The American Century: An Apocalyptic Denouement

Prologue – America, Violence and the Other
“The Apocalypse is coming”, shouts the unshaven hippie, the soul bastion of a free empire. The wailing grounds, the blooded soil; everywhere in America is a killing field: in Echo Park, in Santa Monica, the Castro, out in the burrows, the ‘burbs, the city ghetto, the broken boulevards, the back alleys, the airports. Everywhere has the geometry for violence, the blueprint for annihilation. Apocalypse is inscribed in the logic of memory.

I believe it. Our day in the sun, the American century is over. The heat of a thousand suns illuminated and forgotten in a flash: the bomb, fascism, neo-fascism, communism, neo-communism, Reaganism, Pearl Harbour, D-Day, the Marshall Plan, the Crash, The Depression, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Nixon, JFK, Bush Senior, Bush Junior, Agent Orange, the Civil War, the Cold War, the Berlin Wall, Dresden, the World Wars, Vietnam, Korea, Cambodia, Cuba, Grenada, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Somalia, Nigeria, the smart bomb, the (dumb) BOMB, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the BOMB, HIROSHIMA, NAGASAKI!

“I learnt a new word today: ‘atom’ bomb.”
(J.G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun)

The bomb – the unforgivable act: the beginning and the end of the American century. The memory of ascendance, the moment of crowning, the sovereignty of a superpower, is written in the same logic as that of its future downfall. The moment of triumph is, and already is, a question of denouement.

Where was morality in 1945 when the heat of a thousand suns set upon the Earth, melting the asphalt, the trees, the sky? Roads, buildings, cities annihilated; fisheries, crops, the earth polluted; three generations of food, of wildlife, of human foetuses born malformed and raised malnourished – the retribution of an uncivilized humanity in the name of justice. Inequality done in the name of justice! Violence done in the name of justice!

Isn’t all war ‘in the name of justice?’ The just, the unjust; the civilized, the uncivilized; the West, the East; the North, the South; the rich, the poor; the First, the Third; the developed, the undeveloped; the white, the black, brown, red and yellow; the male, the female; the Christian, the Moslem; the American, the un-American; ego and the Other.

The jurisprudence of the just and victorious always becomes the universal law by which we discern between the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. All patriarchal institutions demand the otherness of the Other, not least the national institution. The nation excludes in order to include. The nation enslaves in order to empower. Power relies on the existence and subordination of the Other: the woman, the black, the poor, the immigrant, the foreigner, the alien, the inhuman, the Other.

America’s Other has always been the world beyond its boarders. We see this in its foreign policy and its legacy of global subordination, however the Other lies deep within the Self also. Descartes taught us that the ego can never fully comprehend the complexities of another’s and mind. Freud taught us that the ego can never even fully comprehend its own mind. America’s ego is splintered, cracking under the weight of itself. The Other reveals itself within the ego, momentarily like an unconscious dream leaving its aftertaste in conscious memory. The black, the woman, the poor, thrust forward across the dividing line illuminating themselves and the truth of an époque. However like a dream, all is forgotten, refused, mistaken, denied. America is not very good at dream interpretation.

…And everywhere the bums will shout, the children rebel; villages, towns, churches, communities, cities and nations; a generation of change in a single moment, a messianic coming. Let the bells ring, in the name of justice, for the democracy to come! For what tomorrow comes!?

“Entire cities rise up in anger…against the inequality set forth as a principle by certain people against other people, against the inequality set forth as a principle by certain races against other races, against the inequality set forth as a principle by certain classes against other classes.”
Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima, Mon Amour

Introduction: The excess of apocalypse
The denouement, the last twist, the final season of the American Dynasty. How did we become so beleaguered, marinating in our own intoxications of excess and success? How did we simulate, imperialise, colonize so much of the Other? How did we do such an excess of violence to the woman, the black, the Earth, the Other? The logical end of excess is apocalypse, where all coefficients simultaneously extend towards infinity and nullification.

The promise of apocalypse is relegated to few discourses: religion, politics, economics and the environmental sciences. It arrises from the problem of sustainability: in the sustainability of ecology and psychology. However sustainability is always a weary afterthought – a repentant hangover from excess. (And we drink when we’re winning.) Without sustainability the human psyche crumbles – emotion is substituted for an excess of violence, just as in ecology the environment is substituted for an excess of consumption.

Dual symptoms: excess and repression = freedom and prohibition = transgression and taboo
The Pleasure Principle leads us to strive after that which pleasures us. The logic of pleasure binds us to it and that which provides it. We are addicted to that which pleasures us and that addiction brings upon an ailment of excess. Like the addiction of the drug, we want more of that which makes us forget our own mortality. However the morning-after always brings back that discomforting fact. There is only one solution, more and more, until excess drives away the fear of death. “Faster, faster, until the thrill of speed overcomes the fear of death.”

