Rattlesnake Ridge      

 
      BFF
“But not Saudi Arabia, or so it seems. And not Riyadh. As ever, Saudi men sit in their large SUVs, stuck in traffic between the steel-blue facades of office buildings, and the wives of these men are still having their drivers drop them off in front of the shopping malls in downtown Riyadh, where they scurry from Prada to Ralph Lauren and then disappear into Starbucks for a latte — in the “family department,” a room on the side kept separate from the world of men. The boulevards and promenades of the Saudi capital look as though they had been swept clean, as if some mysterious force had extinguished all public life. Riyadh has nothing like Avenue Bourguiba in Tunis or Tahrir Square in Cairo. In fact, there is no sign in Saudi Arabia of a public political discourse that could be compared with the debates, held in secret at first and then more and more in the open, with which the unrest began in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen and Syria. Almost every political discussion seems to end with the same words: Long live the king! Saudi Arabia feels like a realm that has come to a standstill in a rapidly changing world. Its leaders, most notably the 86-year-old King Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, are pinning their hopes on the old principle of stability………….”

They call it stability, others call it stagnation. That same argument was used in the swamp that was Egypt under Mubarak for thirty years: they said it was ‘stability’, I called it a swamp. There is not much virtue in stable misery and repression and powerlessness and corruption. Once the fear is gone, the ‘stability’ card is not compelling.
(And then there was/is Khaled al-Jehany, a brave young man, the only one in the city, who stood in a Riyadh street and said that the whole country is a big prison, He was whisked away and his fate is still unknown).
Cheers
mhg



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