For the first time in several wearying days, we are ensconced, somewhat, in a decent hostel. More than decent; this place has a large central courtyard, hanging pot-plants, free internet access and coffee, a deep little pool, and a long promenade of gleaming, slowly turning brass fans depending from varnished roof-beams. More than a alight contrast can be drawn with the dreary cell in which we snatched a few miserable hours of sleep, book-ended with long uncomfortable drives by bus. Three fat cockroaches lay revealed upon the floor when the light was switched on; too sluggish (can a cockroach be sluggish?) to scuttle for the shadows. Initially, I thought that they were dead, crushed or sprayed by a maid too lazy to remove the fat, crunchy corpses. But no, they were alive. Too disgusting to crush, I seized each by a serrated leg with the aid of some toilet tissue and dropped them into the bowl of the toilet, where the cold water seemed to revive them to twitching, churning life. Nothing but repeated stamping can kill a ‘roach; everybody knows that. So I sent them, alive and furious, spinning down the s-bend. They really do look like dates. I must fix some dates up with long antennae and legs next Halloween, to be conspicuously munched on in public. Hell; anytime would do.

Five hours’ rest. This was in the capital city of Honduras, a place seen but dimly after dark and quit in the small hours. So no; not really seen at all. I am doubtful whether I shall now be able to say that I saw anything of either Guatemala or Honduras. I can say one thing: though these nations, like my own, are so small that, in PJ O’Rourke’s memorable phrase; ‘you can’t swing a cat without putting it through customs’, there is definitely a perceptible alteration as you pass through each border control. The people become darker and heavier; slimmer and lighter; earthier or more rarefied; more or less sensual. After Belize, Guatemala arrived in a cloud of stinging yellow dust thrown up by grossly overcrowded collectivos filled with the smell of sweat and the sound of Hispanic pop-music. There were over 6000 murders (not counting road accidents and so forth; proper MURDERS) in Guatemala in 2006. Over 300 have been slaughtered since the beginning of this year. That’s what? Fifteen every day? Frightening stuff; the sort of thing you refrain from telling your parents until you are back around the family dinner table. Of course, this whole region is swimming in blood. The banana trees, elephant-eared, wave glibly green in the strong yellow sunlight. But the blood is there; lakes of it, encrusted into a dried strata of pain under the dust; like a long vanished sea. Just like Cambodia; the ultimate refutation of ghosts. Why should England be plagued by specters and not these places? If there were any truth in the supernatural, you wouldn’t be able to sleep here at night for the screams and moans of the angry, nameless dead.

It’s so nice to be comfortable and secluded for a little while. Peter does rush on so; he never stops. Then I get petulant and frayed and start saying things that I instantly regret. It doesn’t help that my skin is playing up something horrible. Not only do I still have a slight rash of little spots, symptom of ongoing stress, on my torso, but sun burn brings out a far more intense rash of hard little red nodules on my arms and neck. I’m taking anti-histamines for them and they are drying out to red pin pricks but it makes me self conscious; I feel ugly and deeply unlucky; singled out to be a sort of minor leper. Surrounded by all these other travelers, to whom I might like to feel equal, superior even, I feel silly; the type of boy who has to wear a sun-hat while the others play soccer; a sort of cripple or white rabbit. Bed-ridden Colin in The Secret Garden. And, by the time I get over the fucking thing; it’s time to go home.

The other travelers are a funny bunch; enviable and contemptible; often for the same reasons. This never changes; you can take the kid out of consumer culture but you can’t take the mall and the high-school out of their hearts. The popularity contest goes on, long after the school-bell rings. People unconsciously scan and edit their conversation for frequencies that stray too far outside the accepted range. They posture banally. At the moment, the fashion seems to be for a variety of shallow profundity; the illusion of depth. The depth, you see, cannot alienate anybody by making them feel ignorant or lacking depth themselves. Everyone as to be equally deep. This has been going on since the ‘Me-generation’ first emerged, I suppose. All those hippies sitting about, staring at each other an admiration; ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall.’ Even this is a bland observation; indifferently phrased. The generation gap is another problem; a creation of consumer culture in itself; the first great market division; between youth and the parent. The older people who want to retain a bit of ‘cred’ are reduced to risible posturing; the ‘cantankerous old sod’ who "...can tell you a thing or two..." about whatever. Australian men, who are most jealous of their masculine vigor, are wrong the worst offenders of this kind. Whiskery, beer-sodden old Bruces with a raft of whorehouse recommendations and hilarious stories about VD.

A lack of reading is pervasive. Hostels like this have their book exchanges; a glass case loaded with the kind of tripe that any plump bank-teller brings with her to the beach at Malaga. In India and elsewhere, ‘classics’ do pop up regularly; particularly books that are considered ‘relevant’ to the environment, i.e. Midnight’s Children, The God of Small Things, A Suitable Boy, An Area of Darkness. But nobody wants to discuss them. They are not really reading at all; they do not, it seems, have the facility of weaving the stuff that they read into the fabric of their thought. They don’t recycle it, break it up and examine it, accepting this strand as beautiful or true, this as ugly or false. They just consume books. If you ask them to recommend one; they just burp up a title from the ‘India Required Reading List’ and say something about it being ‘amazing; their faces reflecting anything but amazement. There doesn’t seem to be a reading list here in Central America. Further south, you can’t move for people burping on about how amazing is 1000 Years of Solitude, but here they seem to be at a loss. Annoyingly, they seem much better at exercising their linguistic skills than me; I am a shy language learner. Being initially bad at a new language requires something like a talent for rudeness or vulgarity. It’s coarse to butcher someone’s language in public. I have trouble with it. I must be like one of my own Japanese students in this regard; head down; pencil moving; terrified of the next question from teacher. The other travelers just shout at the locals, in much the same way as they flaunt their (admittedly attractively-honed) bodies about in the latest back-packer styles and spout their cod-‘philosophies of being’ in bars. Some of them are so engrossed in being that you cannot imagine them adapting to life on Earth at all. I wonder, truly wonder, whether they are faking it, or at least immersed in a self-delusion so perfect that they can just shrug it off like a carnival costume as soon as then set foot back in Europe or America. It’s quite a get-up, whatever it is. Again and again, one meets the German, French, American or British boy; his head a mountain of blond dreadlocks, his body a mass of fluttering draperies and beads; his eyes filled with skylight and his gleaming, orthodondically-straightened teeth set in a perpetual half-smile, walking in a fog of Nirvana through the streets of some miserable or dangerous place. Untouchable. Nothing bothers him. Nothing is permitted to. What does he do when he gets home? He and his girlfriend; what do they talk about? Maybe they have mastered the art of Tantric conversation; they say nothing at all, or just repeat the same word over and over again at each other. They are difficult to get along with, but not frightening.

