11 by building the tallest building on earth at the site of the World Trade Center towers, but they lost their bid to do so before they even got started.

It's a Pyrrhic victory for Dubai, which planned the skyscraper in better times while trying to become the glamour and leisure destination of the Middle East but finished it (except for a few floors, many of which still have exposed drywall) just as the real estate bubble there burst in the middle of a global recession. I don't think the Burj Khalifa tower - named after the president of the U.A.E. as an act of gratitude to the Abu Dhabi, of which the Emirati president is also the emir, for helping Dubai through its financial crisis - is going to become the kind of iconic landmark that the Empire State Building in New York became once the Great Depression ended. I don't even think the new skyscraper will be redeemed like the World Trade Center towers were once the American economy recovered from the malaise of the seventies. For Dubai has already spent so much money on foolish things like artificial islands and indoor ski slopes, and it's produced so much surplus real estate, it's hard to imagine the Burj Khalifa project breaking even, despite insistences from the developers that much of it is already rented. Consider also the fact that the global economy still hasn't quite recovered from the crashes of 2008, along with the fact that Dubai has few natural resources of any value, and you have yourself the mother of all white elephants.

And they can never hire enough foriegners to keep the place clean.

This skyscraper is a monument to ego, not just to the self-love of Dubaians or other Emiratis, but to the self-love of all humankind. There's some kind of germ in the human psyche to show how clever and capable we are by building such structures to prove that we can in fact build them. It's been that way as far back as the construction of the Tower of Pisa, which, in an ironic twist, has been leaning to one side as if to demonstrate that we humans are not in fact infallible. Skyscrapers - even the most beautiful, best-engineered, and most beloved of them - have all huffed and puffed in their own different ways, their very existence seeming to express the pride and self-absorption of their builders: "Look and see what we just did!" The Burj Khalifa is a continuation of this self-love, taken to the extreme. But this latest variation on the Tower of Babel is bound to fail. It may not get destroyed by terrorists, but the exorbitant costs and labor necessary to maintain it, never mind what it took to build it, will humble its builders and be its undoing. It's likely that no grandiose projects of this nature will ever be attempted afterwards.

We may never love like this again.

Dubai-ous Goals

Somewhere between the bloviating on Tiger Woods's car accident and reaction to a speech on Afghanistan that President Obama hasn't given yet, few people have noticed and fewer people seem to care about the precarious state the emirate of Dubai is in.

Dubai, a part of the United Arab Emirates and one of the few places on the Arabian Peninsula that has little if any oil, has been building itself up as a fantastic tourist destination through the the will and the personality of its emir. Dubai has constructed several skyscrapers housing offices, apartments and hotels, looking like wet-drip sand castles, along with man-made islands in the Persian Gulf, an indoor skiing facility, and a $100 million golf course (designed by Tiger Woods). Rents and sales of these properties were supposed to enrich the small emirate, but such deals have fallen short of these expectations, as much of Dubai's real estate stock was built with - you guessed it - borrowed money, and the emir can't pay his bills.

Dubai has turned to the more fiscally conservative Abi Dhabi for aid, which may come with strings attached. It must be understood that the United Arab Emirates are not a strong federation like the United States is, and this is evident by my use of the plural person with the former and the singular person with the latter. The seven sheikdoms that make up the union are largely autonomous, with their own set of laws and a federal government run by a Supreme Council to manage foreign affairs. The president of the U.A.E. is usually the emir of Abu Dhabi, where the federation's capital is located, and the prime minister is usually . . . the emir of Dubai. Abu Dhabi will almost certainly help out Dubai to preserve the union, but will insist on strict terms for any loans it makes.

So what does Dubai have to do with Dubuque? Well, if there's a good deal of American money invested in Dubai's exorbitant earthly paradise, that could rattle the banks and investment firms in this country, which could have a ripple effect on the U.S. economy as a whole. Apparently, though, it's not seen as major problem on Wall Street . . . yet. Stock prices dipped a bit in half-day trading on Friday, when the Dubai crisis erupted, but the market seems to be on an uptick now.

Stay tuned.