Lounging by a bright blue pool, Kyndra and Cami, stars of MTV’s hit reality show Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County, chat with a bunch of other teenagers. Kyndra’s white bikini shows off an artificially enhanced figure, while Cami’s dark skin glows against an unnaturally bright blue sky. This is Laguna Beach, after a fashion, but it isn’t the TV show. It’s a live appearance, a chance for the show’s bitchiest characters to hang with some of the 2 million viewers who tune in to their breakups and hookups every Wednesday night. As the pool fills up with fans, someone asks why the girls are always so mean to fellow cast member Tessa. Kyndra shrugs: “We just don’t like her personally.” Cami can’t be bothered to answer; she’s busy tongue wrestling with some hipster dude in sunglasses.

Kyndra and Cami are kind of fake—and not just in the catty teenage sense of the word. The two girls by the pool are computerized 3-D replicas of the cast members, who are using mouse and keyboard to navigate their avatars through a multiplayer online environment known as Virtual Laguna Beach. Anyone with a PC and a broadband connection can join them.

You want your MTV? These days, that means going virtual.

Read the complete text at Wired.

An online game is an odd place to have your reputation precede you. But that’s exactly what happened to me not long ago in the massively multiplayer universe of EVE Online. My character there, a spaceship pilot named Walker Spaight, was minding his own business one day when I got a message from another player, who wanted to know if I was “the same Walker Spaight from Second Life,” another 3D online world.

Read the complete text at PC World.

It’s the middle of the night and I’m standing in an empty, starlit field in the virtual world of Second Life. In the distance is a low-polygon-count shopping mall. But at my feet, there’s only pixelated grassland – a simple green texture that repeats to the edges of the computer screen.

Just hours ago, a lavish mansion stood here. It was a custom job built for a player known as BallerMoMo King, whose blinged-out avatar carries a diamond-studded cane and is never without his posse of bodyguards and harem of “MoMo hos.” Baller is one of Second Life’s most notorious gangsters, famous for hiring talented residents to script weapons that can bounce an avatar across the gamespace and bombs that produce enough smoke and fire to occasionally crash a server. It seems Linden Lab, the company that runs Second Life, has had enough. The MoMo mansion – and Baller’s account – has been erased.

Read the complete text at Wired.

As we all know by now (and the rest of the world is rapidly learning), the imaginary currencies that are earned, spent and traded in massively multiplayer online games and other virtual worlds are anything but virtual, themselves. While no government authority stands behind them to insure their value, a seal of approval isn’t needed for a currency to become “real.” A World of Warcraft gold piece is worth as much as you can get for it on the market – about $0.10 at the moment. The U.S. dollar derives its value in exactly the same way.

Read the complete text at The Escapist.

MANAMA, Bahrain — It’s the height of the holiday season and I’m hiding in the men’s room in the executive suite of a big steel-and-glass bank building, scarfing a Snickers bar and stealing sips of bottled water while no one’s looking because I don’t want to offend anyone. The problem is, it’s Ramadan and I’m in Manama, the capital city of the island nation of Bahrain off the Saudi Arabian coast south of Kuwait, and by religious bent and in some cases by law the secretaries and executives I encounter in the day-long series of meetings I’ve been stuck in for two and a half weeks aren’t able to offer me coffee or even a glass of water. Everyone is fasting from sun-up to sun-down, suffering the ever more gnawing stomach burn and squirm of uncomfortability that comes from not eating or drinking all day.

So I’m locked in a men’s room huffing chocolate. It seems outlandish, but really it’s a mild inconvenience, given the good fortune of finding myself on a magazine assignment in Bahrain. Although it’s Ramadan everywhere else, at least I can get room service whenever I get back to my hotel.

While the Muslim holy month of Ramadan is more like Easter than Christmas (or maybe more like Lent), it shares some characteristics with both Christian and Jewish holidays. (All three religions are based on the same text, after all.) At the end of the month there’s a great three-day party, called Eid Al-Fitr, when everyone dresses their houses in fairy lights, goes visiting and sits through an endless string of dinners with the relatives.

During Ramadan itself, as during Hanukkah, it’s sunset that determines when the fun begins. Only instead of lighting candles and giving out gelt, Muslims make the infinitely wiser move of gorging themselves on as much food as possible, keeping almost Spanish hours, and doing as little as possible during the day before closing up shop around 2 p.m. to head home and wait for the sun to set and the food fest to begin again. The restaurants are closed all day, and it’s illegal for even Westerners like myself to eat, drink or smoke outside.

Far be it from me, a non-denominational American in a Muslim nation at a time of unprecedented tension, another bombing next door in Saudi Arabia, and scary-sounding security warnings – stuff like “avoid places where Westerners might congregate” – far be it from me to step on my hosts’ highly inconvenient religious practices by inconsiderately indulging my hunger pangs in public. Hence the clandestine chocolate bar.

When I get a call from Moniem, an enthusiastic young stockbroker I’ve met at a Ramadan supper given by the stock exchange (their Christmas party, more or less), I’m ambivalent about going out. But it’s only in New York that I’ve ever been actually assaulted, and hey, how many times am I going to be in Manama on a Saturday night? So at 9:30 I meet him in the lobby of my hotel and we pile into his cousin Najeeb’s Suzuki Vitara and head downtown for what sounds to me like a gallery opening. “We can go see some paintings,” Najeeb, a back-office accountant, tells me. And all I can think is how fitting it is, somehow, that I should find Manhattan culture being imitated so far from New York.

It takes about two minutes to drive to downtown Manama from my hotel. It takes about two minutes to drive pretty much anywhere in Bahrain, an island about thirty miles long and only ten across. Most of the country’s 750,000 citizens live in Manama, at the northeast tip, but a few towns are sprinkled further down the dusty island, as are a U.S. naval base, a lushly irrigated golf course, and, weirdly, the Middle East’s first Formula 1 racing circuit.

The city itself is a mix of Financial District Modern and two- and three-story Colonial Stucco buildings of the kind found from Manila to Mozambique. Aspiring boulevards emanate from honking traffic circles only to bog down in one-lane back streets that wind around mosques, souqs, tea shops and grill restaurants. It’s a mellow city with a happening nightlife (this is where the Saudis come to cut loose, after all), but even during Ramadan there’s the impression that business is getting done.