Not like the Jessies.

Jessies, as I have christened them, are American youths who have been brought up to win. They are often scarily good-looking, though I recognize them so quickly now that I wonder what I ever saw in them before. Because they have at their hearts, well, nothing. They are hard, glossy, confident, privileged, and vain. They don’t conform; they set the standards of conformity for others. When you turn on US television, they are the faces that smile back at you from all the prime-time shows. They are bigger in real life; bigger and colder and more intimidating. They scare the living shit out of me. We met a pair of them in Flores, hunting for operational cash-machines. Two big, solid frat-brothers in jams, flip-flops and caps. Bursting out of their clothes. They are never at rest; they seem at all times to be at the centre of a playing field, under the eyes of a thousand expectant peers, waiting for that first play. They move their bulk expectantly from one foot to the other. They don’t make eye contact; they appear to be scanning the horizon for what they want. Their hands are held in front of them, one fist punching the flat of the other. There is an air of steroids and cocaine about them. Everything they do seems filled with repressed rage. They roll their shoulders back incessantly. They make amazing contact-sportsmen, soldiers, market-traders, lawyers. I think that they have very little conscience. Conscience is weakness. They do not shed tears for anything. They win.

As I said; they terrify me. I used to envy them; now they look like some sort of genetically-engineered supermen; bred to be without doubt. Arty fags like me like to think that one day the whole glacial façade will crack; the colossus crashing and groaning into the dust. But maybe they never will. These might be the rich Donald Trumps and Jim Welches who live to be 105 and die wheezing complacently in private clinics. Where the weak are good, they are strong; there is no point pondering their shortcomings and vacancies; they will never even think of them. Enough of them.

Back to Guatemala. On the way out of the country, we saw a corpse lying in the road. It was small with the smallness of the poor and with the smallness of corpses. It must be a surprise to pick up a dead body; they look so light. He lay supine, his right leg lay crossed across the other his arms stretched out before him; his face in the asphalt. He looked a bit like the Hanged Man of the tarot: Le Pendu. Probably just a road accident. Who gets executed in the middle of the highway? I didn’t see any pools of blood; we passed him at speed; it was remarkable that the image impressed itself so completely on my retinas. Of course; many murders are committed in the road; highway robbery is one of the most pernicious forms of crime. Only yesterday, a passenger on a bus opened fire on a gang of four robbers, killing two of them outright. Nobody else was hurt, physically at least. Impressive when you think about it; the vigilante must have been a confident marksman. Mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. The Hondurans, like the people of Belize, have more Afro-Caribbean (i.e. Black) in them than the populations of Salvador, Guatemala or Nicaragua. It’s worth noting, particularly to those racists who equate black skin with a violent, erratic disposition, that the black folks of both Honduras and Belize regard their neighbours as over-wrought and violent. Particularly Salvadorians; the most European of all (many have, not only fair skin, but green eyes, blue eyes and blond hair). But that racist would just retort: "Spics are as bad as blacks," anyway. It must be comforting to be an asshole; you can take refuge in any stupidity. Yet it remains that Guatemala is violent.

We stopped at Flores, the city nearest to the Mayan ruins at Tikal, after we crossed the border from Belize. There was some sort of crash just before we arrived but it was kept very hush-hush for obvious reasons. Some people said that there was just a currency shortage brought on by a delay in the manufacture and delivery of new bills; the money we did eventually get was indeed, very soft and almost unrecognizable as currency; more like thin brown layers of chamois. We stayed in Flores long enough to take a 5am collectivo to Tikal, where we wandered about for the entire day. Oddly enough, the king who founded Tikal and oversaw its rise to dominance was named Jaguar’s Paw, which was the name given to the hero of Mel Gibson’s stirringly gruesome Apocalypto, a film we saw in Manhattan just a few weeks ago. Before we went to Brazil, we watched Fitzcarraldo, another movie of inflated, almost delusional vision by Werner Hertzog, starring the ever-deranged Klaus Kinski. That film was about a cruel ordeal constructed around a vision of aesthetic purity and doomed to failure; Gibson’s is simply a cruel ordeal. You can’t deny that it has guts and momentum. The guts however are literal and the momentum is maintained by a director who pursues the story, his hero and the audience with the same scourge that he used on the unfortunate Jesus in his earlier work. ‘Run for your god-damn lives!’ he howls, and the audience flees, with spears and arrows biting the dust at their heels. But this is not a review. Apocalypto lifted liberally and freely from what we know about the Aztecs, mixing it with a dose of Mayan mystery. The reconstructions of working temples of human sacrifice, whirling out of control, are masterful, brutal, and engrossing. His vision of a society in the last throes of horrific decadence, ruled by a disgusting elite of cynical princes and priests, is surprisingly resonant. Mel’s blood-lust seems to become more, rather than less, rational as time passes.