Utter and total repression, however, is not the answer, for that brings upon a parallel set of problems, which Christianity has all too well exemplified. Abstinence is a mechanism for violence in itself, as excess too derives from the stalemate of repression. In repression, violence needs a cathartic push, just as in sexuality there needs a cathartic orgasm. The repression of sexuality, the repression of free will can sublimate into an absolute act of violence, just as the repression of the atom in nuclear fission can bring about a force so extraordinary as to level entire cities.

America’s diagnosis is just this: it is simultaneously excessive and repressive. It tells you, do what you want, but don’t do this”; “say what you will, but don’t say this”; “be who you are, but don’t be like this”. Freedom is lined with prohibitions.

America’s excess is not rooted in perversity, but in neuroses. Fear of God and fear of the Other lead to the neurotic. When excess is shrouded by the possibility of death ¬– a cultural exchange that it refuses – it can do no more than peal further into it, like pealing away the layers of the self in order to open it up to pain. “Out, out damned spot!” What begets violence but violence? “More and more weapons lead to more and more weapons until the world is a grenade with a fuse in it.”

Neuroses and paranoia are further fuelled by repressive taboos, put in place in order to keep social anarchy at bay. Repression marks the traditional Christian form in all its maxims and guidelines, whereas excess marks the new religious consumerism, founded under the guise of traditional religion. Consumerism is religion branched out, diversified and horizontally integrated in post-Fordist economics.

The new religion
Human being as a complex existante, imposed with self-consciousness and self-reflection has always been about religion, spiritual connectivity, whether it be found in the reflection of the self, the fulfilment of consumption, the transgression of repression or the totem and taboo. In the 21st century it spreads like a plague, a mystical pestilence upon the mass consciousness. The religion of consumption, the religion of violence, the religion of sexuality, the religion of God: they all have two modes, excess and repression.

The body, the first and a priori symbol of exchange, the most and the least valuable of all commodities was always given in excess, in sacrificial exchange, to the Gods, to the Kings, to the wars. The lover gives her/his body in excess to that which may confer upon it sensuality, a duality with God and transcendence from material existence. However the church represses the culture of the flesh, thus violence is sublimated unto the body and the mind. Violence is given in excess, to the bodies of man and woman; first and foremost to woman from man, because she was the pillow man bit and scratched at, at night lost in his own frustrations, his own impotency in reaching divinity. Violence, excess and religion have always been intertwined.

Today, the indisputable forces of religion, politics and Keynesian economics lay siege to the world of order and reason, claiming their own World Order powered by man’s lust for spiritual, commercial and ideological fulfilment. The shopping mall is more a religious domain than the altar ever was. “The medium is the message” and the new medium has brought about a religion only daringly dreamed of in the exegeses of Marx and Saint Paul. Marx was right: religion is the sedative. It is the opiate. However Nietzsche is wrong. God is not dead. God is a hydra, and cutting off his head merely creates a bastard child.

Just as man has complicated his perversity with the ruse of civilization, religion has complicated itself, has hidden its guise from us amongst our most profane arts and objects. It seeks us out in our most unholy of moments and depletes our inner most beings, calling us to worship in the message, whatever it may be. “The medium is the message” and the message is always religious, thus the medium, religion. TV is the religion. Sports is the religion. Consumption is the religion. The United States of America represents the perfect union between God and a late night shopping channel. Salvation can be grasped for $10.95 plus shipping. The ancient totems; the crucifix, the crescent, even the swastika have been realigned into a new consumer ideology, amalgamating with new symbols of commercial culture.

The rest of the world is to blame also. They have followed suit in the hope for their own salvation from the oppressive violence done to them. The nations of the world have learnt the sermons of excess all too well. The killing fields litter the global highways, inspired by the flashes of red, white and blue. Kim Jung-Il and Saddam loved American cinema but loathed American hypocrisy, so they fashioned an efficient tyranny – religion without totemism. American tyranny is founded in aesthetics, an aesthetics of violence. They have taught the world, the need for the totem: the flag, the Unknown Soldier, the anthem and the just cause, all in order to do violence. The new religion has fashioned the ancient totemism with the nouveau materialism.

The new apocalypse
With every new religion comes the promise of a grandiloquent apocalypse. The disillusioned Marxists, liberalists, atheists, vegetarians and environmentalists look on, pensively eyeing the apocalypse on the horizon; but if only anyone would believe them. But of course they do. They accept this. What is apocalypse but the zenith of a culture of excess? Apocalypse is the most extreme form of excess; exchange taken to its most infinite value, and within it a culture may both define and annihilate itself.

However the concept of apocalypse is old. It arrises every generation, vehemently spouted out by, or to, the irrational and credulous agents of power. It has been with mankind since the beginning, for any comprehension of a beginning comes with that of an end. Birth and death are irrevocably intertwined. Every beginning has an end, every birth a death, and every genesis an apocalypse. Let us trace the etymology of the word ‘apocalypse’:

From the greek word apokalupsis, derived from apokaluptein, which divinely translates as (apo = un; kaluptein = to close/cover) ‘to uncover’, ‘to discover’, ‘to unclose’ and finally ‘to disclose’. That is, ‘finally to disclose’ – to reveal truth.