Tonight the streets are alive. It’s only a few blocks from our parking spot behind the stock exchange building to the warren of narrow alleys that constitutes the old souq, but we walk them in the company of dozens of other Arabs all headed in the same direction. I lope along behind Najeeb from square to square, followed by Moniem and a melismatic soundtrack of Arabic music. It’s as crowded as an American subway at rush hour and I have to dip my shoulder between passers-by to keep up. I am the only white guy in sight, but no one seems to notice.

We stop on a corner where a man is serving something Tang-like in little plastic cups, but when I try to pay the cousins laugh at me. The crowd is lighter here, but they are still coming and going in all directions as if headed to a rock concert maybe, stopping to greet each other in the street or not stopping but just smiling and waving as they go past. At the end of the street I can see a building that’s somehow grand and squat at the same time, its soaring face a brilliant aquamarine festooned with tall ornate Arabic writing in white and gold. Most of the people passing by are either women in black abaya or men in white dish-dasha, the heel-length robe that is the standard men’s uniform in the Arab Gulf (though both Moniem and Najeeb wear American-style clothes). A couple of girls go by in the long robes and headscarves that leave only their faces revealed. Najeeb stares after them hungrily and asks me if I think they look nice.

Moniem is otherwise occupied. “Not so many paintings,” he tells me, looking disappointed, and it takes me a moment to realize he’s referring not to art in a gallery but to paintings like the one on the banner being carried toward us by two young men, of a bearded Muslim preacher or prophet or maybe even an ayatollah. “Maybe we see some music,” Moniem says. And as if on cue, a little cart like a laundromat wagon comes trundling around the corner with a loudspeaker teetering on a pole sticking out of it, powered by a car battery and tended by two young men in black slacks and black button-down shirts, broadcasting the words of the bearded, black-robed man who leads them. A phalanx of clarinetists, also in black, follows along, joined here and there by a trumpet or two, all tootling the same dirge-like Arabic melody, and between them and the imam’s sermon – it’s enough to drown out all the other noise on the street and focus my attention completely on the scene.

The musicians march four abreast but the street is only eight or ten feet wide, and Najeeb’s would-be girlfriends scamper down a side alley to get out of the way. Everyone else stands to one side or another and as the marchers go past, I suddenly find myself pressed into a doorway, transfixed by the musicians’ clamor and then by the long double column of men who follow behind them. They come in a slow, leg-swinging pantomime of a march, all dressed in black (some in what could pass for business attire, some in jeans and AC/DC tour shirts), and all in their 20s and 30s and 40s, neither too young nor too old, the same solemn expression on each man’s face. Each one carries a short bundle of chains fixed to a wooden handle, and as he rotates his torso through each step, he throws one arm over the opposite shoulder to deliver himself a ceremonial blow.

Once I get the hang of Moniem’s English, I understand that we’re out on the night of the Muslim year that commemorates the martyrdom of Imam Ali, who founded the Shiite sect of Islam in the Seventh century and who is apparently buried in Iraq’s holy city, Najaf. The men performing the ceremonial self-flagellation known as latmiyaat are expressing the sect’s 1,350-year-old grief – much as Christians commemorate Christ’s death and resurrection at Easter (or did, until the vapid bunnies and painted eggs got the better of them).

The streets of Manama are a million miles away from Manhattan and art galleries and insipid wine-guzzling scenesters – though even crowded into the doorway with a strange religious procession swirling through the night streets in front of me, I can’t help feeling momentarily like a five o’clock-shadowed Brad Pitt in the second act of a multi-million-dollar filmed-on-location epic of love, loss and bad line readings. When the procession passes, my co-stars and I wander on through the rough hodge-podge of three- and four-story whitewashed buildings. Thin short alleys let onto small rectangles of open space where kids run around and kick balls while the adults chat like friendly neighbors on the sidelines of a Fourth of July parade. Where five streets meet and somehow form a square, more than a hundred women dressed in black are seated on the ground, listening to the story of Imam Ali’s life. A more vitriolic sermon emerges from a mosque that appears suddenly, recessed between two buildings across the street from a row of storefronts. Amid the rapid-fire Arabic, one semi-familiar word surfaces from time to time: Amreeka. America. The security warnings return to my mind, but in this crowd I somehow feel more safe than threatened. This is not a place where Westerners might congregate, after all. “Don’t worry,” Moniem tells me. “It is George Bush they do not like, not you.”

Without my noticing, we’ve wandered back toward the car. The crowds have thinned out a bit, the procession has broken up. The breeze coming off the Manama waterfront, a block away, is downright cool. “What do you want to do now?” Moniem asks me. I hardly have an answer. Najeeb breaks in: “Let’s go to the mall.”

Seef Mall, about a mile away, strikes me as – well, it’s a mall. A vast multi-level indoor air-conditioned mall as up-to-date as any in America, filled with name brands, screaming children and teenage girls – much to Najeeb’s distraction. At the Dairy Queen I have a falafel-burger and marvel at how far down the fast-food chain Bahrain reaches: there’s DQ and Burger King, but there’s also Cinnabon, Bennigan’s, Ponderosa Steakhouse, and even, weirdly, a Seattle’s Best Coffee. I’m a bit shell-shocked by the transition from centuries-old ceremony to 21st century commerce, but it’s soon clear we’re here mostly for Najeeb’s benefit. He ducks into a cosmetics store to flirt with the girl at the register. He has a “girlfriend,” whom he’ll most likely marry, he tells me, but she’s still a teenager and he sees her only about a half dozen times a year. He prefers the idea of love American-style. Despite his frustration, the impression I have is that he gets to try his hand at it often enough.

It’s getting late. The cousins suggest we take in a movie at the mall’s 16-plex. “Johnny Depp,” Najeeb nods approvingly at a Pirates of the Caribbean poster. But the last thing I want to do in Bahrain is sit through an American movie.

Not that an American movie is at all out of place here. The Gulf has its share of American restaurants, American products, American attitudes and ambition (while I am in Bahrain, Najeeb is head-hunted away to a new job after only two days at his old one) and American institutions like the mall, the gigaplex movie theater and the AC/DC t-shirt. Perhaps that’s part of the problem, but not everyone sees it that way.