But there is no reason to think that the temples at Tikal were drenched ‘from the crown to the toe/ top full of direst cruelty’. And Gibson’s Jaguar Paw was a brave forester, not a monarch. Tikal was just awesome; dug out of the soft grey jungle soil and strangling vines, the stepped pyramids themselves are soft; built of stone that crumbles to the touch, like feta cheese. There is some debate about the wisdom of uncovering them at all; are they being excavated for research, or simply the delectation of tourists? Many of them are still left untouched; the resources simply don’t exist to dig them up. The ones that are fully exhumed are almost perfect. Some have been fitted with rickety wooden staircases that remove the need to actually climb the monuments whilst allowing tourists a few from the top. Others can be scaled outright. At the top of the rickety staircase example, Peter are I were photographing raucous green parrots when there panted onto the scene a fat North American man who had no sooner mopped his fleshy brow and regained his hard-won breath before he began, with that curiously national trick of ‘taking up the thread of a conversation already underway’ to tell us all about himself. His whole biography spilled out of him; his back problems, his heart conditions and the various medications he took for both; his late bereavements (at least one parent and a Schnauzer dog; he seemed more cut up about the dog, to be honest,) his career as a pastor (I should have guessed: he had too much bonhomie even for your average Mid-Westerner), the moral state of Washington D.C. (poor) and the relative merits of Idaho (excellent), his missions, his good works, the unfortunate children of Haiti and Guatemala, the worth beyond all worldly wealth of a child’s smile upon receiving his first pair of new shoes. He seemed to be an entirely admirable person, large hearted and emotional, crass and loud-mouthed, jolly, obese, hyperactive and soon to die. And he never pushed Jesus on us once (the Lord came up but once, and only in the normal way of things). I believe that he was a celibate homosexual; he seemed the sort to seek out the company of younger men and the sort to delight older women with his puckish good humour. But it’s a cruel world we live in. His stout jolliness; his small hands and the spectacles (whose lenses seemed to press wetly against the corneas of his eyes) appeared suspicious in themselves. The cherub-faced pedophile has become a demon of the time. Any pastor who looks like Mr. Pickwick is a suspect; though child-molesters can be 28 and leanly muscular. We ran into him again a day or two later in a pharmacy in Flores, enquiring after pain medication for his back (something strong, to be taken by one already on a bunch of other pills). Peter helped him out again.

What can you say about Tikal? Look at the pictures. The one pyramid that we could scale properly exerted a vertiginous horror on me before, during, and after the climb. It possessed the unusual quality of looking even higher and more daunting from the base than from the summit. Anticipation perhaps. One wrong step and you’d be smashed to pieces by a successions of edged blows like a frenzied axe-attack. You’d be mincemeat by the time you reached the foot of those cruel steps; mincemeat in a split and leaking bag of skin. However, we got up and down again un-minced, and we basked in the cool air at the top. The main structure has been closed since two people stumbled and fell the pulverized deaths. There is a related story about a couple who made love on top of one somewhere (they are mixed up confusingly in my mind; now I have this image of a pair of lovers furiously copulating and then bouncing gruesomely down the hundred stone steps. The old combination; love and death. But that never happened. But I bet it did.

‘You’d better Belize it!’ is the slogan of the tourist board of – you’ve guessed it already, haven’t you? – Belize. It is stitched across the laurel-green baseball cap of the man sitting at the next table. We are drinking surprisingly expensive iced lattes in a coffee bar in Belize City. Our surroundings are decorated in a way that brings to mind Dickens’s description of the Misses Cratchet’s Christmas finery; ‘brave in ribbons’. Much of Belize is brave in ribbons. This coffee house, for example, under its jolly paint-job (obviously the product of several days’ hard work on the part of it’s enterprising owners) and its bead curtains and its chintzy curtains, is a pretty cistern-like set of concrete rooms at the top of a flight of dim, and narrow stairs. The ‘espresso dock’, prominently signed, is an ordinary domestic espresso machine displayed on a Formica table in one corner. It is roped off like an exhibit in the British Museum. The bookshelf is mostly crowded with tawdry and tattered titles by authors who popularity probably expired before they cashed the cheques from their editors.

The most popular daily paper is lying on the table in front of us. Most prominent of the words comprising the headline is ‘homosexual’. It reads ‘The Homosexual High School Administrator’. That’s it. There is no mention what this person may or may not have done. On closer inspection it turns out that the homosexual administrator, who shall remain unnamed, who works at a school, which shall remain unnamed, has been committed hideous sexual crimes, which shall remain unspecified, against a number of young men under his charge, all of whom shall, for their own sakes and that of their families, remain unnamed. Though editors of this paper loudly and pompously proclaim that their whole concern is for the safety of the community, it is hard to see how this long, fact-free, and entirely uninformative rant does so, unless by printing the words ‘homosexual’, ‘sodomitical’, ‘criminal’, ‘appalling’, ‘unspeakable’ and many others in close proximity to each other. Weirdly, the article does note that boys in the school are under frequently exerted pressure to perform homosexual acts by older boys. Perhaps it is a disease, spreading from the evil administrator. It is odd that this evangelical, nonsensical, and unconsciously homophobic reporting is primarily found in Afro-Caribbean cultures, especially those previously dominated by the Victorian British, with their contemptible moral values and hypocritical cant. The story poisons my whole day and infects my view of the people of Belize. I see knives in men’s smiles and the dancehall music that thumps out of road-side stores sounds like baseball bats and boots.

Victorian too are the names painted on the signs; where in the world would you find a young man named Horace H Harrison in this day and age? Or Oliver S Wiggins? One lady doctor rejoices in the title Ms Velda M Flowers MD. They are splendid names; like mango trees splitting the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral. Lonely Planet, with its customary glibness, describes Belize as an ‘incredibly tolerant’ nation. It also does its unconscious trick of constructing, through randomly placed warnings throughout its text, a picture of bone-freezing danger everywhere that takes a while to thaw out. But it’s hard to think of any place that habitually listens to songs about killing gay people as ‘incredibly’ tolerant.