‘Apocalypse’ is the final disclosure, the end of argument, the end of discourse and simultaneously the revelation and annihilation of truth.

Discourse begins and ends with death. Discourse (from the Latin discursis: ‘running to and fro’) is but the to and fro tennis match of knowledge, life, time and truth. Everything is logos, the search for truth: the word, the idea, the reason. The end of discourse is the end of the end. So at the moment of apocalypse all will be revealed, and alas forgotten, sent to the oblivion of a thousand suns. Truth is disclosed at the moment of its annihilation.

A violent uprising – the logic of dynastic decline
We are finally learning. The American Dynasty is unveiled as the secret plans and malevolent truths are squeezed from the tortured corpse. The corpus of history: a corpus of knowledge, a corpus of violence: violence done to and by itself.

A body is bruised from the outside and the superpower has received its fair share of bruising. However America’s wounds reveal a domestic savagery, a domestic battery, from the inside out. The type of battery that is so predominant in the familial structure, the primordial and a priori¬ (so they tell us so). The structures of power are failing and falling, disintegrating upon the weight of their towering flags. The zeitgeist is crumbling. The body of a nation unravels itself from the inside out like that of a Francis Bacon portrait, yearning to escape its own axes, its inherent aporia; yearning to escape its own birth and death, but whilst ever accelerating towards both.

In Birth of a Nation, D.W. Griffith taught us that every nation is born out of an act of extraordinary violence, and that every nation is defined by such an act. It stays in the gene pool, the unconscious memory from generation to generation, a memory of the past, present and the future. The bomb: the repressed memory, like the ghost of Christmas future, it haunts the American psyche, reminding it that its day will come. “[Nostalgia] remembers the future and dreams the past”, said Gore Vidal. The dreams of the past have been spun and woven into a thick blanket covering the American consciousness from its true legacy. However the blanket is patchy and the threads are coming apart.

The nation, as the human, is born out of a violent surge, a moment of discontinuity. Only such a violent act can call for the undoing of this discontinuity. The undoing is occurring, the unravelling, the unveiling, the unclosure, the disclosure, the final disclosure, the apocalyptic truth. Steadily America is rounding out its legacy of violence, getting closer and closer to the final act, the final bomb – the penultimate act of excess. The synthesis of excessive violence and consumption will bring upon us an extraordinary act, an extraordinary coming, an extraordinary Other.

For what tomorrow?
Alas, let this not be some scathing demonology on America and the world as is. We’re here to hope, to inspire and to transcend discourse in all its forms and amalgamations. Apocalypse is upon us, yet we’ve so many unresolved issues. We have not resolved the inequality between man and woman. We have not resolved the inequality between white and black, white and brown, white and yellow. We have not resolved the conflict between science and religion. We have not resolved the conflict between religion and religion.

But something is coming, brewing, and rising up from the tides of violence and consumption, from the infinite exchange of flesh and commerce. The Other is coming. The Other is rising. But the Other need not be a man. It need not be an act of violence, a person, or a prophet. The Other is an event, a time, a place, a moment, a memory of the future. Like a messiah, the Other comes, from beyond the horizon, from beyond our own calculability. It takes an unknown form. It could be human, inhuman, technological, scientific, political, environmental, economic, or religious. It could herald the new beginning or mark the end in the heat of a thousand suns.


List of thinkers
J.G. Ballard
Georges Bataille
William S. Burroughs
Jacques Derrida
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Margueritte Duras
Sigmund Freud
Michel Foucault
Karl Marx
Friedrich Nietzsche
Emmanuel Levinas

San Francisco - "Fuck Hate & Go West!"

The oscillating hills of San Francisco mimic the Acid Wave that hit here in the late ’60s. Scattered bodies, like the ocean’s debris, litter the streets, displaced along the hills and highways where the wave hit and rolled back in. Far from the ocean’s mouth opening up across the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco has been afflicted my a very different disaster; namely a human one – addiction and poverty.

The common analysis of a lot of drug counsellors is that drugs do not discriminate. However in America, such a statement is loaded and visually untrue. Take any American city, and one usually only needs to cross the river, transcend the (in)visible line into no-man’s-land and discover hoards of chalked blacks, Latinos; the unwanted yet needed others of the American dynasty. (Why are they needed? Someone has to take the butt for capitalism to work.)

The point is that, in San Francisco, the economics of poverty and the psychology of addiction really don’t discriminate. The bums are of all colours; a union of cultures (which seems appropriate since the United Nations Charter was signed in San Francisco): the blacks are represented, as too are the whites, the Chinese, the Chicanos, the Latinos… It’s a real pluralist congregation on every street corner. Who would have thought man would find his common bond in the needle and the acid tab? Well, certainly all those hippies did as San Francisco is their (il)legitimate child, their present to the liberal world, their Trojan Horse to the conservatives and patriarchs of the new millennium.