On the ride back to my hotel, Backstreet Boys blaring from the Vitara’s speakers, I thank the cousins for showing me a slice of Islam I probably never would have found on my own. This sparks a discussion of “living the Muslim way,” which Moniem and Najeeb describe as a life in harmony with one’s fellows – something they find lacking in the Arab world. “Here is violence, discrimination, bad feeling between Shia and Sunni,” Najeeb says. Moniem agrees.

“Here we are not living the Muslim way,” Najeeb tells me. “Only in America do you find people living like true Muslims.”

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AS A MEMBER of Oman’s Royal Family, Her Excellency Sayyida Zawan al-Said might be expected firmly to support her country’s government, or at least to keep a low profile where matters of domestic politics and international relations are concerned. This is the Gulf, after all, where women are meant to be seen and not heard.

But although the Sayyida presents the splendorous picture one expects from a Gulf royal – when she strides into the lobby of the Grand Hyatt Muscat to meet me, it’s in a Dolce & Gabbana denim waistcoat and jeans that hug her curvy figure, with a Chanel handbag swinging from her arm – her voice, with its distant hint of a lisp, is a different matter. When Zawan speaks, she hardly blends into the background – though this is due mostly to the fact that she can be heard every day on Oman’s only English-language radio station, hosting a breakfast show on which she regularly takes the Government to task and fields listeners’ calls on everything from male injectable contraceptives to women’s rights, Madonna’s latest change of style or whatever else might also cross her mind.

Far from being a quiet face in the royal crowd, Zawan has taken on a calling few in the Arab world – whether women or men – would dare to try: after a dozen years of work she has transformed herself into an American-style “shock jock”, with two popular and eyebrow-raising English-language radio shows each day that have just completed their first year on the air. When I meet her she is on her way to London for a well-deserved break, and to seek out foreign broadcasting talent who might be able to help her expand her offerings beyond Early On, the breakfast show she hosts from 7am to 9am five mornings a week, and Later On, the afternoon drivetime show she produces.

And far from earning the wrath of Omani society, her candour has been widely appreciated by listeners who call in to her shows or even drop by to be part of her studio audience ‹ once they get over their shock.

Though her subject matter might seem unremarkable to a Western audience, the relatively autocratic Gulf does not yet have many presenters who question things – such as whether it’s fair to have the police hiding speed cameras behind the bushes – or who ridicule Sultan Qaboos bin Said al-Said’s “meet-the-people” tour (”not a single woman among these so-called people”).

The 39-year-old BBC-trained broadcaster describes her show as “a bit of a wake-up call for a lot of people”. A typical comment from a caller: “I’m so glad someone is saying that at long last” ‹ though a segment on the search for female Viagra inspired one listener to call in with the news that “we’re so sick of faking it”, a comment that itself must have been something of a wake-up call for many listeners.

Though there is no ratings service in Oman to track Early On’s popularity, it is “the most listened-to programme”, according to Zawan, and has even attracted media attention in neighbouring states such as the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.

At the same time, Zawan is aware that much of its success is due to a lack of choice: “It’s the only breakfast show on the only radio station for the British expatriate and English-speaking Omani communities,” she says.

But compared to what came before it, Early On is “extremely, extremely popular”, Zawan adds. “It was just a nothing breakfast show before. You had a string of songs and there was no one saying anything and it had no name and no specific presenter. I just waited and thought, gosh, what a goldmine this is.”

When she approached Oman’s Minister of Information about taking over the show, he was sceptical at first, but finally offered her the slot – with no support and no pay. After the first three weeks of funding, producing, co-ordinating and presenting the show herself, as well as raising three children, Zawan was ready to quit. But with some encouragement from her husband, a retired Omani brigadier – and in light of the fact that the show was a runaway hit within days of going on the air – she persevered, eventually striking a deal with the Ministry of Information under which she would continue to provide free programming to the station in return for the freedom to seek her own commercial backing.

Six months later she signed up HSBC to sponsor Early On, and soon after that landed Bank Muscat as a sponsor for Later On. Except for some bells and whistles that she says give her shows a more professional feel (things like the programmes’ jingles, voiceovers and other effects, which she pays for herself), the sponsorships cover most of her costs, and the salaries of ten people who work for her.

While it probably hasn’t been hard to outdo Radio Oman’s traditional fare, Zawan has also been lucky in that she hit the airwaves at a time when the country is hungry to be engaged by a liberal dialogue on politics and current events.

October 2003 saw all Omanis get the vote for the first time. But turnout to elect the Majlis al-Shura, or consultative council, the country’s parliament, was hardly stellar, coming in at less than 25 per cent of the 800,000 Omanis eligible to vote. Political analysts in Oman and the United States say the low numbers are due to the fact that most Omanis still do not feel they have a political voice, despite Sultan Qaboos’s token steps toward democratisation. The Majlis – like most in the Arab world – is not empowered to make any laws but only to comment on those proposed by the Sultan’s Cabinet. And political campaigns are forbidden to use the mass media, making it difficult for the more than 500 candidates who were standing to reach more people than they could shake hands with.

Zawan does what she can to move the political dialogue along with comments on things like the Sultan’s meet-the-people tour, but even she is constrained. “At the end of the day, I would have liked to know who these candidates were,” she says. “But how could you move towards a more publicised, political comment when you actually have a huge big notice stuck on the board saying ‘No one is allowed to talk to any of the candidates standing for election on any of the programmes’? How do you react? That just says it all, really.”

Nevertheless, for the Arab world she remains an unusually freewheeling presenter. Some have chalked this up to her royal heritage: her father was an Omani government minister and brother of Sultan Qaboos’s father, making the Sultan her first cousin.

Zawan, of course, disagrees with the notion that her royal blood has given her more latitude, and holds that anyone could say what she says on Omani radio. When I ask why she feels the freedom to speak out when others don’t, she gives an answer that is odd to hear, coming from royalty: “I feel I have nothing to lose.”