Ms Antolina Griffin is the proprietress of ‘Freddie’s Guesthouse’ on Eve Street. We are six when we arrive and she is adamant that the single female among us should get a room to herself. Unwittingly, she also prevents a more hideous crime from being committed by forcing the two homosexuals to share a bed in a room with a heterosexual Frenchman. Though the sodomites are in a bed together, no abominations are on the cards; not unless we can corrupt the Frenchman in double-quick time. Mrs. Griffin is a small ovoid widow with tightly curled hair and a bright print dress of the sort all our grandmothers favored. Her eyes are dark behind violet glass, but her smile is bright. And she has that voice; that sweetly, richly declining accent that gradually massages sentences flat. Even this starchy widow can ‘tak’ a sen-tennz an’ mak’ it lie oot an’ purrr’. Her demesne of pink wash, cushions and cloth flowers is on the upper floor of the building, where Peaches, her minute chestnut dog taps across the polished wooden floors.

By far the largest building in Belize City has to be the Palace Casino on the waterfront; a twelve-storey, concrete building in a town where, as a disgusted former citizen informs us; ‘Three floors is high-rise’. You can’t really walk up to it; it is made to be approached by car only. Inside, a blissfully frigid lobby; a cinema entrance on the left; a trio of bored looking professional girls knocking their knees together under a potted palm in the centre and, on the right: the casino floors winks and flashes evilly from behind a cordon of tinted glass. A sign warns that no Belizean not in possession of three hundred dollars will be admitted. Theoretically we could swan past the bulky security guards, flip-flops, smelly tee shirts and all. But my companions don’t feel like it tonight, which relieves me. I harbor a restrained horror of all houses of game and those in impoverished regions most of all. Dreadful enough the spend-palaces of North America, to which the elderly flock in their Winnebago’s only to leave by bus; more awful by far are the money-prisons of the developing world; gleaming vaults protected by gun-turrets and surrounded by miserable shanties whose dwellers tell tales of gleaming white toilets where men in tuxedos hand out mints. The Palace is a huge white bunker. Though it is reputed to be a cash cow for the community; bringing money and jobs to the city; it looks and feels like a parasite; sucking money into its depths and generating only a spectacle of hopeless desire. We turn to leave. Outside the hot night air blasts us again. Back at the guest house, there is a large spider climbing the wall of our room, I flick it into a water glass, which I take outside and upturn into the road.

Even though it is a poor country, Belize loves it's pet dogs. The people seem indifferent to the independent and economical cat but every yard has it’s mutt, pooch or ravenous carnivore yapping, snarling or comatose in the heat. The grocery stores are hardly bursting with produce but every one has its corner stacked with sacks of Chum, Purina and Winalot. It’s not cheap stuff. A child could eat for less than a large dog in Belize.

We decide to leave Belize City. Only myself and Peter are going west to San Ignacio (or Cayo, after the district). Goodbye to Carl, the French anti-Corporate investment banker. Goodbye also to Caroline, the Canadian English teacher on 72-hour exile from Mexico for visa reasons. And farewell to the Czechs from Harvard, hyper-intelligent and already appalled by the warm, morbid morass of Central America. We leave town on a decommissioned US school bus; the high seat backs reduce us all to children again. We have the windows open are far as they will drop, and the cross-breeze is warm but fresh. But the hot-blooded Belizeans wither in the cold and slam them shut. After a while, it starts to rain; a hot, booming sky-wash that turns the interior of the school-bus into a steam room. We’re soon as wet as we would have been had we been riding on the roof-rack. As we drive past orange orchards and banana fields, I catch up on the litany of horrors that makes up Central American history. No wonder they smile so much; it reads like Titus Andronicus; ‘Why do you laugh, Sir? I laugh because I have tears no more to shed.’ Somoza, Avila, Cortes, Reagan; the book even has a special box: ‘The Top Five Bastards’.

I’m going to switch to the past tense, just for practice.

The journey west didn’t take long; we arrived in Cayo, or San Ignacio, before darkness fell. A few miles from the Guatemalan border, Cayo (shorter, see?) is a favourite staging post for travellers west and a posting for other ex-pats; mainly archaeologists working on all those Mayan ruins out there, all still buried in soft limey soil and strangled in jungle creepers. This shows. At the Pacz Guesthouse, we were shown a decent room by a South African forestry consultant named Jeroen with a huge squeezy handshake and an voice so erratically tuneful, it sounded like a harmonium with a hole in the bellows, or as if his voice was about to break again. Three beds this time; the last time there were only two and three of us in need. Oh well; no spiders. Stretched out on the verandah was an old sod of some variety smoking through a cough like the gargling of rotten eggs; a truly horrific sound. In the street, two pubescent girls, one white ex-pat, one Hispanic, playing with a ruptured pink plastic ball and trying to outdo each other in insane sexualised giggling; another sound calculated to strike cold fear into my heart.

The people of Belize are an odd mix. We met Mennonites on the bus; Mennonites! Young men with thin wispily-bearded faces and huge hands pulped by hard work, wearing granddad shirts, dungarees and broad-brimmed hats. They wanted to know whether we spoke German. Did they want to practice their ancestral language on us, or had they always spoken German since they arrived here, in this yellow and green swamp? I was amazed. Then there are the aged Rastas; their eyes like peeled lychees under the vast striped turban of their dreads; their arms wiry and corded. They watch the swaying Caribbean princesses go by; picking their path over the rough and sodden ground in the strappiest, sparkliest, least practical shoes ever seen in such a place, balancing on their stiletto heels the sultry bulk of their swaying buttocks and breasts, straining through emerald chiffon and flamingo lycra. It’s an amazing combination of tensions and sexual packaging. They don’t sweat though, the shoulders six inches in front of me on the bus are as softly, as plumply dry as powdered doughnuts. The young Hispanic men lurch down the side walks in bandanas, flat-peaked trucker caps and tawdry bling-bling; their trainers prison-white, their outsize shirts horribly screen-printed with airbrushed heroes; Bruce Lee, Tupak, Bob Marley, 50 Cent. Their tiny mamas are all thin-lipped disapproval as they scold their resentful mustachioed and glum-eyed daughters.

