2006-02-26 - 8:04 p.m.
Okay, I posted my survey answers (update just previous to this one), but I still want to write a little something about my rage at Congress over this Dubai Ports debacle, in which Congress is dead wrong and President Bush is right (a shocking statement from me, I am sure, but I'll say it and mean it whenever it is true).
Up until recently, I wasn't a person who hung around ports very much, they seemed like complex, complicated, possibly frightening and dangerous places of machinery and industrialism in which metal overpowered delicate human flesh. I was more of a "humanist," we might say, whereas the port was, even more than the factory, the home of the machine.
However, two summers ago, I went on a cruise that left out of the Port of Houston and immediately I was impressed by, well, let us just say the smell, sight, and sounds of COMMERCE and of MONEY. First off, there were all those oil refineries and storage tanks that one passes on the way south to the port complex. This is better than money in the bank, because oil is an essential commodity upon which the world's entire industrial way of life rests, and Houston was the American center of it. How much more exciting it must be to see that same thing in the Middle East? Far better than a tour of Swiss vaults, if you ask me.
On my busy cruise ship, one that never rests but continues weekly trips from Houston south to Cancun, Cozumel, Honduras, and Belize (so WHEN do they ever get to maintain or repair it?), there was some kind of power failure on the ship and so our departure was delayed. No worries, I can enjoy myself in port as well as out to sea, so I enjoyed lounging on a deck chair with dozens of new friends and the waiters kept filling our drink glasses. I spent the next six hours looking at a view of infinite stacks of shipping containers labeled "Maersk".
"What is this 'Maersk' company?" I asked myself, who seemed to have the shipping container business sewn up...for one like me who has his eye open for good stock investments, this looked like it bore investigating. Of course, I found out that Maersk was a Danish company, the largest shipping company in the world.
After the cruise and back home in Los Angeles, I explored our own port and not only saw Maersk, but saw other immense port facilities owned by Hundai (Korean), Evergreen (Taiwanese, I think), and APL (which I believe is Singaporean). The gantry cranes, I was told, were by Noel, a German company, made in factories in Abu Dhabi. Meanwhile, huge ships heavy-laden with containers kept slipping up and down the main channel of the port--Japanese ships, Chinese ships, Korean ships, Danish ships, and all of them registered, of course, under some flag of convenience (Panama, Liberia, the Bahamas, etc.) that allowed them to operate as freely as possible. All this huge commerce, and not an American presence to be seen.
A few weeks ago, I took the boat tour of L.A. Harbor again and saw the new, larger gantry cranes that the port is getting so that we can off-load the new post-Panamax container ships. These larger gantry cranes are made by the Shanghai Zheng Hua Port Machinery Company (Chinese), that also makes the ships that carry these cranes across the ocean fully-assembled. Other U.S. ports are getting them, too. The tour guide casually mentioned that since the U.S. no longer makes anything anymore, we have to import everything we buy (a slight exaggeration, but the point is well-taken), and thus the Port of L.A. is the busiest port in the world. It is cheaper to ship everything from Asia straight to L.A. in post-Panamax carriers and then transport by truck and rail across country, than it is to use smaller ships through the Panama Canal or take the larger ships around the bottom of South America to eastern ports. From that tour, I could see the picture very clearly: the goods aren't American, the ships aren't American, the port facilities aren't American, and the port machinery isn't American...who's MAKING money off this deal? Other country's companies are, while Americans are just mindless consumers, busy cleaning out their checking accounts, maxing out their credit cards, and producing nothing to put back in. I don't blame Maersk, Hyundai, Evergreen, APL, Noel, ZHPM, or any foreign country for this, but the American people who allow themselves to be sound asleep and mindlessly unaware of what is happening in the world just beyond them (and more and more in midst of them).
While the U.S. has been sleeping, Dubai, meanwhile, has been growing their economy by leaps and bounds, becoming a "Hong Kong" of the Middle East, building the tallest building in the world, becoming the world's fastest-growing tourist destination, and shock, even starting a fledging aerospace industry. These are good things that Americans should admire and emulate, although it IS frightening, for while we fade, another (generally unknown) country is very quickly growing. But to fight it is the wrong tack, if we even CAN fight it.
