I guess that icon wasn't a word much in use until we all went on line, but it's one that's been turning up in my mind quite a lot since the UAE started celebrating its 40th birthday. To quote a friend of mine: "Dang! I'm older than a whole country!" Everywhere I go there are signs of national pride; houses decorated in the national colors, flags the size of football fields, cars wrapped in pictures of the three sheiks. The date palms are wrapped in fairy lights and the schools are distributing flags and scarves to their students. Scarves in 78 degrees of heat? I wonder if that was thought through. I've even bought a t shirt in the national colors so as to go with the flow, but given some of the looks I've got from my neighbors that may not have been a good idea.
Why are we all so keen on symbols? Look on any discussion board and you'll see what I mean. Kittygurrl37 has a persian kitten picture for an identifier, whilst HAVOKK666 represents himself as a heavily armed troll with bad dental hygiene. Is this post-modern cynicism on their part, or is that really the image of themselves that they want to project? As an exercise for the student look on Facebook and see what you can see there. Why does your aunt use a picture of her dog? Why do you? Why do entire nations, tribes, families identify themselves in this abstract fashion? What's the real message? I know that it's a moment of pride for many Americans when we see a bald eagle. They're impressive birds, soaring free, symbolic of mountain majesty and a swift nuclear counterstrike, but turning it into a window decal for an F-150 seems to be a degradation for something better suited to an F-16.
So our forefathers [and foremothers, who never get enough credit] decided that the new nation would benefit from being identified with an airborne predator with a taste for carrion. Ben Franklin preferred the turkey as an alternative, given that it was "in Comparison a much more respectable Bird." If he'd had his way then Thanksgiving dinner would certainly be different today. As for Uncle Sam, well, strange dress sense is just the start of it...
As for the British, we have a number of symbols accumulated over the centuries. The Rose, far from being sweet and pretty is left over from theFifteenth Century wars of succession, known as the Wars of the Roses. Not a pretty image. Bulldogs? Butt ugly products of a breeding program. But then bulldogs are symbolic of stubborn determination, a quality alien to most of the nation but attractive to our secret selves. So, we are told something about nations by the icons they adapt, but perhaps not the image that they themselves wished to project. Got that, HAVOKK666?
So, here in the UAE the soul icon is a falcon. Wild, dangerous and justifiable, given that falconry is still a widely practiced sport, if only by the unreasonably rich. As the guide at the Al Ain Zoo pointed out however, falcons and hunting birds in general, have no loyalty whatsoever, being nothing more than feathered mercenaries. I think - borrowing the famous sequence from 'American Beauty' that the true symbol of the UAE should be a plastic supermarket bag, blowing endlessly through the desert. Owing to most Emiratis' assumption that someone else will deal with the trash, specifically an imported Indian, there is a supersurplus of plastic bags. Most of them get eaten by camels, which isn't a surprise as a camel is not the most discriminating of gourmets. Sadly for the camels they die as the bags blocks their intestinal tracts.
So perhaps the search for meaningful symbols should be tempered with some humility. For America the turkey, for Britain a mongrel dog, for the UAE a plastic bag blowing through a desert landscape accessorized with dead camels. For you, a picture of yourself on Facebook.
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