Driving towards New Orleans, I had thought that we would at some point enter the South, crossing over the Mason-Dixon Line into another America. But the modern freeway imparts sameness on either side like the wake of a ship and the brown landscape emerged slowly from under the dwindling patches of sodden and isolated snow. Kentucky slumbered under dry winter thickets and a sallow, low-slanting sunshine. We came at midnight to a motel, featureless and isolate, like something fallen from the back of a truck, where we occupied a chilly room decorated in wan pastels. A flap of damp wallpaper bulged behind the door and the heater, when activated, emitted a tepid, monotonous sigh. The coffee machine was broken and the beds were thinly blanketed, so that we slept on the very edge of actual coldness.

The next morning, we ate miniature cinnamon rolls and drank hot coffee in a small cafeteria maintained by a small Indian couple. From a bracket high in the corner, television news flashed, beamed and chortled. Outside, hardened patches of ice clung to the grass; glinting and trickling in the sunshine, and our breath smoked. Overlooking the highway, a full-sized fiberglass Tyrannosaur bared its teeth ferociously, but its small eyes looked desperate. A sign proclaimed that we had just missed DINO WORLD and to come back soon. The roadside is littered with these weird attractions; who conceives and executes them? Who suddenly decides that his quiet spot shall be home to the world’s largest baseball, or a giant piñata warehouse, or a replica of the Taj Mahal?

The journey is littered with towns and villages romantically named, in which little or nothing ever happens. Venice, Sparta, Athens, Troy, all flew past unnoticed. No signs indicated Birmingham; Peter thought this might be because it is known as a black city. At the last stop for gas before New Orleans, the pump was old-fashioned, with a lever that had to be raised to reset the counter. I puzzled over it shame-facedly until a young woman came out from within to show me what to do. At the next pump, frat boys on their way to Mardi Gras joked.

The sedgy land remained brown, falling down to the flat monotony of the Mississippi Delta. Signs of devastation appeared; ramparts of splintered trees, whitened and twisted, stood like a sunken garden of bones. I was reminded of the shattered landscape around Mount St Helen’s, where the forest was blasted by a lateral volcanic explosion more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped at Nagasaki, which withered the land like the breath of a basilisk. Concrete barricades blocked many of the highway exits; we guessed that they had served communities that were now erased and desolate. Ghost suburbs began to appear; the tall plastic signs that declared gas stations and chain restaurants struck up from the roadside, but they were headless or faceless; their message blown out by the hurricane. Suburbs are lifeless places enough; at first glance these looked like any strip mall anywhere. But the car parks were utterly empty and plate glass windows lay shattered everywhere, revealing rectangles of darkness. Clapperboard houses lay tilted, cracked and sagging like Dorothy’s house from Kansas, dropped from the sky onto the Wicked Witch of the East. Through their gaping dormer windows nothing can be seen but the daylight glimmering palely from the other side of the gutted and rotten buildings. They are drift houses, thrown up on the beach to die like whales. Everywhere, there were the grim family similarities of all natural disaster; as all burn-victims have the same face, washed and smoothed by flame into an inexpressive waxen ball, so these drowned ghosts resembled their victim cousins in Sumatra, Bangladesh and Florida. The vegetation had the pallid look of the grass under a stone; sun-starved and sodden.

The road began to rise up out of the Delta in a long slow arc over the bridge that leads into the city of New Orleans. We were driving west, and the sun was cold but fiercely orange, flaming through the dead houses as light from a grinning pumpkin at Halloween. The bridge crested and the city floated before us in the amber light that burned on the flat dead water of the delta, the light that turned everything to rust and embers; the light of winter and of war; the light of disaster.

And then the sun fell behind the horizon and a blue twilight rose like smoke. The houses on either side were whole now and occupied; with the happy light of dinnertime streaming through windows, through curtains and glass. We took an exit from the highway downtown, where sombre office blocks make deep trenches of shadow that the sun rarely penetrates. But among the hard-shouldered monoliths also stand fine old Southern belles; still brave in their scrollwork and white paintwork and to one of these; The Pavilion Hotel, we came at six o’ clock.

A Southern Lady, the Pavilion is conscious of standards that are her own and that are scrupulously maintained. The gentility is not faded; the lobby blazes with chandeliers and brass; the ceiling is all twisting rococo foliage and the wallpaper is crimson. Breakfast was not included but peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are served with hot chocolate between ten and eleven every night. The guests gather for their comforting childhood snack before setting out in search of more adult divertissments.

It was Friday; the Mardi Gras celebrations had been underway for several days already but the larger krewes and displays are for the weekend, Lundi and Mardi Gras. At midnight on Tuesday, the masks are put off and the city falls silently to the forced contrition of the hangover; to sackcloth and Ash Wednesday.

But that is five nights away still.

Along Canal and Royal Street, bleachers had been erected for city dignitaries and those who like to watch the parades from a higher point of vantage. On Friday night, they stood mostly empty. Small groups of people stood about in the streets, watched over by indifferent police. Mobile restaurants selling po’-boys, corn-dogs, ice-cream and cotton candy stood at the junctions, generators roaring. Giant stadium lights stared whitely down on the entire scene. The city was chilly and there was a slightly pointless atmosphere about, of nothing left to do but wait for the signal to begin.

For those who don’t know, the New Orleans Mardi Gras is dominated by krewes; organized groups small and large who work on their costumes and themed floats all year round. Some krewes are small neighborhood affairs, others are lavishly funded and mounted; super-krewes that enjoy corporate sponsorship and have as their grand-marshal some reigning celebrity of film or television. Many have names drawn from the mists of Classical mythology; Orpheus, Endymion, Bacchus and Morpheus. The decorated floats, accompanied by school-bands, military parades and cheerleaders, sail down through the neighborhoods towards the Financial District and the French Quarter. “Throw me something, Mister!” is the constant scream of the crowds but it is only after dark on Bourbon Street that young men and women yank up their shirts, flaunting breasts, bellies and toned abdominal muscles in return for some gaudy trinket. In the neighborhoods; the mood is of a County Fair, with families setting up deck-chairs and windbreakers and the lines of step-ladders from which small children can watch the show while their fathers crack open can after can of beer fished from loaded plastic coolers. Wizened grandparents, swaddled in heavy cardigans, peer from the safety of front halls and stoops. I had to keep moving; people don’t like people to spend too long standing in front of their little darlings as they beg for beads in spots that their parents regard as their private stake-hold.