So now a Dubai company, Dubai Ports World, had become successful enough to buy out an old and venerable British company, P&O (which stands for "Peninsular and Oriental"), a holdover, I believe, from when Britain had the world's greatest shipping empire (but no longer). This multi-billion-dollar purchase involves running port facilities all around the world, a great business to be in, that's for sure, and of this global port business, some of it (but a mere 6%) is in the United States.
Suddenly, Congress finally opens one blood-shot eye and rouses itself from its stupor to scream and shout about "port security" because our precious "infrastructure" is being taken over by not only a foreign company (as if the British P&O weren't a foreign company), but by "Arabs," and that, to them, means "terrorist attack". Because a handful of Saudi Arabians participated in 9/11, all of "Arabia" is our enemy makes as much sense as damning everyone with red hair because of Timothy McVeigh. Which Arabic country is really our enemy? I thought Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, UAE, Oman, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt were all allies. To go a little further afield, I think it's a pretty sure bet that Morocco, Tunisia, Libya (with whom diplomacy worked), Syria, and Jordon all mean us no harm. Or is the problem not "Arabs," but "Moslems," but we can also add the non-Arab, but Moslem countries of Pakistan, Turkey, the "Stans" and Indonesia to our list of allies, or at least countries that mean us no harm. So, among Arabs, that just leaves us with Iraq and Afghanistan as possibly "enemies" (although in both cases, it is our own country that led the attack), so I would say that the truth is that Arabs are our FRIENDS more than they are anything else. Oh yeah, Iran...they've maybe been rattling their swords a little bit, maybe not...but how many Americans, or Congressmen, know that Iranians aren't ARAB, they're Persian (but they ARE Moslem)? (P.S. The definition of an Arab county is that they speak Arabian. In Iran, they speak Persian languages, such as Farsi.)
President Bush has been vilified for not giving Congress any notice of this deal, he is blamed for "sneaking it in." Honestly, I think he couldn't have imagined that it was a problem, any more than if a Swiss company wanted to buy P&O, for Dubai's connection with terrorists was no more intimately involved than any bank's. I am sure the terrorists had some money in Florida banks, too, but would Congress prevent a Miami-based company from running the Port of Miami? Besides, immediately after 9/11, Dubai cooperated with the U.S. and froze the assets of any terrorists happening to have money in any Dubai banks, and assisted the U.S. in every other significant way. And something else that people may not know (I hadn't heard of it before), Dubai donated a hundred million dollars to Katrina relief, more than all the donations of all the other countries combined. And Yet Congress worries that this country will facilitate the shipping in of a dirty bomb? WHY would they want to? Because they "hate our freedom" and "economic prosperity"? Ever seen some photos of downtown Dubai? I think if anyone should worry about this kind of envy, it would the people of Dubai worried about the envy of Americans.
Speaking of "Arabs" and "port" security, the following airlines have long been flying into U.S. airports without any negative incident: Emirates Air, Saudi Arabian Airlines, Kuwait Airways, Royal Jordanian Airlines, Egypt Air, and maybe even more (I just got tired of looking up all these Arab airline flight schedules, but there are many, many more Arab airlines, such as Qatar Airline, Gulf Air, Syrian Air, and so on). Since 9/11 was accomplished by air, why wasn't Congress worried about all these Arab airplanes flying into our airports? It's interesting that the planes used were United and American, as American as airlines could be. If Dubai were complicit in the terrorist attacks, it seems it would have been so much easier to fly an Emirates or Saudi Arabian plane into the World Trade towers.
I am surprised that our elected representatives in the federal government aren't more educated than they are. At the very least, they ought to understand every country in the world and be thoroughly aware of global economics. It also wouldn't hurt if they at least read an English translation of the Koran and maybe took some lessons from religious scholars on just what exactly the differences are among Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, since that one area seems to be one of our greatest trouble spots. And the differences are amazingly slight, and can pretty much be summed up like this:
1. All three religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam rest on the foundation of the Abraham-created religion of One God. All three religions honor the Jewish Old Testament.