The Beats were here too and they were world travellers, sexual deviants and bug-powder vein pushers. The Beat Museum sits happily on a busy cross street in North Beach, appropriately sandwiched between a sex-shop and a tavern. But the Beats are now dead, gone, forgotten and overused. Literary critics couldn’t rescue much meaning out of their scatology in the end. Very few survived the prowl of academia. The museum is but a flagrant memory, a shrine to a generation of misogynists, drug abusers and perverts, who probably didn’t care nor believe that what they were doing was either right nor decent (except for Ginsberg. He was high and mighty until Burroughs shot him too (he shot and killed his wife)).

San Francisco should annex itself from the United States – the world’s first gay-friendly nation with the pride flag hanging high, mighty and multicoloured. Bill Burroughs’ infamous saying “Fuck Hate” could be the national motto and the Pet Shop Boys’ “Go West”, the anthem. Who would wage war on the fags and bums, except for maybe America? Homosexuality as a terror upon the American family! San Francisco as a part of the Axis of Evil, led by Speaker of the House, San Franciscan resident, Nancy Peloski. We could restart civilization from Northern California. We have everything we would need in abundance: seafood, drugs, the Napa Valley, City Lights bookstore and Francis Ford Coppola. The bums can even stay too (they’re so friendly anyway). We could even bring Castro back (there’s actually a suburb named after him).

I want to move to San Francisco. I want to ski down its blocks and boulevards. However it doesn’t snow here, which is probably a good thing, as everywhere pedestrians would be tripping and cracking their heels. It is one of the few American cities where you can actually walk in, and the most worthwhile to do so too, as every now and then the climb to the peak of a block pays off as you peer down the backside of a mountainous city (They should line the pavements with T-Bars).

Ah, San Francisco. We’ll always have San Francisco to keep the conservatives at bay, or rather away from it. And if they breach the hills and valleys, we can always head west across the Pacific (China is calling – the future is coming). Right Wing political ferret Bill O’Reilly called San Francisco “a liberalists’ paradise”, like that was supposed to insult. Either way, it is queer-friendly, female-friendly, black-friendly, Latino-friendly, Chinese-friendly; they even let some conservative pigs hang around Nob Hill. They have special visas.

Here’s to the revolution. Fuck hate and go west!

Atlanta - Looking for Blowjobs in Boarders

Atlanta is where the ghost of conservatism confronts the new America. What is that exactly? The emergence of the hip-hop generation? The aspiring black man and woman? The re-resurrection of church and state? The nouveau riche? The old rich? Whatever it is, one hallmark stays the same – a culture of excess.

Huge lots of land extend their reach further and further, converting pastures, forests and streams into the satellite malls and highway restaurants of another urbanized and gentrified generation. Everything converges into concrete: rows and rows of shopping malls, fast-food chains and pump stations. An unconscious council mediates the omnipotence of simulacra. East Berlin had more individualism in Trotsky’s day. Perhaps that is the great irony of capitalism: everything is more of the same.

The lights of downtown hum in the night. Omnipotent black motor-carriages drift listlessly by on Atlanta’s nine lane highways. Downtown actually makes Atlanta a pretty city. Someone got the distribution of highway and high-rise right, or wrong for that matter. There are virtually no busses in Atlanta. The public transport system is reduced to a couple of scattered lines in order to limit the mobility of lower-income earners. The MARTA (Metropolitan Atlanta Rail and Transit Authority) has been disturbingly re-coined to infer the “Moving of Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta”, which is more or less its resulting function.

Like in almost all American cities, segregation farms a disturbing dual personality across the lines of East and West, black and white, rich and poor, possibility and death. East Atlanta is a free-market crack den. However, there is potential here, shunted along by the procession of capitalism. Entrepreneurs are welcome to the grim streets. Gentrification is converting, composing and covering-up. Cross-sections of downtown seem to have been implanted with Walt Disney’s DNA, sprouting legions of designer streets and boulevards. Other parts mimic the old South, the French and the Spanish architecture prettied up for the likes of me.

However culture is still rooted in simulacra. If you want a book in Atlanta, you go to Boarders. If you want a coffee, you go to Starbucks. If you want a blowjob, you go to church. I went to Boarders.

Savannah - Salt, Sex & Death

I want to die in Savannah. I want to be a 19th century ghost.

An open-ended graveyard sits wishfully by the police station. Grave robbers don’t go there anymore. There is nothing left from the mausoleums and carcass-fed flowerbeds to extract except for the tombstones themselves. But cemeteries too wish for patrons and there is no shortage of bodies in Savannah. Fresh flowers on youthful graves lay boastfully next to hardened moss covered crypts. Wind and rain has withered much of these decrepit stones. Some have been washed to the bone, leaving only a date or a partial name, a forgotten epitaph or the story of a child lost to cholera. Even in death, we grow old.