The beads thing has really gotten out of hand. One hardly needs to make any effort at all; just stand in street long enough and as along as your head isn’t too large, you’ll be festooned with strings of them after a half-hour. The smaller beads are regarded as practically worthless and usually end up hanging from trees and overhead wires. What people really shriek for are the large heavy ones or the beads particular to each krewe, with their commemorative medallions. Floats also routinely distribute stamped metal doubloons, stuffed toys and small noisy musical instruments. Paying attention to what’s going on around you is good idea; sometimes a krewe-member can become overly generous and launch a sack of beads, unopened, into the crowd. Being clonked on the head by a kilo of plastic is not an experience easily forgotten and there were stories of near-injury and nasty shocks. After a few hours, most people have a huge collar of glittering junk piled up around their necks like Mister T and have to start discarding the surplus. By the small hours, the gutters are clogged with silver, green, gold, scarlet and purple trash that you crunch through to get across town.

Before Hurricane Katrina, an effort was being made, Giuliani-style, to clamp down on the carnival-esque excesses of Mardi Gras. Extra police were being deployed under orders, not only to stop robberies and assaults but to regulate public drinking and indecent exposure. After the disaster, the situation is even more frantic. The Hurricane blew away enormous amounts of paperwork; entire criminal records were lost as the jails emptied. Of the thousands of people displaced; the ones who stayed away were the ones with families to protect. In the streets, a common and poignant scene is of two people reunited in their old neighborhood. Two years ago, this was their home; now they are just visitors. They embrace and slap each others’ backs and ruefully exchange details of the places where they live and work today. “Man, I’m in L.A. now. Where you at?” “Boulder, Colorado; can you even believe it?” His friend replies with a disbelieving shake of the head. Boulder City is infamously Christian-conservative; a world away from New Orleans, with its Catholic churches, strip-joints and dives.

In one such dive; part-liquor-store, part smoke-shop, part-speakeasy, an Asian shopkeeper handed out smokes and half-pints of bourbon to a predominantly black clientele. A drunken couple bawled abuse at each other through a thick fug of cigarette smoke. A man lay insensible in the corner, attached to his dog by a piece of string. I received the impression that I was under wary surveillance. A man queuing at the counter told me that because I am white, people assumed that I am a policeman. I assured him that I was not and he began talking casually about the situation in the city since the hurricane. Half the houses in the city may be vacant and the future of the city may be entirely in doubt, but the cost of living is rising rapidly and the contractors are moving in. There is a bad element loose on the streets and the murder rate is the highest it’s been for a while. There are a lot of police about but the feeling is still chaotic and morose, with the need to attract visitors outweighing pettier concerns about public decency and alcohol. When the federal compensation cheques arrived, some people got little in comparison with what they had lost; others received more money that they had ever seen before. There’s a mordant optimism in everything he said, with hope and fatalism mixed in equal measure. Things will go on, he supposed; what’s the alternative?

The alternative is the sort of defeat that Americans are conditioned to believe impossible; the absolute end and destruction of an American city. About the catastrophe, an atmosphere of unbelief still lingers. The images of huddled crowds of terrified people crouching on rooftops and rounded up in the grim concentration camp of the superdome are an ugly dream. Some people choose to protect themselves from it by apportioning blame; trying to characterize the people of New Orleans as bringing disaster upon themselves, as being inherently corrupt, disorganized and chaotic. There is an inescapably racist undertone to this frame of mind, together with a religious smugness. New Orleans was Babylon, Sodom and Gomorrah; New Orleans was Catholic; New Orleans was full of blacks and homosexuals and French-speakers. New Orleans was not America. America is still safe.

It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that most of the choices that seem to dictate the course of our lives are illusionary, and that genetics, together with continuous conditioning, makes deviance or even mild variation virtually impossible.

I have a great friend, a photographer who has always wanted to be a photo-journalist; that is: a photographer whose work illustrates in a coherent series of images some essential truth about life somewhere in the world. In the meantime, he has taken more mundane and marketable work; he illustrates glossy calendars of European countries for the American market; capturing images of donkeys and baroque belfries in Spain; Norman keeps and highland cattle in Britain; donkeys and pipers in Ireland. By cropping out the bustle and detritus of modern urban life, by shooting at dawn or dusk and composing his photographs with skill and artifice, he offers to Americans an idyllic Europe; bright and unspoiled. It’s not the truth but it’s not lying either. It does involve a certain amount of hiding and revealing. True photojournalism is all revealing and no hiding; studio photography is all hiding and no revealing.

He was walking aimlessly around Dublin City when he met another photographer, who told him that there was to be a small reception and lecture given by the Getty Stock Photo Agency at a venue very nearby. Any Irish photographer or photographer working in Ireland was invited; the subject was basically ‘What Getty Wants from You Guys These Days’. As at any such function in Dublin, there were to be complimentary drinks.

Not being one to refuse either professional advice or a free cocktail; off went my friend to the top floor of an exclusive shopping centre, where there were vodka martinis handed out by smiling blonde hostesses to an assortment of local professionals who smiled at their friends or ignored their enemies.

