The Boat vs. The Middle East

The boat that Tony Horwitz took from the UAE to Iran is the exact opposite of the Middle East. On board, people of different races and religions mix freely and discuss their ideologies in order to better understand those of others. Jesudaysn is determined to understand and discover every idea around him not to look down on those ideas but to add them to his knowledge of the world. He has found his own religion not through dogmatic tradition but through his heart, and has recently converted to Christianity. The captain Kochrekar is in charge but is far from dictatorial; the cook Lawrence of Goa is required to decide what to cook and how for himself (“A cook must be his own master.”) and even Tony gets a chance to steer the boat, which is basically a democracy where everyone works to their strengths. Conversation about love and sex is open because women are not considered the scourge of the earth, too dangerous to be freed. The crew says openly that they are in the Middle East only for its money (‘I am not interested in these Arabs…Only in their money.”), rather than hiding greed behind falsely polite language and bureaucracy, as do many people Tony meets during his trip as they speak about bribes. The boat appears to be a sort of paradise, yet ironically these people who deserve so much have no money to stay on shore and eat their food out of old containers. Their oppressors the Arabs fight wars over the oil which has made them so rich. Why is it that those who deserve the best get the worst and vice versa? The answer is that the Arabs got lucky and unlucky: they were lucky enough to stand on oil, and unlucky enough to be in hardly the political position of choice at the time it was discovered. They were still angry at the Western colonizers and Attaturk for destroying their culture and only partially understood that this was gone forever and some of it must be abandoned in order to survive healthfully. When the West came looking for oil, they gave it to them, but took only money, not ideas, in return. They ended up with a society of supposedly traditional Arab values with European cars. A society unsure of its place in the modern world, but leaning towards fundamentalism, is a dangerous place for the people like the crew of Tony’s boat-a.s