338 DESTINY DISRUPTED
entertainment tastes might run to alcohol, nightclubs, opera. Their chil-
dren might listen to rock and roll, date members of the opposite sex, and
choose their own spouses.
Anyone who didn't take this route probably ended up wearing the tra-
ditional garments of the society: pehran-u-tumban, shalwar kameez, sari,je-
labiyyah, keffiye~whatever was traditional in a given country. Their daily
schedule was shaped by religious rituals, and when they spoke of their fam-
ily they would tend to mean a large network of relatives to whom they
were bound by intricate obligations. Their spouses would probably be cho-
sen for them by others, possibly a committee of relatives from which they
themselves might be excluded.
Diplomats, businessmen, and other functionaries of the Western world
would feel comfortable dealing with the folks who wore suits to work; they
were culturally familiar. They might rarely interact with denizens of the
other culture.
Those who wore suits to work had a good chance of living in houses
with modern kitchens and bathrooms equipped with electricity and
plumbing. Those who didn't, ended up in houses with kitchen and bath-
rooms like those of their ancestors with informal plumbing and possibly
no connection to a public sewage system. As an energy source, instead of
electricity, they might use charcoal, wood, or some other fuel burned di-
rectly for heat and light.
The people within the nation's governing club made money on a scale
corresponding to that of the world economy. People in the left-behind, do-
mestic economy generally had much smaller incomes, adequate perhaps to
their needs in a village or an urban slum, but not enough to let them move
out of poverty.
This whole dynamic was not limited to the oil-rich nations. A similar
process was taking place in countries without oil, if they had strategic value
as Cold War chips, and who didn't? Egypt, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and
many other countries that fit this definition got torrents of money from
the superpowers as "development aid" designed to tilt them toward
whichever side was doing the giving. Roads and hospitals, schools and air-
ports, armaments and police equipment, whatever the ruling elite of a
country needed, they could get the money for it in the forms of grants or
loans from outside. It wasn't oil money, but compared to the revenues gen-