A sweet sea breeze drifts down the boulevards and avenues, lamenting the past and serenading the present. Savannah itself is a crypt of memory – Civil War treaties, Southern generals, murdered mistresses, cotton colonies, abandoned slaves, abandoned wives, the whorehouses… the dead have memories and they dance and drink on their graves at midnight to remember.

Savannah was once the dollhouse for the old and the rich – the Belle Époque. Now their kids have grown up and turned it into their playground. The introduction of the Savannah College of Art and Design has brought a youthful zealousness to this culture of death. Youth is the great antidote for death, as death is but the great intoxication of youth.

It is a sensual town. The duality of sex and death flavours the air – a mixture of salt water and aged moss. All that curved and ancient stone: mighty monuments to the memory of the South. One always hears the “click-clock” of a nearby horseshoe echoing from the oyster shell pavements. One imagines parades of fornicating bodies perched on benches, clawing behind/beneath tombstones, lining dim avenues and thumping rickety awnings.

They call Savannah the ‘Garden of Good and Evil’, as if the two were absolutely singular to one another. However man is naturally an organism infused with seeds of both – irrevocably bonded to the twin forces of nature. The human mind is a twisting well of caverns, forms and shadows trying to resurface all that was lost and forgotten. However at midnight the latter gene takes prominence above all. The haunting ghosts of a blemished life take hold. Strange things happen in Savannah at midnight. “Not gonna lie”, says Leigh.

Virginia - Slim and Narrow

Virginia is a marsh where all of the past and future soldiers congregate in death and bog[god]. One could envisage a scenario out in the sticks, where both the Islamic Jihadists and the Confederate militias practice their skirmishes in between the highway belts and tobacco farms, narrowly missing confrontations until the day when they both have God sitting high and mighty on their shoulders.

The idea doesn’t seem so obsolete. After all, this is God’s country where the twin pillars of the American economy stand side-by-side in the name of God and Dollar: the miliary and American Tobacco. We can pinpoint geographically where the majority of the world’s cancers and smart bombs germinate. These two industries – along with dairy farming – gave the Commonwealth of Virginia (population 7.5 million) a Gross Domestic Product of US$327 billion for the first year of the war. War is big business for Virginia and of course everyone needs to smoke in war. What else will they do? Army rations usually consist of a tin of Spam, a stick of gum, condensed milk and five packs of Winston.

American flags drip onto the asphalt of the ‘Old Dominion’. It perpetrates so much of the landscape that one may confuse it as a natural fauna. Driving under the infinite sky – flat from horizon to horizon – is like driving under God’s open wound. It’s easy to see how one can lose themself here, then later find their soul down in a whiskey den, at the altar of a church or conscripted into the marines.

The long arms of interstate extend out among the open marshes, past fathers and forefathers of the brave and stolen. Is the Underground Railroad still in practice?

Houston - Got a Shotgun?

Concrete and steal arteries reach over vast planes of Texan desert, bleeding across the horizon. Houston is the car crash of the millennium waiting to happen. The motorcades of two million of the Space City’s patrons glide down six, seven, eight, nine lane highways. Even God gets stuck in rush hour traffic here.

In Los Angeles I garnered that it took half an hour to get to anywhere from anywhere. In Houston it takes forty-five minutes. And the scenery is a lot less pretty. Houston is like the practice range for placing highways anywhere in the world – I-10 version 1.0. In fact, highway is probably Texas’ third largest export after oil and drill parts. They build them out across the Beltway and ship them off to Abu Dhabi.

Of course, Texas has a ‘rich’ history with the Middle East. Back in the ‘90s Houston became the home away from home for the Sheiks, the Muftis and the Taliban, led in-hand by all those great Texan oil barons. Thanks to innovations in communication they no longer have to come here. Though, George Bush Senior still makes his home off some hazy highway, veritably curdling away in his anxiety, as his son launches a war on everything from free speech to ‘My Pet Goat’. The son sometimes makes his home here too, relinquishing his saddle to their old friend Dick Cheney when he’s not off hunting Democrats or lawyers.

They say as you steadily go from West to East in the United States, the layers of courtesy shed and by the time you get to New York you’re deep in the throws of a venom-spitting inhospitable waiter having a bad day. (Of course, New York is a lot closer to France than the rest are.) A thin layer of nicety lies over all off America in varying gradations. There’s something to be said though of that ‘Southern Hospitality’. It’s both infectious and sometimes nauseous. All of that “How are you doing?”, “Have a great day”, “Thanks for asking”, can be a warm welcome, especially when people in Sydney are generally assholes.

