On the way back from New Zealand, I had the option of a stopover in Los Angeles. I took it and went to stay at Venice Beach for a week. I'd never been to the US before and have always felt a hick when owning up to the fact. I once heard someone say that they had no inclination to visit the US-as if to have one would be immoral. It is partly because people say such ridiculous things about the US that I am attracted to it.
I imagine it to be a sexy sort of country, with a vigorous, miscegenistic populace brought up to believe that anything is possible, including immortality and personal happiness. I also imagine that, in many respects, the US's present is Britain's future; where the various new blooms and mutations of that global organism called "liberal democracy" first became apparent.
Although I freely use the term liberal democracy, I'm still struggling to comprehend what it is. So far my line of enquiry has led me to a book called The End of History and the Last Man, in which Francis Fukuyama claims that, believe it or not, liberal democracy is the acme of mankind's ideological evolution. One of the reasons I opted to stay in Los Angeles was because I thought it would be an appropriate setting for tackling such a book.
We have arrived at the end of the history of conflicting ideologies, says Fukuyama, because the bourgeois "men without chests" have triumphed finally and irrevocably over the aristocratic "beasts with red cheeks." Competing ideologies such as communism have all failed to satisfy the long term, deep seated needs of the human soul. Liberal democracy alone can achieve this because it endlessly stimulates reason and desire (main components of the soul according to Plato), and offers each of its citizens what Hegel called "recognition." I have to admit that stated as baldly as that it sounds a bit hit-and-miss, but as I sat outside a caf? on Venice Beach, I was so engrossed by Fukuyama's argument, that the bums were loath to trouble me. Sometimes I looked up from my book to contemplate the handsome Last Men and Women as they glided past my table on their rollerblades. I also saw the police and, more surprisingly, Jonathan Ross skating by. "Believe the Hype -Get Sucked In" said a startlingly frank advertisement glued to a palm tree opposite.
To be honest though, the chief reason I chose to stay at Venice Beach is because it is the setting for Baywatch, the compulsive American television series about a team of scrupulously moral, politically correct, well-endowed lifeguards, who run around the beach with next to nothing on. Undoubtedly, the part of my soul which comes into play when I watch Baywatch is desire. When I rented a room in a council flat in Hackney last year, the tenant (Arthur) and I watched the programme religiously every Saturday evening throughout the winter. Usually we stared in appreciative silence at the healthy, golden bodies cavorting in the Californian sunshine, but one day Arthur could no longer contain himself and madly blurted out: "Before I fucking die, I'm going to LA, just to see all those babes fucking walking about with nothing but bits of string up their arses."
Then he got up and went out and as he went past me I noticed he was struggling to control his face as if he were about to burst into tears. Just to compound Arthur's frustration, when I got to Los Angeles I bombarded him with postcards of smiling babes in bikinis and wished he were there.
My week at Venice Beach coincided with the Miss Galaxy 1996 national female bodybuilding championships. The Hotel Cadillac, where I stayed, was right on the beach, and for three days you couldn't move in it for female bodybuilders. They were everywhere: in the lobby, the lift, the corridors, and up on the roof, where topless sunbathing was discretely permitted. "How's it going, dude?" they'd say as I lay down among them, and I'd reply: "Very well, thank you" and wish that Arthur was there because even with his eyes out on stalks he would have come straight back with something witty or suggestive and initiated a conversation.
The contest was held over three days. Each day I rollerbladed over to the outdoor stage where the heats were being held, and watched as one orange, muscular woman after another took the stage, walked up and down a while, then stood and flexed her body in front of the judges, one of whom was "Magic" Johnson, the famously HIV-positive basketball star. At one point he was asked to say a few words. He got to his feet with a humble, ironic smile and said what a pity it was there was only one prize as the contestants were all so beautiful he'd like to give them all one. Then he sat down again and the rap music was pumped up and yet more muscular women trooped out on to the stage. For a while I shared a concrete post with a fireman in uniform who just kept repeating "God damn. God damn." I sympathised by making agonised grimaces at him. Surrounded by so much bulging flesh on the stage, and by the bodybuilder boyfriends who comprised a large part of the audience, I felt quite puny; ethereal even. About the only individual present, in fact, without much of a chest to speak of.
