I meant to note that I finished John Bradley's, Saudi Arabia Exposed: Inside a Kingdom in Crisis last week. Bradley is the erstwhile editor of Arab News, Saudi Arabia's major English language paper.

The book is a short, good read, that attempts and largely succeeds in giving the reader a more magnified look inside a usually monochromaticly portrayed country. To put it in pictures, if this map is the view of Saudi Arabia most people have, then this map represents the version of the Kingdom that Bradley presents - variegated, with internal borders, different, regionally distinct, and far more tenuously held together and less homogeneous than most outsiders choose to believe.

The book weighs in at a short 215 pages, but there's very little filler here. The chapter describing the practice -- surprisingly overt and widespread practice -- of homosexuality within the Kingdom is worth the cover price.

Any highly sex-segregated society (Bradley mentions prison and shipboard life as examples) is likely to develop such phenomenon, with the attendant and necessary rationalizations to overcome the cognitive dissonance involved -- it's not homosexuality, it's about power, and men being men, etc... Besides, "Ain't nobody's business but our own..." In some ways, gays are more liberated than straights, as two men holding hands and engaging in light kissing in public is perfectly acceptable, while a man and a woman may never engage in such behaviors.

In fact, the image of the KSA that emerges is of a nation under the tremendous pressure of cognitive dissonance, and the resulting mental strains and questionable behaviors that emerge while trying to keep the whole together and sane. If countries were people, we'd be giving this one a wide berth, maybe even isolating it so it doesn't become a danger to itself or others while slipping its daily Prozac through the slot in the door, but countries are not people, and we're going to have to find a way to deal with this one's pathologies and somehow mainstream it.