But a dark unconscious force broods; it’s been brooding since the last great slaughter of the Wild West. The twin desires of aggression and sex are not mediated well enough here. All the spite and angst that individuals need to cultivate a healthy mentality is getting buried underground with buckets of TNT and a shotgun to boot. There is a cumulative unconscious dark matter waiting to latch onto an ideology. Perhaps it has already found one, but regardless of creed, there is the ordinary fear of not God, but of the Other.

Those who can afford it bunker down behind large housing estates with several layers of wall and security. Everyone else has large walls surrounded by more walls. For Houstonians, most of the time spent outside of these walls is spent in one of their large cars. Everything one needs to mediate their consumption can be bought drive-thru or have Fed-Exed to them. Groceries, pharmaceuticals, even Starbucks; one never has to leave their car ever again out of the ordinary fear of not God, but the Other.

Providence - “At the Heart of the Swamp Yankee”

The habitual way of getting around Rhode Island is by foot or cycle. If you drive, you’ll be out of the state within ten minutes. But then maybe they want that.

Though New Englanders are vehemently proud of their Anglo-Italian heritage, they really don’t care for Anglos, or anyone else for that matter. The male of the species is extremely territorial. Really all of New England is. They get this from the English – “Southern Ferries”, “Northern Bastards” - that sort of bullocks. The Irish own Boston, and Providence is really, well, up for grabs. The accent here is Cockney English drowned-out by American-Italian, or vice versa. This of course makes for huge issues at the level of procreation. The English and the Italians were never really meant to be together, ever.

The Rhode Island education system is a dreary scene. It’s a popular destination for immigrants on the Eastern Seaboard – all those boats that couldn’t make it to Canada. There are Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Haitians, Dominicans and West Africans… the whole of Guadeloupe. (I’ve even heard rumors of remnants of Suharto’s ex-government hiding out here.) Perhaps this is why they refer to the colony as “the Ocean State” – you never know what catch the Great Blue will yield!

So Providence is the starting point for all those wide-eyed educational reformers. Everyone wants to deconstruct the system, wants a hands-on roll for building the America of tomorrow. Its failures loiter in between the Elizabethan houses and tuck-shop art galleries. The mad, the unemployed, the hip and the arty. There is a lot of sense of “come to Providence and fuck the system”. Though the only system-fucking really happening is the cost one pays for tobacco rolling paper - $6 for a sheet of 50. Don’t smoke! Big Tobacco has got their eyes on you!

Failure in the American system really means active rejection of the system, refusal to work within it. However, in a slow and jacket-drawn town like this, everyone seems to be doing something - even the youth - just not up to the expectations of the rest of the economy. It must be the latitude. There’s a lot of blowing on your coffee, rolling a second pipe, tucking in your sandwich… a “how you doin?” and “I’m not too sure about that?” How does anything get done here? Yet it does! Maybe it’s all that pretty architecture. It keeps one livid and content. It is nice to walk around Providence – pastel columns, Victorian and Elizabethan maid’s quarters, old brick smoke stacks. Every house has an enormous front door, attached to a burdening atrium. However, I’m not too sure what this facilitates, as locals are afraid to let other people (local or not) into their houses.

Providence sits solemnly on the North East hugging the Atlantic. It tempers the bounty of big-city crime that comes out of Boston. It’s a suburb in search of a city, which may prove difficult, as the tallest building I encountered in “downtown” was the five-story shopping mall. Providence city itself seems ludicrously non-violent, but on the West Side, ghetto-inhabitants taunt the local paper-youths and out-of-towners/college students.

What really happens in Providence after dark? I don’t know. At half-past-five the drowsy inhabitants climb their spiral staircases to their Victorian lofts to lay and drink eggnog and eat turkey. They don’t come out until Starbucks reopens at 8am. I feel that sex is not a common occurrence here either. It’s too much effort to pull-off ankle warmers and pull-on your lover’s organs. The cold tends to make people dirty, irritable and obscenely neurotic (of course the last two can be blamed on the lack of sex. The first on the unwillingness to remove garments). Add to this the fact that the average Rhode Islander is pretty damn unattractive (recall the Anglo-Italian genes), and you get a declining white population, coincided with massive non-white immigration. This of course makes everyone more fearful, which in turn keeps him or her locked-in at night and away from said lovers. Cyclically viscous.

The more boisterous way in which Rhode Islanders sublimate all this tension and fear is through showcasing their aggressive personas. Bar chat solicits a lot of “peckerheads” and “fuckin’ cockroaches” and “those fuckin’ Boston motherfuckers”. This makes for random outbursts from just about everyone to everyone else. But I’ve yet to see a punch thrown. I’ve yet to see any physical display of aggression. What shitty part of the English gene did they get (again, recall Italy)? I feel that Australia or England could take over this State through a strategic and decisive onslaught of pub brawls.

