“Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey has established an essay competition to honor the late Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, the Pentagon announced Monday.” (1)
This is my entry. —Luciana Bohne
Abdullah and his personal “MiniMe,” Bush2.
[dropcap]I like[/dropcap] everything about Saudi Arabia. I wish England would call itself Windsor England, Saxe-Coburg England, or Mountbatten England to distinguish itself from all the other Englands. I like it, too, that there are 7000 princes because they must have a lot of weddings, and I like weddings like that of Kate and Wills. Too, they must have a lot of royal babies. Royal babies are so special! I am very nostalgic for royalty. Real royalty—like the Stuarts, for example. The 17th-century absolutist monarch of England, King Charles Stuart I, unfortunately, had his head chopped off, but this, happily, would not be a scandal in Saudi Arabia.
I think with longing of all the TV mini-series that could be made of the interesting intrigues and family murders—a series like “The Tudors”—called “The Saudis.” I like it that Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy and that our advanced, liberal, humanitarian democracies respect the people’s tradition of placing executive, legislative, and judicial powers in the hand of one well-wrapped-up man. It’s important for a king to be well wrapped up because no one should ever see a king shiver from cold (this rule was established by King Charles on the scaffold in the 1600s). I regret only one thing about the Saudi Kings—their uncanny physical resemblance to the foreign-born Henry Kissinger, but perhaps in their amazing march toward modernization, they will seek out cosmetic surgery for their remarkable facial repulsiveness in the future and look more like Obama, who, whatever else he may not be, is definitely a fashion plate—and doesn’t he know it, taking selfies even at funerals of great men.
British PM Gordon Brown doing the obligatory sucking up to King Abdullah in London (DowningStreet, October 2007).
I haven’t yet mentioned the Saudi kings’ innovative theory about women, which takes into account a condition that was not present in Fifth-Century BC Greece. Aristotle believed, correctly, that women formed in the mother’s womb when there was a sudden drop of temperature in the fetus’s wombal environment. Thus, the fetus, headed for malehood, would suddenly be thwarted into a fetal femalehood position. In the science of Ancient Greece, women, therefore, were freaks of nature, deformed men—a kind of amiable monster of the human species—tolerated as the reproducer of the species but unable to leave the house or walk to the agora, where men made decisions about when the women could be allowed a shopping walkabout or a day at the amphitheater.
The wise Saudi kings honor this scientific view of women as “inferior men,” absorbed into the Christian tradition by the Aristotelian St Thomas, who determined that women were like flower pots, in which men deposited their seed. In addition, Christian tradition required that women cover their head, as the sight of a being with a womb but no mind insulted god. The wise Saudi kings have modernized these combined traditions and have added a modern touch: women in Arabia are, famously, not allowed to drive. I find this very touching. You wouldn’t allow your pet pug to drive, endangering his life and that of others. In fact, you keep your pet on a leash so that he doesn’t run into the street and cause traffic jams, splattered all over the road. Riyadh has a lot of traffic. Everyone knows that women are mindless and make for bad drivers, especially when driving while burka/nakib. Of course, this reduces the use of gasoline consumption, but the kings don’t worry. They use the surplus to buy lots of weapons from the advanced West.
So, to conclude, Arabia is a very progressive absolute monarchy: it protects women from harming themselves and injuring society in innovative ways that update the Graeco-Christian tradition. I like it, too, that the late-King imprisoned some of his daughters for disobedience. The idea of imprisoned princesses is romantic—an unusual practice in our drab, democratic age. It reminds me of the 15th-century’s murdered little princes in the Tower of London and of Rumplestistkin. Arabia remains both a magical land, straight out of the romances of the Middle Ages, and a dynamic, forward-looking society. The credit is due to the respect the Royal House of Saudi pays to that obscure religion they invented in the desert, circa 1744 (Wednesday, 3 pm): Wahhabi, which has no connection to Japanese cuisine. One last remarkable modernization the House of Saud has imposed is commendable: it does not allow its people to waste time voting in elections, an innovation that the West may well envy.
Luciana Bohne is a retired college teacher who also writes for Counterpunch and Intrepid Report.
(1) http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/pentagon-creates-essay-contest-to-honor-saudi-king/article/2559252