After a period of conversation, the talk began. Like many such a lecture, it was given by a marketing executive; sharp-suited, fresh-faced and brusque; confident that the information that he was sharing was bona fide; part of that absolutely unimpeachable because democratic canon of truth gleaned from focus groups, extensive random-sampling and professionals such a psychologists and sociologists. This is the truth that wins elections, sways public opinion and desire; above all it sells everything that we use. It is no longer open to question; it is the greatest power in the developed world today; far more potent than the religion whose images and archetypes it has annexed. My friend was being told about the images that modern Ireland would respond to: the images that would sell Ireland; he was therefore being informed about the nature of modern Ireland; he was being told who he was and who were the people standing around him.

The most important point made was that images of Ireland should no longer focus on group-activities but on the individual. This might seem odd; that people acting alone should be popular in a country that has for so long depended on it’s communal activities; the family; the Church; sports organisations, pub-culture and musical groups. It’s not that these things have vanished from Irish life; just that they had to be approached from the point of view of the individual. In a photograph of a hurling game; the emphasis should be on a single player; his heroic exertion; his lonely, heroic achievement; his victory as a winner; man of the match. The other players might exist but they are a blur in the background; supporting players in his personal drama.

This literal focus on a pin-sharp individual wholly isolated or surrounded by vague and impressionistic extras; this was the key-note approach to be used everywhere. Call it the spot-light. You don’t share it with anyone; the businessman clinches his deal; the sportswoman breaks the white tape; the musician is lost in his or her art; the socialite dominates the circle of listeners in the bar. The best possible image is the familiar one of the muscular bare-handed rock climber who ‘clasps the crag with crooked hands’ in his world in the sky; advertising everything from shoes to soft-drinks to student loans.

Everyone wants to be special; to feel like an individual or at least like a member of a select group. Walk about any city and you will see people who can be categorized according to any number of categories. Remember rockers? That subgroup has sub-split into many others; goth, grind-core, pop-rock, AOR, nu-metal; not to mention the thousands of people who buy the music who don’t adopt the identity. There is little or no connection between these sub-groups; the grind-core fan has nothing but contempt for the kid who likes nu-metal and they both hate Christian-rock.

This is a crude example; music has always had its cliques, its costumes, and its divisions, primarily because adolescents since the 1950’s have used music as a way of defining their emerging identity and expressing their passions and dissatisfaction with the world around them. Now that adolescence is growing; people no longer emerge from a period of chaotic self-definition; they continue to define and redefine themselves throughout their 20s and into their 30s. They have ‘quarter-life crises’ at 25; 30 is the ‘new 20’ and 60 is now middle age. It has long been said that you are only as old as you feel, but we are getting to the point where none of us know how old we feel at all. I am 30: does that mean that I am old? Should I grow up? Should I get a mortgage or continue buying designer clothes? Am I a married father or a sexy stud? Should I set up a pension or go snow-boarding? The market tells us that we should do both; that the one doesn’t exclude the other. This is a very confusing and expensive proposition; no doubt people feel frustrated.

The original ‘generation gap’ was a marketing tool designed to split the family, society, into two parts. People talk about how homosexuals are attacking the family, but consumer capitalism has been chipping away at it for decades. Convince young people that they are completely different from their parents and that they will never become their parents, nor should they. Grandparents are a different species and small children are pests. Now you have at least two markets; the one defined against the other. Easy.

The real problem is that they didn’t stop there. With our help, the marketers have continued to split the atom; slicing society into thinner and thinner pieces along social, sexual, political, class-based and aesthetic lines. Some of these areas are allowed to cross-pollinate; athletic heterosexual men start bleaching their hair and wearing pink polo shirts; whilst gay men adopt the Abercrombie and Fitch uniform that began it’s career defined as ‘rugged and heterosexual’. Present generations ransack the past for inspiration: Tom Ford’s Gucci revolution virtually reversed the flow of modern feminism. (Ironically Ford is a gay man and gay men have modern feminism to thank for virtually everything they have achieved since the 1960’s.) Ethnic tattoos become an epidemic; a rash of Me-ness. Who wouldn’t hire a waiter because his has a tattoo these days? How long will it be before sober business suits completely vanish from the workplace? ‘Real men’ complain about ‘metro-sexuality’ and run to take refuge in a faux-masculinity based on off-road vehicles, boot-camp exercise regimes and beer. Everything is celebrated; everything else is reviled. Everything has camp value; everything is me.

I cannot think of a single person who cannot be catagorised according to an ever-lengthening list of market-types; each with its own guidelines and characteristics? As Bill Hicks sarcastically remarked; “The anti-marketing-market? That’s a great market!” Red ribbons changed charity into consumerism and an expression of personal allegiance to liberal values. Now Americans wear yellow-ribbons to declare allegiance to the US military. How do you sell charity to jocks, who think ribbons are gay? The Livestrong yellow rubber wrist-band makes a masculine statement about yourself, supposedly fights cancer, celebrates an athletic (non-gay) hero, and it costs nothing to produce.

The Getty Photo Archive is just telling Irish photographers what the situation is, and has been for many years now. Despite its pretensions towards hyper-modernity, Ireland has habitually been five or ten years behind the nations that it most seeks to emulate; the United States and Britain. A quick glance at the posters for the present elections reveals how little Irish politicians know, or want to know about marketing personality. Flat green rectangles with some indifferently-photographed apparatchik staring out at the viewer; a party logo; a meaningless slogan; empty of imagery, connotation or nuance. Maybe this is very clever; maybe Irish people are uninterested in personality politics. Or maybe this is just an economy with a coastline around it and nobody cares about anything but tax-breaks and property-prices. Politics is the poor cousin of consumer culture and we express ourselves, not through politics but consumption.

There is no ‘Me’ in democracy.

December 22nd 2006, Ann Arbor

My, don’t we feel awkward sitting here looking at each other awkwardly as even this sentence is, that is to say, awkward? That piece of exquisite verbiage should illustrate my present mental state fairly well. Like a big ship full of fried eggs and cheese listing on a noisome sea of booze, my breakfast swings and bumps on last night’s excesses. There is no snow on the ground here but the air is filled up with water. Fog; fog is everywhere, hiding anything that strays more than fifty yards away. The windshields run, the roofs patter and drip, the shoes fill and the fronts of your jeans feel uncomfortable where your jacket ends. Colorado is paralyzed by snow but Ann Arbor lies swathed in the same mist that is keeping planes on the ground in London. Not a chance of a snowflake this year, I fear.