To add further anxiety to the witches pot, Rhode Island has the highest percentage of troops per population sent to Iraq of all 50 (51 inc. Australia) of the American States. There is a great deal of both pride and regret. The war and its perpetrators are condemned, but of course the troops are honored. The posters for Iraq food/Christmas drives sit side-by-side with “Bush Lied” and “The Neo-Conservative Dream is Over”. But of course Rhode Island has always seen itself as the custodian of the conservative dream. The official name of the state is Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. It was the first colony to declare its independence from the Commonwealth, though now some think this was a bad decision. There is not a lot of talk on the war, only talk of political turmoil and change. The Right and the Left live harmoniously side-by-side, drinking each other’s coffees, serving each other’s suppers and car-pulling each other’s children. However they dream at night of a time where they might have each other’s throats and bodies. Until then, they’ve got other problems.

All this anxiety and dread over the war, the immigrants, the education, each other… Rhode Island is but a simple representation of every other State in America (minus California who should really annex). Slowly one-by-one, the Americas are realizing too that their dream is over. Their days in the sun have left them swollen and brown. Of course the browness comes from other things too.

Las Vegas - Neon Sarcophagus

Las Vegas is like a grand over-the-top elephant graveyard, where the cold and wind-hardened players of North America go to die and become reborn. They spin that wheel, like a rat in a cage, sweating out every last breath of wholesome song and dance. However, for the God-fearing people, death is not the end; they never quite reach the cemetery, but instead get lost in a maze of neon and slot machine, with the voice of God chanting “One night only at the New York New York”, or “Try the Venetian’s… [whatever]”

They get continually resurrected in sexier and more blindingly colourful formats. Celine Dion is on her third or fourth farewell tour. Cher had a string of comeback performances before she finally hung-up her face. I’m not quite sure she has yet. Barry Manilow very scaringly lives 200 feet tall hugging the walls of the Bellagio – an iridescent icon to the youthful refusal of death, but at 63 years old. There are those who I wasn’t sure were still alive. Even 2Pac, whose body was found bullet ridden off the strip, refuses to let his musical repertoire dwindle. He’s only released about seven singles since 1997. For the man who sang, “live and die in LA”, he’s truly found a greater fate.

Vegas is the last great cosmopolitan in the world and the only city that the Chinese are losing money in. Yet the town represents all the great potential between East and West, a Diaspora of humanity’s great civilizations. (Why do you think they filmed ‘Rush Hour 2’ here?)

At some point in the last ten years, the bigwigs decided that it was the Chinese bringing in the currency to Vegas. The locals were coming in, playing a few rounds of roulette, catching a show, trying out a new steakhouse (like they’re any different?) and then going back home to Kentucky to count their Kodaks. It was the Chinese, they learnt, who were dropping massive amounts of US tender into the Nevada desert, à la American economy. Sure the lovely old ladies of yesteryear were pushing a few pennies into the slot machines, but nothing beats watching the ferocious fearlessness of a Honky or Shanghainese matron dropping her dowry down a roulette hole in a matter of hours. I call it an R-Hole (similar to K, but without the messy sheets).

So the Americans want entertainment, the Chinese want a fast dealer and good feng shui. The kwai-lohs complied. Las Vegas represents the cultural needs of easily 100,000 Asians per month. The concierge will always speak a dialect or two. There are Asian-inspired bars, hotels and strip clubs. I found Hainanese Chicken Rice on the room service menu at the Wynn. I had Penang kway-teow for dinner. It cost US$40, as opposed to 4 Ringgit in Penang. Every hotel has at least two “high quality” Chinese restaurants. Restaurant menus will be written in several languages, none of them European (if you count American as a language). Wolfgang Puck, the great American restaurateur, has leant his name to about thirty fusion restaurants across the city. He has pioneered the art of mass-producing artisan food.

My favourite is the one that sits right next to the Venetian’s water feature. It’s called Tsunami – “authentic Asian cuisine with a twist”. (You see. This is the problem when the only international news content on Fox News comes through a segment called “Around the World in 60 Seconds”). But who cares? Certainly not the Asians. They’re all in Steve Wynn’s lap throwing down at the tables: “Li li li li li! Bet red! Red 28.” The Tsunami could cover the desert to reach the strip and the Asians would still be the last ones betting.

Las Vegas is either the entertainment capital of, or the most entertaining capital in America. I haven’t decided yet. Magicians, singers, cabarets, comedians, strippers, celebrities, the American Billboard Awards… There’s nothing like a decisive and well-oiled culture industry. The entertainment mediates the balance between gambling and existential being. So all this “culture” must be maintained in order to sublimate the fears of retardation by poker machine, which is a common enough cause of death in suburban Australia.

There are great hopes for the future though. They’re working on a new business model at the MGM Grand, mixing psycho-chemistry, quantum mathematics and a new kind of Black Jack. Soon culture will be available in a clear liquid form that you can inject or swallow in-between hands, just in case you feel the need to leave the casino floor. It can also be laced in your cigarettes for a slow in-take or shovelled up your asshole if you like to stand whilst betting. But sex is such an important industry in Nevada – “the home of legalised prostitution” and annulments thankfully – that they’ll have to give pass-outs to under-sexed husbands, whilst their wives handle those long gear-knobbed slot machines. Gambling makes one so tense, that sex is the only real cathartic expression for post-capitalism.