Though her lineage probably helped her gain access to the Minister of Information to propose her show, she did not simply walk into a career in radio. After taking advantage of London University’s external degree programme to study English literature at Oxford, Zawan cast about for direction before trying Radio Oman in 1991. Having found her passion, she went on to take a graduate degree in broadcast journalism and has pressed ahead with her ambitions ever since.

Now, with five hours of independent commercial programming on Radio Oman, Zawan has created what she calls “a radio station within a radio station”, and hopes to take it even further. While in London she will be looking for a presenter with a lively enough personality to take over her duties with Early On (her search in Oman proved fruitless), which would allow her to start a third programme in the lunchtime slot. At that point, she says: “The next step is to open my own radio station.”

Her dreams include even more than that. She is currently drafting a proposal for an English-language television entertainment show (”a really massive big programme”) to offer to an Arabic station, and hints that she would like one day to be in the business of commissioning such fare, rather than producing it. So how long will it be before we’re tuning into Zawan-TV? “I’m trying actually to be less of a control freak, so I don’t get hurt,” she laughs. She is committed to Oman and to helping to develop the media there, but admits to the possibility that her ambitions might one day take her abroad again: “At the end of the day, does it really matter where you base yourself if you are able to have your own satellite TV station?”

-30-

“Did I show you my leather outfit?” Philip Kaplan pops up off the sofa and lopes through his midtown Manhattan loft, returning with a white leather pants-and-vest set. “Touch it,” he urges, pointing to the big red star stitched onto the vest. “It’s python. Made by the guy who does all the stuff for Guns N’ Roses and Marilyn Manson. The pants were like $2,000, and the vest was like $1,000.” He strokes the python. “I designed it,” he says proudly.

Until recently, Philip Kaplan could only dream about buying $3,000 rock-star outfits. When he arrived in New York from Chevy Chase, Maryland, five years ago, he lived at his grandmother’s apartment on the Upper West Side, in his mother’s childhood bedroom, because he couldn’t make rent. “I knew the locations of all the ATMs that gave out $10 bills,” he recalls.

Even at the height of the tech boom, when he had come up with FuckedCompany.com, the dot-bomb Web site he still runs out of his apartment, he couldn’t afford that much “rich-guy stuff,” as he calls it, with a dismissive wave. Then one day last year, when he was 26, he sat down to figure his net worth for a mortgage application. Somewhere along the way, he had hit seven figures. “I called my parents,” he says. “I was like, ‘Guess what?’”

Kaplan will only say that he’s “a 7- or 8-millionaire,” but the exact number isn’t the point. The point is that in the not-so-distant past, Kaplan was just a nice kid from the suburbs who could hardly afford a round of drinks. Now he’s a guy who once spent so large at the Tribeca Grand Hotel bar that the management comped him a room at closing time because they didn’t want the party to end.

When I first meet him, Kaplan has been up for 48 hours straight, staring at lines of code on his computer screen. Because he often works all night and sleeps late into the afternoon, he left the steel shutters on the bedroom windows of his loft on 31st Street. “I don’t want to be a cog in the machine,” he says. “I want to be the machine.”

Scattered around his Aeron chair are a bunch of shoeboxes that have just been delivered by UPS. Kaplan keeps buying shoes on Zappos.com because they have his size – no small thing to a guy with size 14 feet. He still favors jeans and t-shirts at home, but when he wanted to sharpen up his wardrobe recently, he kept the Versace boutique open late so he could buy a couple $2,000 suits. The upgrade is extending to his home : Kaplan has just closed on a new triplex apartment on 15th Street. We hail a cab to go see it. (If Kaplan had a few more errands to do, he might have hired a car and driver for the afternoon. He likes to drive, but like most New Yorkers, he doesn’t own a car. On a recent trip to L.A., he rented a $400-a-day Corvette.)

Down on 15th Street, Kaplan strides into his new place and opens his arms wide, surveying his kingdom. The large, empty ground-floor cube is fitted out with fixtures that were high-tech before he was born. “Isn’t it great?” He’d been looking in the million-dollar range, he says, but his broker showed him this $720,000 triplex because he knew it had something Kaplan would want: an underground bedroom that has no windows at all. Kaplan put 25 percent down. “There’s no reason to pay cash for anything with interest rates at 6 percent,” he says.

The new place also has a washer and dryer, which his current apartment lacks. One afternoon I go with him to the Laundromat to make good on an overdue bill. The last time they picked up his clothes, the sack tipped the scales at 76 pounds. “I just keep buying shirts and socks and let the rest of it get dirty,” Kaplan says cheerfully, writing a check for $170. “When I get to the point where I’m recycling underwear, that’s when I do my laundry.”

Kaplan takes pains to point out that as millionaires go, he is “not super bling-blingy.” But he has nothing against blowing cash in pursuit of a good time, and he’s flown himself to Vegas for the past two years for the Adult Video News Awards, where he rubs elbows (if only that) with the girls, parties with a porn photographer friend, and tries to get close to idols like Gene Simmons and Vince Neil.

If Neil didn’t remember Kaplan from the year before, it’s probably only because Neil has never seen Spel, the heavy metal band in which Kaplan moonlights, playing drums. One cold winter night, Kaplan rents a Ford Expedition to drive the group to a gig deep in the hinterlands of New Jersey. He picks his bandmates up at the $1,200-a-month rehearsal space he rents on Eighth Avenue where the guys also live. On stage, Kaplan beams from behind his drum set like a manic Charlie Watts. His best move is when he spins a stick and pushes his $800 Selima Optique glasses up the bridge of his nose in the same motion.

Spel is pretty good at their Jersey gig, but it’s clear that Kaplan shouldn’t quit his day job. Actually, he hasn’t had a day job in about four years. He quit a company called THINK New Ideas in 1999 to start his own Internet consultancy. Then he set up FuckedCompany in the spring of 2000, gave away the consultancy to his employees later that year, and has been happily working on his “art,” as he thinks of it, ever since. Besides FuckedCompany, Kaplan’s art consists of the handful of sites he’s dreamed up (like his latest, MarketBanker.com), almost all of which are designed, tested, maintained by Kaplan and a single employee. Kaplan usually eats at home so he can work more. If he wants a meal from a restaurant that doesn’t deliver to his neighborhood, he phones in a $14 pick-up order and hires a $25 courier service to get it for him. He would rather work than go on vacation. He likes to work so much that perhaps it’s not surprising that this interferes with his love life.