2. Christians believe that Jesus was the promised Messiah, and also that he was God incarnated in the flesh. Jews do not believe that Jesus was the Messiah (for whom Jews still await), nor was he God incarnate. So where Christianity spins off from Judaism is with the meaning of Jesus and the New Testament.
3. Mohammed was born about 600 years after Jesus, and he was inspired by revelations from God, but since he could not read or write, those who listened to his poetic pronouncements wrote them down and those were later combined into the Koran. (That Mohammed was illiterate was in his favor, because his revelations had obviously came through him and could not have been recitations of what he had read in other scripture.) There is very little in Mohammed's sayings that differ with either Jesus or the Jewish prophets. Also, two other collections of writings were composed (the Hadith), relaying stories of what Mohammed did and said. Muslims include the entire Bible (both the Old and New Testaments) into their own holy literature, so where they spin off from both the Jews and the Christians is in their Koran and the Hadith. They consider Jesus to have been a great prophet, but they do not consider him God in the flesh, which they see as impossible and meaningless. God is God, and not in the flesh. Mohammed is not "God incarnate" either; Mohammed is the "Last" prophet, but a prophet and not "God". God is One, to the Moslems, and the Christian trinity, which divides up and therefore reduces the oneness and power of God, is idolatry similar to the pagan religions. Also, the Muslims do not believe that Jesus was crucified, because God who is ever good and merciful would not have allowed that for a dedicated, loving, and peaceful prophet. (They believe that someone else was crucified in Jesus's stead, possibly Judas.) None of that "Jesus died for your sins" makes any sense to a Muslim. Each individual is responsible directly to God for all his actions; the prophets were only to show the way and to relate as clearly as possible the word of God. Interestingly, Moslems also believe that JESUS will return (not Mohammed), and his purpose in returning will be to reunite the three Abrahamic religions, all three of which are "people of the Book".
It is very clear to me that any true differences between the religions are political and dogmatic, and fail to relate to the true spirit of any of the three religions.
And I learned something very interesting the other day that I had never heard before. I had long known that a dangerous pattern in each religion is that the mystical gnostic tradition of the original prophet or founder gets solidified into a stagnant dogma. The powerful mysticism of the Jewish religion as brought in fresh by Abraham and then later, by Moses, had stagnated into a solid legal structure administered by a temple hierarchy (The Sanhedrin), and Jesus was the revolutionary force that wanted to revitalize it ("to fulfill it"). But then after his death, what Jesus brought in was solidified under the Popes and the Holy Roman Empire, and it wasn't until St. Francis that Christianity had any force to revitalize it.
Mohammed, of course, was a fresh voice whose revitalization founded a whole new branch of the Abrahamic religion, but as time went on, it, too, became dogmatic and the revitalization force for Islam was the Sufiism that flowed out of the spiritual union of the teacher Rumi, and the traveling mystic, Shams. Rumi's possessive students were envious of Shams and his spiritual relationship with Rumi and sought to separate them. Shams moved on, traveling elsewhere, and influenced others. One of his later students or disciples was none other than St. Francis, so the new thing I learned was that Shams not only contributed to the revitalization of Islam (through Rumi and the Sufi order), but also contributed to the revitalization of Christianity (through St. Francis). This serves to underscore for me the essential mystical similarity of these religions and it is through this core understanding that it would be possible to form a reconciliation of what apparently have become great enemies. And it is interesting that Muslims feel that it is JESUS who will, himself, ensure this reconciliation, and I highly recommend that others meditate upon and contemplate this concept.
Meanwhile, for all reasons of sacredness along with practicality, a mindless prejudice against "Arabs" does us NO good, and could cause us a great deal of harm. And to every American who likes to participate in our industrial way of life (that's anybody who buys anything instead of self-sufficiently making it himself or herself), Congressional interference in the running of the very gateway through which everything that we need arrives (the ports), is to flirt with imposing on the American people shortages of the sort we have never imagined or had to endure ever in our lives. I, for one, am not the least bit interested in having that happen, and when its cause is a groundless prejudice, it would be all the worse for our hearts and our bodies to bear.
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