Joe Allen
The view from Abu Dhabi From my front door in America to a job site in the UAE – with TV screens all along the way – the outside world looks pretty bleak from the window of a Covidian cattle car
T
hey say travel opens your eyes to the world, but the New Normal doesn’t offer many opportunities to nose around. Your path is pretty well marked out for you, from one door to the next. Any deviation from that path is considered a violation of public health. One false move, and you could be held responsible for countless people dying of Covid. During a global panic, nose-pickers are the new mass murderers. Just to get out the door in the first place, I had to send in a mailin nasal swab test. I probably took six Covid tests before it was over -– one swab every five days for three weeks. Each time, a weary nurse from Asia, India, or Africa – peering out over two masks and through a clear plastic face shield, searching my face for any sign of humanity – would ram a massive Q-tip down my throat until I gagged, or up my nose until they’d scraped a layer of cells off my prefrontal cortex. Most were gentle at first, but each time I went in, they’d drill down a little deeper. You got the feeling they’d conspired to test our
8 ColdType | February 2021 | www.coldtype.net
limits, if only out of boredom. The day after I got home, Chinese authorities announced that anal swabs are far more effective than oral or nasal testing. I’ve never been more relieved to be back in the good ol’ USA, land of the free and home of the brave.
America! Fuck yeah I arrived in Abu Dhabi right after the US military moved a nuclear submarine through the Strait of Hormuz, just off-shore of the UAE. It was another attempt to intimidate the Iranians on the opposite shore. Just over a month before, one of Iran’s top nuclear scientists had been gunned down in the streets of Tehran. According to Iranian officials, the assassination was pulled off by an autonomous pickup truck armed with an AI-guided gun turret. Just after America’s ominous nuke-sub display, a Tehran court sentenced an Iranian-American businessman to 10 years in prison. He was accused of spying for ’Merica. A few days later, the US arrested an Iranian professor teaching at
Boston University for “acting as an unregistered agent of the Iranian government.” From our crew’s perspective, just across the strait from Iran, the news media seemed full of bad omens. Our show was one of many Western productions blowing through town. Any one of us could be a target for the next attentionhungry terrorist. The longer our company was imprisoned in that hypersanitised Covidian cattle car – quarantined in a beachside resort with nothing but CNN International, Russia Today, the BBC world service, and rumour-infested Interwebs to keep us apprised of the plot unfolding outside – the more my American co-workers indulged dark, and ultimately delusional fantasies that we would become collateral damage in some toxic foreign entanglement. After decades of hard flexes, colour revolutions, full-on invasions, and relentless drone strikes from the West, these Middle Eastern cats show no fear of Armegeddon. It wouldn’t matter to them if the End Times turned out to be spiritual or utterly mundane – they