Kaplan is tall, handsome, nice, funny, and rich, so it seems odd that he wouldn’t have a girlfriend. “A girl might be really attracted to the things I’ve done, and then, once we get in a relationship, she’ll be frustrated that I can’t spend enough time with her,” he explains. “But I didn’t just wake up and have seven companies.” When he’s invited to the premiere of the movie Spun at the Tribeca Grand Hotel, the only girl he can think of to take is someone he chatted with recently on the Internet. “A normal bachelor millionaire would probably be able to lock down a date for that,” Kaplan muses. Even a fake rich guy like Joe Millionaire has better luck. “People perceive me as a man about town, but I’m just the dork who didn’t have any plans for Valentine’s Day,” Kaplan says. “I want a girl to use me for my money.”

One night, I meet Kaplan in Little Italy bar where he likes to hang out with a bunch of other young Internet successes every Monday night. “I have two very distinct groups of people who are my friends,” Kaplan says. “Half my crowd are not particularly rich, half are. It’s not like we sit around and count money. But we’ll go to a bar and get the $400 bottle of vodka and sit at a table and just be stupid.”

Not that Kaplan likes to be stupid with just anyone. He’s been to the Hamptons but has no wish to be part of that scene. Instead, Kaplan thinks he might prefer the seedy cool of Asbury Park on the Jersey shore, where he’s considering investment properties. “It’s half, like, crack den,” he admits, “but parts of it are starting to get nice.”

That’s about the state of things at his new home on on 15th Street, where we tread carefully on the stained shag rug of the upstairs balcony bedroom, soon to be Kaplan’s office, once it’s renovated. “A lot of doors are open,” he says. “The money thing definitely enables me to say maybe I want to have a magazine. I thought about opening a barbecue joint. “Everyone has one million-dollar idea every ten years, but the thing is, you have to do it, and nobody ever does,” he says. Kaplan’s latest? “A topless shoe shine. It takes a long time to shine a shoe, all that wiggling and stuff. It’ll be like Starbucks,” he says, his eyes flickering over an imaginary line of topless shoe-shine girls. “It’ll be everywhere.

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KYOTO, Japan — I’m on the Karasuma line of the Kyoto subway as Bush’s Iraq deadline passes, and I couldn’t feel further from the war. On either side of me, Japanese commuters are catching a last few minutes of sleep before they hit the office, and standing nearby is a beautiful young woman in kimono. This is the town for geisha, after all – though after checking around I realize she’s probably just a college student, dressed up for a night on the town to celebrate graduation. I’m a world away from home, from New York, Philadelphia, Baghdad, London. Bombs are falling, but in another time zone, far away.

Bombs almost fell here, in another era. Kyoto was on Harry Truman’s original A-bomb list in 1945, but was spared because of the city’s cultural history, which stretches back thousands of years. This is Japan’s garden city, the most beautiful spot in the country, filled with temples and cherry blossoms and the intricate history of samurai, shoguns and emperors. Once the country’s capital, it has also given rise to some of Japan’s greatest literature, and was the location for Akira Kurosawa’s oft-quoted film Rashomon. As the mellow recorded voice of the Japanese subway woman smoothly announces my stop, it is hard to picture the sandstorms sweeping Kuwait, let alone the firestorms that are about to sweep its neighbor to the northwest.

I’m on my way to cover an international gum-flap known as the 3rd World Water Forum, which has attracted thousands of people from all over the globe. They represent multilateral agencies, non-governmental organizations and corporations big and small, and they have come to discuss the world’s very real “water crisis”: 6,000 people die from water-related diseases every day; 1.1 billion people have insufficient access to safe drinking water; 2.4 billion have no sanitation facilities. You want mass destruction? Here it is.

Sadly, WWF3 is proving a bit of a bust. There are precious few concrete proposals for how to mobilize the funds it would take to give a billion people clean water, and those who control the cash – executives at big water companies like France’s Vivendi Environnement and Suez Ondeo, the UK’s Anglian Water, and Germany’s RWE (owner of Thames Water) – are met by protestors decrying the involvement of the private sector in such public works.

In fact, the four other gaijin on the subway car with me – otherwise known as “whiteys” in the parlance of a Japanese friend of mine – are among the hundreds of environmental lobbyists, indigenous peoples’ respresentatives and other water activists who have booths or press conferences or papers to hand out at the forum. I’ve seen them in the lobby of my hotel, taking up too many of the restaurant’s tables, munching corn flakes and talking about Bay Area real estate prices. Their hearts are in the right place – or near there, at any rate.

But on the subway, I notice something odd. All four of these staunch advocates of the thirsty guy are gripping America-sized paper to-go cups from which the aroma of fine espresso wafts.

And yes, the cups are from Starbucks.

The sight of four foot-stampers sucking on Starbucks cups is an enjoyable irony, but it’s somehow less delicious on this particular morning in Japan. After all, this is a country America bombed the shit out of half a century ago. It was here that we unleashed the first weapons of mass destruction the world had ever seen. No quick exit that time: we stayed to write a new constitution, gave the Japanese a crash course in representative democracy and market capitalism, and all but denied the country its right to bear arms. It’s not so much that we were afraid of what would happen if we didn’t refashion Japan in our own image. It’s just that, as a people, we tend to be small-minded. We don’t know how to rebuild a country any other way.

But the small-mindedness seems to work for us. On the subway I enjoy my laugh at the activists’ expense and then turn to the day-old newspaper I haven’t had time to read. There I see that despite the fact that more than three-quarters of the country opposes “the disarmament of Iraq,” as GWB so delicately described it that morning, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has trotted out his movie-star good looks to sign on for Bush’s war just hours before the first cruise missiles took off. It “wouldn’t be prudent,” as Papa Bush might have said, to do anything else, what with North Korea warming up its nukes nearby and Japan’s best defense being the 60,000 US troops that are stationed here. No one forced Koizumi to come on board. But somewhere along the line, America made his country an offer he couldn’t refuse.

