You Can't Go Home Again

Dispatches from The Arabian Coast

The problem with knowing how to travel cheap is that expensive is a choice. No “eh, this is probably the best I can do” or “don’t all meals cost $15 here?” I could be spending $22 per night right now on a hotel that has everything I need, maybe $10 per day on food, as I’ve done for the past week and a half. Instead, tonight, I am paying over $100 to stay at a tourist resort right on the ocean, because I am tired of not being able to wear a swimsuit and because who the hell knows where I’ll be a week from now. Home, hopefully. Inasmuch as home exists anymore.

I am in Oman, the Middle Eastern country you never hear about because it quietly goes about its business while its neighbors do things like build the tallest tower in the world (UAE) or build a ski resort in the middle of the desert (Saudi Arabia) or get bombed to shit by Saudi Arabia and the United States (Yemen). It’s a beautiful country, with desert and mountains and coastline and a tropical paradise down south I’m not going to be able to visit this time. It is also the only majority Ibadi Muslim country in the world. Odds are you haven’t heard about that sect for the same reason most people haven’t heard of Oman: it quietly does its own thing. One of the principles of Ibadi is tolerance, so while you will not find Omani women going around without the hijab and abaya, no one minds too much if visitors do. They prefer it if you don’t parade around half-naked (unless you’re at a tourist hotel) and drinking is illegal (unless you’re at a tourist hotel), but Saudi Arabia this ain’t. They’ve also remained neutral in the Sunni/Shia conflict. Diplomatic negotiations happen here. The Switzerland of the Middle East, some call it.

What a journalist who covers American politics is doing halfway across the world is as confusing to me as it likely is to you. I’ve been tapped to write an article on Oman’s space program, which is as far from my wheelhouse as Oman is from America, but I’m learning as much about it as I can and gathering notes for what I hope will be a good story. A feel-good story, about a scrappy country making good.

In 1970, when Sultan Qaboos bin Said al Said deposed his father and took the throne, Oman was about as backwards as it is possible to be. There were 10km of paved road. Three primary schools, no universities. Geopolitically isolated. Slavery was still legal, for fuck’s sake.

Sultan Qaboos died in 2020 and left behind wide paved highways connecting every corner of the Sultanate, several universities, excellent geopolitical relations, and no slavery (he got rid of that immediately). He disliked skyscrapers so much he banned them: only Omani architecture is permitted here. Rather than sink money into vanity projects, he invested in infrastructure and courting foreign business. When he took the reins, Oman was not “Oman,” It was “Muscat and Oman,” and the country was fractured in exactly the way you might expect from the name. The Sultan renamed the country and pushed a vision of a shared and ancient past that helped heal the divide, alongside a vision of a future in which Oman becomes a hub for agriculture, trade, and above all, technology. Hence the launchpad — the Middle East’s first. And hence my presence here.

I am an outsider. I can’t know anything for sure. From where I sit, though, it appears the late Sultan made every area of life orders of magnitude better for the Omani people. There is something very strange about being in a country like that while my own country commits suicide.

Oman is an absolute monarchy. Sultan Qaboos established a bicameral legislative branch elected by universal sufferage, but they serve an advisory function only. The United States is moving rapidly in that direction as well, but our would-be Sultan is the opposite in every other respect. Oman built universities; Trump is destroying them. Oman invested in infrastructure; Trump is actively gutting ours. Oman cultivated good relations with the countries of the world; Trump is trashing our reputation. Oman is investing in the future. Trump is sending us back to the past.

I don’t fancy an absolute monarch of any sort, but if we must have one, I would prefer a Sultan who believes he has a responsibility to his subjects and works to bring them together, instead of a fascist claiming carte blanche to subugate half the population for the crime of not loving him enough.

Gulf Standard Time is eight hours ahead of Eastern Time, which means the news starts rolling in when I start getting ready for bed. Sleep has been…elusive.

As I write this, we are reeling from the news that the Trump regime has arrested Wisconsin judge Hannah Dugan for refusing to comply with an administrative warrant (because it’s not goddamn valid) and letting an undocumented person exit through the jury door and not the main entrance (which she’s allowed to do). “The [judges] are deranged,” Attourney General Bondi told Fox news yesterday. “We are sending a very strong message today ... if you are harboring a fugitive… we will come after you and we will prosecute you. We will find you.”

