barbarians at the gates

'They are turning the holy sanctuary into a machine, a city which has no identity, no heritage, no culture and no natural environment.'

---from The Guardian.

There's something barbaric about the Saudis. Of course, if it was just about architecture or aesthetics it wouldn't be so bad, but it's really symptomatic of a really bizarre mindset that finds expression in many walks of life (attitudes to women, other faiths, etc.). I really couldn't give a fig what the towel-heads do, but the fact that they're exporting their brand of ignorance everywhere else makes me slightly nervy.

A people or government that has such disdain for its own past is really quite delusional. I once had lunch with a local maulvi here and despite spending the first thirty years of his life in the U.S. he didn't want to talk about America at all. That was odd, very odd, for it is hard to imagine that anyone who hasn't had extremely unpleasant childhood experiences would want to willingly negate what is so obviously a part of the fabric of their life.

This is not about some sort of blind sense of nostalgia or the arrest of all development. After all, one could quite easily advocate a middle path, one of an organic development that is line with a country's history, traditions, culture and environment. To say that some buildings have value because they are of historical/cultural or aesthetic merit is not the same thing as saying there should be no change whatsoever. There's a kind of fanaticism that wants to hold on to the past too tightly-just as there's a kind of fanaticism that wants to reject it in toto.

I wonder if there's a whiff of Stalinism in all this? One of the strangest things you noticed at Essex was just how much the East Europeans seemed to hate-and hate with a venom-their own country. It was as if Communism had, in addition to creating some horrendously ugly buildings, blanked out people's memories (and maybe the two are connected).

At another, less insidious, level there is the development of the bland, monotonous shopping malls in many (American) cities, so that what is distinctive of a particular place is lost to the vision of the planners; it's all about getting from A to B with least resistance.