In effect, the nationbuilding America did after World War Two made us into a kind of realpolitik Godfather, selling protection around the world for the same things Vito Corleone wanted: a measure of docility and a little tribute – only in our case tribute takes the form of a Starbucks-friendly economic system and a little lobbying of intransigent Security Council members.

It doesn’t always work, of course (viz., Germany, which is bucking the system by denying us its UN sway). But it’s a nice little trick America has for turning enemies into friends. If you do the reconstruction right, even a country you’ve atom-bombed can become a comfortable place to eat corn flakes and complain about the gentrification of your neighborhood back home.

And that’s when it hits me, staring at the cappuccinos, laughing silently to myself at the folly of these smug, cause-proud Americans who can’t be bothered to sample even as much of the culture as it would take to eat a Japanese breakfast: this is what we’re doing in Iraq. It isn’t about oil or religion or terrorism or policing the world or striking back. Yes, tangentially it’s about all those things. But politicians, and especially presidents – even ones like Dubya, who only holds the job as a stepping stone to becoming baseball commissioner – presidents think in longer terms than that. They’re like novelists: they work because they want to be remembered.

How much do you know about James Monroe’s presidency? Not much, probably, but you’ve heard of the Monroe Doctrine, which first set up America as a policeman outside its own borders. More to the point, though it wasn’t dreamt up by a president, same goes for the Marshall Plan. You think George Marshall cares that no one knows his first name? No way. There are three secrets to a successful political career: legacy, legacy and legacy.

George W. Bush’s legacy will be made not in this war but in the post-war rethink in which Bush and his friends and business associates sit down to refashion Iraq. It won’t be an easy job, but if he gets his reconstruction right, Bush’s legacy will be an American pied-a-terre in the Middle East – which would constitute nothing less than a huge, historic victory for the loosely connected shadow empire we maintain all over the world. We can drink the sweet aroma of Japan’s cherry blossoms, we can quaff German beer, sip Italian espresso. We can move anywhere we want in the developed world. But the Middle East is one of the few regions without a comfortable country where Americans can drift about blithely spending their money on American companies, free of any more fear of crime, suicide bombers or terrorist assault than they’re wracked with back home. It might take a couple of decades to bring about, but you know the president who sets the change in motion is going to be long remembered for his good works. Plus which, maybe then we could even jettison Israel, where our tactics haven’t worked out so well, you’ll have to admit.

Understand that I’m not talking clent-states. We don’t want to force anyone’s allegiance; we just want to make it really, really hard for them to do anything else. It’s moral suasion through infrastructure. We want to make Westernization into the path of least resistance. We want to give visiting protestors easy access to Starbucks. You think real estate prices in Oakland are bad? Wait till we gentrify your country.

If you think that’s not what we’re up to, look again at the news. Yes, we’re going to occupy the place and install a democractic government, but that’s just SOP. Most countries eventually find their way to some form of democracy and capitalism anyway. Far more interesting than the political edicts, though, will be the redevelopment contracts, which will go to big American businesses like Bechtel and any company Dick Cheney’s ever had anything to do with. Not even Tony Blair gets a piece of the action. We’re going to do things right.

Of course, we’ve first got to win the war. It could all be over by the time you read this. “Shock and awe” may just carry the day. Then again, Baghdad could become Stalingrad. For the Iraqis’ sake, we need a quick victory. Better to go in as a compassionate conqueror than as a bitter little general resentful at having had his fingers burned.

Saddam is not Stalin; he is not Hirohito; and he is not Hitler (though this is one of the few places that last comparison can even be made). He is crazy and evil and continues to do horrible things and he needs to be stopped, and for a variety of reasons war may be the best course of action right now, I don’t know. Bush may not be the best president for the job, but he’s the one we’ve got. If you don’t like it, vote more often in the next election.

Actually, Bush is an ass. No argument there. But I always thought he and his cronies were not quite the swiftest scuds in the silo. I thought they just wanted contracts for their friends, oil for their country, vengeance for their wounded pride. It took the Japanese subway to convince me otherwise. You’ve at least got to admire the guy for the range of his vision.

And it really is a brilliant vision that Bush and his handmaidens have of the world. What a great thing, if decades from now Baghdad could become the next Kyoto or Berlin and we could one day hold a big international conference there – on, say, water – and politicians could do a little sightseeing in between their pointless chin-wags and people could fly in from all over the world to protest the involvement of big business in social works while sipping from big business’s to-go cup.

It’s a totally brilliant plan, and you have to admire the people who came up with it. Not Bush and Cheney and the smoldering Condoleeza Rice, but you and me, very gradually, over the course of the last two and a quarter centuries. If you don’t agree, I’d be happy to discuss it with you over a cappuccino at Starbucks. Anywhere in the world.

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At seven o’clock on a recent morning, Aron Oakley, 23, aerodynamics engineer for the Penske South race team, is watching numbers crawl up his computer screen as he muses over his luck with the ladies. For Oakley, romance may be elusive, but the numbers make perfect sense: The figures he’s reviewing represent the drag and down-force pressures that could propel veteran driver Rusty Wallace to victory in the Daytona 500–NASCAR’s Super Bowl–on February 17. It is Oakley’s job to help turn Wallace’s car into the sleekest, most streamlined racing machine that can still be handled. From this carpeted control room, where the loudest sound is the creak of ergonomic chairs, Oakley glances through a double pane of glass at the source of his high-tech data: North America’s most advanced wind tunnel.

What’s going on here at the Auto Research Center in Mooresville, North Carolina, as the Penske team blows air over a 40 percent scale model of Wallace’s Ford Taurus, may look like a bunch of kids building model cars. But these guys aren’t your usual racetrack grease monkeys. They’re mechanical engineers with university degrees, and they bring a whole new set of high-tech tools that are forcing NASCAR to change gears. “You used to have to work hard; now you’re working a lot smarter,” says Robin Pemberton, Wallace’s crew chief until the end of last season. “They’re the next wave of people that are going to control the sport.”