We were warned by no less than the Director of Counterterrorism himself, a few short days ago. From Ken Klippenstein:

“It's really quite that simple,” [Sebastian] Gorka said in a little-noticed interview with Newsmax. “We have people who love America, like the president, like his cabinet, like the directors of his agencies, who want to protect Americans. And then there is the other side, that is on the side of the cartel members, on the side of the illegal aliens, on the side of the terrorists…”

“And you have to ask yourself, are they technically aiding and abetting them?” he continued. “Because aiding and abetting criminals and terrorists is a crime in federal statute.”

I’m not the first, or second, or fifteenth person to state that this feels like a big red line separating “Trump is eroding democracy” from “We are living in a dictatorship.” It’s not a done deal. There are protests, it is good that there are protests, please go to a protest if there is a protest near you. Also, this is where things were headed this entire time. Trump is America — it’s why he keeps saying “we” in his speeches — so it stands to reason that anyone who opposes him is committing some form of treason.

For the last decade, we have teetered on the edge of fascism: not falling, but not stepping back either. On November 6th, we fell. If Trump manages to imprison a judge for refusing to obey ICE, to make the charges stick — well, that’s us hitting the ground.

That’s one bad thing that happened in the last few days. Here are some others:

• Three US citizens were deported yesterday, all under the age of 7, with “no meaningful process.” One of them is actively undergoing cancer treatment. One of them is two years old.

• ICE has detained multiple older US citizens, though none have yet been forced to leave. One man, who is disabled and cannot read or write, was forced to sign a paper declaring himself a citizen of Mexico. They kept him in custody for ten days before finally releasing him.

• The Department of Justice (air quotes) has quietly given ICE permission to enter “alien enemy” homes without a warrant.

• Trump keeps talking about sending US citizens to CECOT “if it’s permissable by law” (which is exactly how he talked about sending immigrants to CECOT before doing it in the dead of night) .

• The Krome migrant detention center in Miami is so overcrowded that detainees are sleeping beneath toilets. Two men have died there in the past three months. Multiple women report being chained inside a bus for hours without water or access to a bathroom. They were told to defecate where they sat.

There are a bunch of other awful things that have happened, but this particular set of happenings tell an extremely specific story, and that story is: we are inches from a future in which they can and will disappear whoever they want. Where they can, and will, throw you into a gulag without due process. None of us are safe anymore.

I am in Oman. I’m safer than all of you. With my return date approaching, though, I can’t stop thinking about customs. It’ll probably be fine. I’m probably not on anyone’s radar. I’ll probably have no problems…but I am an outspoken critic of Trump and also genocide, and I have the last name that I do, and I am coming from a part of the world the regime does not care for, and I can’t be sure of anything anymore.

This country is very beautiful. The people are friendly, the hiking is spectacular, the food is amazing. I can say I’ve eaten camel now — it tastes exactly the way you’d expect, except delicious — and seen them wild, eating the leaves off scrubby desert trees along the side of the road. I’ve seen the sun set over Oman’s Grand Canyon and seen the aflaj, an incredibly sophisticated irrigation system thousands of years old that still provides water for the dates and pomegranates and figs and mangoes that grow here. My Arabic is coming back — not enough to have a conversation, but enough to know that it’s still in there, somewhere. This is maybe the coolest trip I’ve ever taken…and I am unbearably homesick. I will never stop being homesick. There is no home to return to.

So here I am, in this 100 dollar hotel, with a pool and a beach. In a second, I’m going to take my computer over to the pool bar, where I will use my credit card to purchase pricey freshly-blended fruit juices and learn more about space programs in the Middle East. I will lounge in my one-piece swimsuit, obscene but permitted at tourist hotels, I will eat a ridiculously expensive dinner, I will swim in the Arabian sea. I will take a deliciously hot shower and sleep on this absurdly comfortable bed. In two days, I’ll go back to the budget life, and I’ll do what I came here to do.

And then, against my better judgement, I’ll return to the place I come from.