The Answer is 'Yes'
3 Comments Published by Tom Gara on Saturday, October 3 at Saturday, October 03, 2009.
The National's Peter Hellyer on the ridiculous $950,000 "Sheikh Zayed Mosque rifle, designed as a tribute to the building and its creator, inlaid with 36 coloured diamonds and engraved with an image of the late founder of the nation:"
From $80,000 Vertu mobile phones to "exclusive" $40,000 Montblanc pens with the UAE flag tacked on in coloured Swarovski crystals to an even more exclusive diamond studded television, one thing is clear: Getting your second-rate, overpriced product, covering it with lurid diamonds and crystals, pricing it in six figures and shipping it as an "exclusive" product to the UAE is a fundamentally sound business model.
"The concept of this rifle is an insult to the mosque, to the man who spurred its construction and to Islam itself. It is also an insult to those attending the show. Do the gun’s manufacturers think that the deep affection in which Sheikh Zayed is held by the people of the UAE, both Emiratis and expatriates, is such that the mere tacking of his name on to a rifle adorned with diamonds is sufficient to persuade someone to buy it?"Yes, yes they do. And they are almost certainly correct in their assumption, because the people of the UAE, both Emirati and expatriate, are suckers for the global "phenomenally expensive tacky shit" industry. In fact, they are fast emerging as a kind of global class of jet-setting slack-jawed yokel, getting gleefully conned into swapping their precious resources for handfuls of coloured beads.
From $80,000 Vertu mobile phones to "exclusive" $40,000 Montblanc pens with the UAE flag tacked on in coloured Swarovski crystals to an even more exclusive diamond studded television, one thing is clear: Getting your second-rate, overpriced product, covering it with lurid diamonds and crystals, pricing it in six figures and shipping it as an "exclusive" product to the UAE is a fundamentally sound business model.
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Reminds me how Baruch Goldstein's wife won the right to keep the machinegun used to kill Rabin (in a court case); it apparently is presented proudly inside a cupboard in the Goldstein house.
-An @er from Korea-
Gara quotable: "global class of jet-setting slack-jawed yokel"
beautiful :-)