First, though, they’ll have to gain the old-timers’ confidence. Most racing engineers came up in the sport without the benefit of college, honing their craft trackside every Sunday. “We have to convince the guys that are building the cars that it’s not just a science project,” Oakley says of the scale tunnel, “that you can trust the data that comes out of here.” With the tunnel costing more than $1,000 an hour, they had better be able to trust it. Penske’s model cost close to $1 million dollars to design and build, from laser-scanning a full-size car to assembling the model’s carbon-fiber body and fitting the chassis with components built in a stereo-lithography lab. Over two days, a fourteen-foot fan blows air at 89.2 m.p.h. over the model as the seventeen-ton roadway beneath it turns a belt of simulated asphalt at comparable speed and yaws enough to tell the engineers what the car will do in a turn.

All the wind-tunnel data Oakley gathers, both full-size and scale, as well as past performance figures, data on various car parts, track characteristics, and tire configurations, is filed away on the laptops toted by the team’s trackside race engineers. If Rusty reports that the car is too “loose” coming out of Turn Three, for instance, some of the most advanced software tools in NASCAR racingn can point to various adjustments that improved that condition in past races at the same track.

But NASCAR, rooted in the low-tech worlds of bootlegging moonshine in the Carolina hills and racing 1940s hot rods on the beach at Daytona, has resisted the acceleration. “We try to keep a good grasp on the technology,” says one official, “to where it don’t get too out of hand.” Penske’s laptops may be stuffed with data, but the sanctioning body forbids computers onboard cars during a race. Decisions as to tire changes, suspension adjustments, even refuelling (no fuel gauges, either), must be determined by a pit crew’s sense of timing and a driver’s feel for how a car is handling. Race engineers can make suggestions based on software, but the turns of the wrench are still a matter of eyeballs and elbow grease.

“I have a problem saying, ‘You guys tell me how to fix my car,’ ” Rusty says. “If I want to change something, we can simulate it in the computer, but I’m a seat-of-the-pants-type driver. Once my crew chief has given me the best car he can give me, and the engine guys have given me the best engine they can give me, and the pit crews are giving me the best pit stops–then what’s left is just getting in the car and driving it.”

The sound of a stock car pushing 7,500 rpm down the front stretch is glorious to the ear. It’s louder than a roar, more intimidating than a growl, and as for a purr–well, those noises are for pussies. A stock car fronts all the whine and buzz and guttural rip that pure mechanical muscle can produce, enough to put all other notions of manhood to shame.

At the North Carolina Auto Racing Hall of Fame, just down the road from the Auto Research Center and the Penske shop, dozens of vintage cars sit motionless on display. There’s an awesome Dodge Daytona, a blazing orange Plymouth Superbird, and a ‘79 Monte Carlo, driven by racing’s king, Richard Petty, which looks like it’s about to leap right off the garage floor. Over in a corner, two women are swooning over a cardboard cutout of the late champion Dale Earnhardt. This is the sport, remember, that Paul Newman turned to when he realized that just being a movie star no longer cut it with the ladies.

With a sigh, I gun my rented Chevy Prizm up to an edgy 3,500 rpm. Back at the wind tunnel, I ask Oakley whether being on a race team has improved his luck with girls. “Not yet,” he laments. He and another young engineer are comparing notes on vintage Hewlett-Packard programmable calculators, long the race cars of the engineering world. It’s a heartening sight. If these guys are the future of racing, maybe there’s hope for those of us without a stock car in the garage. Maybe a pocket protector would do.

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Financial Times, weekend magazine, The Business, April 14, 2001 (2,733 words)

About 60 people are standing around under a bright, midday Florida sun, their attention focused on four men singing in the tight harmonies of a barbershop quartet or a street-corner doo-wop ensemble. But rather than striped shirts or baggy jeans, these four choristers are clad in the dun-coloured robes and turbans one might expect to find in a desert enclave–not in swampy Florida, where real street-corners are scarce despite the preponderance of pavement that covers the state like a rash.

Nor are the golden throats belting out Andrew Lloyd Weber. With a minor-chord reference to “Satan’s nail-pierced casualty”, they ask the assembled: “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” Hoots of “Yes!” and “Glory!” come back to them from the crowd. They aren’t bad singers really, but their musical prowess is hardly the point. Their audience has travelled from the far corners of the earth not to be entertained (though they do find themselves in Orlando, the family entertainment capital of the United States and home to Disney World), but to get something more uplifting out of their visit. They are here for The Holy Land Experience, a new 15-acre theme park mimicking ancient Jerusalem, and billing itself as a “living Biblical museum” that offers “historical proof” of early Christian lore and the fact that the Bible is indeed the word of God.

IF IT SOUNDS STRANGE TO FIND EVIDENCE OF a divine presence among the densest concentration of amusement parks in the world, consider that Orlando is as much a desert as any you might find in the Middle East: if culture were rain, this place would be in the midst of one of the longest droughts in recorded history. But into this desert has come Rev. Marvin Rosenthal, ordained into the ministry in 1968, after growing up outside Philadelphia as the child of orthodox Jews. By dint of a truly transcendent vision and more than $15 million raised through his ministry, Zion’s Hope, plus the help of a group of “Christian businessmen”, Rosenthal witnessed the culmination of almost two decades of work and preparation when the Holy Land Experience opened in early February. Since then, it has seen so much traffic that visitors are often turned away at the door and told to wait a while until a few more of the devoted–or merely curious–have left the complex.

Once they do gain entry, visitors find themselves in a street market meant to conjure visions of first-century Jerusalem–if soft drinks and polo shirts had been on sale during Christ’s lifetime, that is. Thousands of tonnes of concrete have gone into recreating weathered stone buildings such as those the early Christians might have taken refuge in (a single Roman Centurion stands guard when not posing with tourists), including both The Old Scroll Shop and Methuselah’s Mosaics–where everything from menorahs to stuffed camels to Bible study guides, videos, robes and postcards are on sale. If the artefacts inside the gift shops are not exactly period pieces, great care has been lavished on the apparent antiquity of the buildings’ exteriors–right down to the camel footprints sunken into the walks.

Still, not everyone is satisfied. “I’m curious about the little things, like how they did their cooking, what they ate,” comments Forrest Schaefer, a 56-year-old housewife. “You’re going to get a lot of people here who know their onions–how they dressed, how they killed each other.” Schaefer has driven an hour and a half from Ocala–an easy trip, considering there are visitors who have come all the way from Tennessee and California just to experience the Holy Land’s wonders. “I like it, but you’re short a few soldiers. This is an occupied place,” Schaefer says of the Centurion. “I’m also curious about his equipment.”