Nevada also has a prohibition on cocktail waitresses with mediocre breasts. They were all sent back East and then an influx of Latinos and Russians came in from Southern California to take over. I struggle to find an American accent here in fact.

The last great cosmopolitan on earth, its towers prey towards the sun like the cyborg replicant of every commercializeable, mass producible culture that ever came in and out of existence. The Incas, the Egyptians, the Indians, the New Yorkers, the pirates… they are all represented here, encased in domes of fluorescent glass beaming out to the desert. Las Vegas is the museum of apocalypse, enshrining our common fates in a sarcophagus of excess. It is the spiritual zenith of excess. Its accountants and marketing managers have perfected the formula for a mass religion of consumption. Every great empire came to its downfall from the follies of its excess. Las Vegas has found a way to thrive on its. And that in its own decadent perversity is quite a beautiful thing.

Beverly Hills - Home of the neo-European

I like Beverly Hills. Maybe it’s my innate faux taste for thinly layered beauty. I don’t mean the prêt-a-porter, the grandiose yet quaint restaurants and the overdressed dogs guiding their over-payed owners into their oversized cars.

In fact, I hate the speakers strategically littered along Rodeo Drive, blaring out bland Christmas classics. I imagine some Wizard of Oz-type enigma deep in a burrow of Wilshire Boulevard controlling the soundscape for optimum material consumption. It didn’t work on me. I didn’t buy anything except for a rap demo from a very well dressed busker and his burly and somewhat intimidating gold-chained associate.

What I do like are the cafes that edge Santa Monica Boulevard on the fringes of the main shopping district. Here, leather dressed Mediterraneans and their Ducati Sportclassics meet the pavement with a sense of contagious ease.

They sit for hours smoking non-Cuban cigars, sipping chrome coloured coffee and greeting with hugs and kisses the passer-bys. After a while, one surpasses the assumption that they all know each other. I even walk-up eventually and introduce myself in broken French to share a moment of late-capitalism. A cappuccino and an Armani blazer is an entrance enough to any conversation here.

I sat for one whole afternoon outside one of these cafes, watching the expatriate locals as the sun set over the horizon of the boulevard. The hip blacks and tanned Italians leaning back and contemplating the idiosyncrasies of an ideal existence. They stare passively-out (they never lock eyes) at the masses of chrome that roll by; a “ciao bello”, “cava?” a “take it easy my friend”…

I like this passivity – actively taking it easy. I wonder what they all do for work, but I don’t want to ruin the idea of a life of coffees, cigars and casual banter.

East Los Angeles - Dresden in SoCal

The East of Los Angeles met with the same nemesis of late-capitalism to which so many other metropolitans have befallen. It is the wreckage of a failed social-welfare state collided with the more sinister darkness of mass-drug induction.

With the funding for public hospitals dramatically reduced and the housing for the mentally unstable destabilised, the psychologically and financially deprived roam the streets in droves. Blocks and blocks of unconscious militias collect with uncertain futures, sleeping and wandering between the wind-swept drives and avenues.

If only they could mobilise, they would prove an unsettling force to the thousands-strong Los Angeles Police Department (they did one week in 1992). However madness is kept at sea by the substitute medicine of crack cocaine. This is no perverse antibiotic though, no soma; theirs is a spark plug of anti-social behaviour and random atrocity threatening to under-siege the mainstays of LA that keeps the LAPD non-content.

The cityscape of downtown and the East LA rolls-on like a concrete mountain range – a horrid memory of bombed-out Europe. The architecture here is a marriage between minimalism and a lack of funding. They are monuments leftover from the apathetic anaesthesia that laid over all of America in the early 90s.

Whoever told the Americans they could do minimalism? The buildings look like leftovers of an unfinished terminal of LAX – concrete slabs of grey unearth, reaching out like broken sacrifices to the Hollywood Hills. The angles and corners meet at the street level with makeshift tents and shelters. The over-towering shadows cover up so much and so little of the decay. There is not even the memory of a dream here.

There are no white faces in East L.A, except for those resurrecting the old factory warehouses with art-studios and lower-East urbunes. But even those bodies don’t come out at night. They move gracefully inside with the slick of paint on canvas, transforming a portal from the dead-end avenues and junky terrains.

The one-way streets make for a dizzying maze of an inebriated hell. One has to track back through the layers of downtown’s inferno to find an escape route. As we drive down the broken boulevards, their eyes sink into our skulls as they penetrate into the car window. A “hey man, have you got some change?” and occasionally a “what the fuck are you looking at?” It’s ambiguous as to who are the ghosts – them or us.