I had been born in Bahrain in the GCC or Middle East region and had stayed in Dubai for a period of time.<p>I was also an expat which meant no citizenship no matter how long I stayed (because thats how the middle east works) and almost all expats end up going home or to another country in North America or Europe.<p>One thing I noticed in Dubai is how it sort of represented an extreme outlook of how oil has affected the Middle East where it was both a boomtown full of money-crazed foreigners paying no taxes and also feudal nobility/sheikhs who rode their horses, practiced swordfighting/hunting and had huge estates while also being very fundamentalistically religious.<p>In my mind, the GCC or Gulf region reminds me heavily of pre-renaissance Italy where people were making huge amounts of money from trade, etc while also experimenting with new ideas. Albeit with the pope and all his religious police on the side doing their persecuting just like modern muslim institutions. Also the Arabs are more obsessed with money than humanity, art and science than the Italians.
There's a "blind man and the elephant" feel to that article. John McPhee, this guy isn't. He should visit a big fracking operation in Oklahoma, and its "man camps", for comparison.