One might almost forget that jolly Ho-ho-mas is upon us, but thankfully, the toasty hearts of the American corporate sector are ready to suffocate us all in holiday cheer. At home, Christmas means a visible rise in the number of steamily erotic fragrance commercials on the television, the occasional hamper advertisement from Londis, a bit of pointless prancing- that is to say, ballet- on the BBC and the ritual disinterment of Noddy Holder. You may have heard American conservative commentators say that there is a War against Christmas? This, to their minds, is bad, as opposed to other wars that are manly, patriotic and highly profitable affairs. No, this war is a bad one, one barely befitting the name WAR, which deserves to be declaimed manlily in patriotic capitols like this: WAR. (Did you notice that if you make ‘manly’ into an adverb, it turns totally gay-looking? Man-lily? That, Sir, yes-SIR, is the reason why gays will never be allowed to join the military; they will turn those fine men and wi-men into man-lilies.)

Back from this tangent I spring, like a well-lubricated trigger. This war on Christmas is more of a slightly contemptible inconvenience, like being sexually harassed by someone with multiple sclerosis. ‘How dare you!’ you cry in the post-office queue and turn, only to see the withered creature withdrawing its fingers from your person and smirking pitiably from its bath chair. Thankfully, Bill O Reilly is on hand to defend the sacred festival of the nativity of Christ from the likes of those Italian liberals who put hand-holding homosexuals in the crib in Rome. Judging from the dust jacket of his latest tome, Bill is either on the South Beach Diet or has contracted a terminal illness, but his vigor remains, well, vigorous. From the Gortex shell of his ski-jacket, his bony head juts like a giant dislocated knee on a neck as stringy as that of a tortoise, but his eyes are still as narrow as a rattlesnake’s vagina, the better to pierce falsehood. And HE says that there is a war on Christmas therefore it must be true therefore shut up. QE fuckin’ D.

However Stalinist things may have gotten in the public sector, the corporations have risen to the challenge. Every time you turn around, seasonal jollity engulfs you like a giant pair of sexually unappealing breasts; the breasts of an emotional ex-schoolteacher met years later perhaps, or those of an annoying co-worker who is a bit drunk now. Though the reviews for The Nativity Story make Baby Jesus cry (Anthony Lane and his smirking homosexual friends will be drinking scalding Cosmos in hell soon enough), the lines at the box-office are frankincense and myrrh to his button nose. Everything that is not wreathed in plastic holly is dusted with styrene snow. Every man wears a reindeer sweater; every woman has her novelty Christmas earrings on (“They’re little San’a heads; look, they flash read and green, aren’t they just DARling?”) and the downtrodden African-American cashiers at TJ Maxx are wearing their Yuletide scowls.

At Barnes and Noble, there’s a special on unsightly coffee-table books so huge that, if they’re in the room, you HAVE to look at them, so glossy that you can put them in the centre of the floor and have a dance-off. It’s either that or a calendar for 2008. Here I have to step with care; Peter drags me from shop to shop to make sure that his Spain and Britain calendars are in stock. If there are more than eight on the shelf, he curses the disgusting public for not snapping them up. If there are less than three, the curses the idle staff that refuse to restock them. And what company they keep! Do you like doggies? Pah, what a question; what breed? Chihuahuas? Now, what do you want them dressed up as? What do you mean you don’t want them dressed up? Without costumes, they’re cute but not DARling. How about firemen; to commemorate the heroes of 9-11? OMG, that’s DARLing and shows you love America! It also sends out the right message to our allies. Did you know that Muslims think that doggies are unclean, and pigglies too? Don’t forget to buy a calendar of pigglies dressed as characters from Star Wars just to gosh-darn those terrorists straight to heck. Look at Luke Skyporker! Look at Ham Solo! Gee, that’s funny. You’re a funny guy. That guy should get, like, a medal for funny. He’s like, Lord Funnington-Smile of Laughter-shire.

Everyone is wired on cookie-dough and mood stabilizers. Peter’s parents, as I may have mentioned before, live in a warm condo-community surrounded by the headquarters of Pfizer pharmaceuticals. I can see their magical silvery walls of right now. Nobody goes in; nothing comes out; only boxes of triple-scrumptious anti-depressants to chase away those blue meanies. On a cold and frosty morning, you can stand outside the chain-link fence and watch the plumes of steam turn to ice crystals in the air. I like to wrap my scarf up tight and put on my-ear muffs and lift up my cherry nose and just BREATHE in the delicious fumes. After a quarter-hour, I’m so full of Christmas spirit that I could shit party-favors and piss eggnog.

Oompa Loompa Doopedy-dee/
Frowning’s illegal; try it and see./
Oompa Loompa Doopedy-da/
Read the small print, sing Fa-la-la-la.

What do you get out of wearing a frown?
Mentioning things that get everyone down?
Everyone’s having good times but you/
What do you think we ought-to-do?

Think-pro-tec-tive cus-to-dy
Let’s-black-bag-his-grumpy-head.

Oompa Loompa Doopedy-dip,
If you are wise, you’ll button your lip,
You will live in happiness too,
Like the Oompa Loompa Doopedy do.

(Failure to sing the preceding song to the correct melody and in proper Oompa Loompa manner as demonstrated in the 1971 Mel Stuart movie constitutes a felony under US federal law under Section 32 of the US Homeland Security Bill (amended 2006), paragraph 5c. Describing the amended bill, entire or in part, as ‘terrifying’ or ‘indefensible’ is also proscribed under section 51 of the same bill. Either felony is punishable by a period of no less than _____________________.)

Charlie wishes you and yours all the blessings of this holiday season. Thank you for your continuing support. Have a joyous and prosperous New Year; we look forward to seeing you in 2007.