While the park may be a few soldiers short of a legion, it is hardly hurting for guests. It has exceeded its 1,500 capacity on most of the days since it has opened, and is running at such a clip that Rev. Rosenthal anticipates using some of the proceeds from the $17 ticket price (one-half to one-third of what parks such as Disney and Universal Studios charge) to make it easier to attract pilgrims. “We’re a not-for-profit religious organisation. If the attendance stays as good as it has been since we have opened, then we will be in the very delightful position of being able to lower the cost of admission,” Rosenthal says.

To help things along around Easter–which, with Christmas, looks to be the park’s busy season, Rosenthal says–the Holy Land Experience is planning an original musical production by Ron Owen, the ministry’s composer-in-residence and head of production at the park. If everything has gone according to plan, the sound of a 100-voice choir will have been filling the park this weekend in an evening-long number titled “The Kingdom, The Power and The Glory,” accompanied by a symphony orchestra formed especially for the occasion.

Of course, even with special events like “The Kingdom, The Power and The Glory,” the Holy Land Experience is hardly on a level with amusement parks like Disney World. Of the dozen attractions at the site, three are shops or markets and one is a restaurant–none offers the visceral excitement of even the Mad Hatter’s Teacup Ride (though the appearance of God in a column of smoke and light above the Wilderness Tabernacle may get your blood going). I’d been hoping for the Red Sea Water Slide or to catch a glimpse of Mary Magdalen on some kind of Last Temptation Island. But alas, there are no miracles here, only a humble and earnest depiction of some highlights from early Christian history.

Among the most impressive sights at the Holy Land Experience are the lines of visitors awaiting entry not only to the Oasis Palms Cafe (with its mouth-watering Bedouin Beef Wraps and Persian Pita Stuffers) but also to the Wilderness Tabernacle, a simulation of the portable temple in which the 12 tribes of Israel transported the Ark of the Covenant throughout their 40-year journey through the desert. Though visitors will stand for over an hour in the intermittent Florida rain to get inside, the visit is worth it. “When I was in the tabernacle, it felt like God really was there,” says Sarah Harper, a pretty, auburn-haired thirteen-year-old from the small town of Archer, near Gainesville.

But the presentation is over almost too quickly. “May the Lord bless you and keep you,” intones a “high priest” after God has come and gone. “Now I’m going to ask you all to exit over here to the left.”

Almost as popular as the tabernacle is a model of the holy city itself, circa AD66, and a 20-minute film, “The Seed of Promise,” shot in Jerusalem and depicting everything from the Garden of Eden to the second coming. Though some visitors were prevented from enjoying the film by inevitable start-up glitches (involving the security alarms in the Theater of Life auditorium), no such problems were apparent in the dramatic musical presentation on the steps of Herod’s Temple, in which concerned citizens of ancient Jerusalem ponder–in typical Florida fashion–whether their next administration will be Roman or Judaeo-Christian. Though the outcome of this race was never in doubt, the audience of 100 or so sits rapt through to the end of the play, when a flock of white doves is released into the humid air. Just down the Via Dolorosa at Calvary’s Garden Tomb (past the acacia, aloe, olive, pomegranate and papyrus marked out along the way), the quartet is in full swing.

With just a handful of attractions to choose from, it’s hard to believe that visitors spend almost five hours at a stretch here, nearly as long as the average stay at a big theme park like Disney–testament, perhaps, to the power of devotion. But at no point during their stay does anyone inquire of visitors as to their faith–if any. Though organisations have sounded off against the idea of a theme park that promotes Jesus as the messiah and, they say, attempts to convert Jews to Christianity, there is hardly any promotion afoot at the park. And though the tabernacle presentation and the lecture at the Jerusalem model end with hints of the saviour to come, there is precious little evangelism and the historical productions stick mainly to run-of-the-mill Judaism and early Christian history.

“We’re not offering anything to the non-believer,” says Rev. Rosenthal. “Now, you don’t have to be a Christian to come here and enjoy this. Everybody that went to see Cecil B’s ‘The Ten Commandments’ did not necessarily agree with everything they saw. I visit some of the theme parks here in Orlando the way I would eat a watermelon. I enjoy the sweet meat and I spit out the seeds.”

ROSENTHAL HAS LONG MADE A HABIT OF PICKING and choosing between the meat and the seeds, especially where religion is concerned. In the “primarily Jewish” Strawberry Mansion section of Philadelphia, he was bar mitzvahed at 13, but found, several years later, that his mother, an orthodox Jew, had been converted and “born again” in Christ.

“When I turned 18, I decided I didn’t want anything to do with God, with religion, Christ, the whole routine,” says Rosenthal, now 65. “I went into the United States Marine Corps, came out and went into a new career, as a ballroom dancer.”

At first, Rosenthal’s oral autobiography skips directly to his new faith: “Then I found myself going off to Bible college, then the seminary, then the pastorate.” And even when pressed, he manages to evade the question of just how he came to accept Christ. “I met some fine Christians who had a very positive influence on my life,” he says of his conversion. “It was no one thing, it was just good counsel, a godly lifestyle, it was sharing Biblical truths.”

“I’ve always believed you can’t steer a parked car. I don’t think God gives direction to people who sit home, fold their hands and say, ‘What’s my life all about?’” Whatever it was, it led him to the Friends of Israel, a Christian Zionist ministry, where he served as director from the mid-70s until 1990, when he established his new ministry, Zion’s Hope. Besides leading teaching tours to the Middle East and editing and publishing magazines devoted to his faith, Rosenthal also found time to become an eschatological theorist, publishing the influential “The Pre-Wrath Rapture of the Church” in 1990, in which he staked out an end-of-the-world territory for himself that few before had trodden.

These days, though, there is hardly a whiff of brimstone about Rosenthal’s rhetoric. At the park, he seems more politician than pastor. He wanders the grounds in a herringbone jacket informal polo shirt, flashing his grin from beneath bushy brows and gold-rimmed glasses. “I’m very fortunate,” he says. “I try not to micromanage. However, in the first weeks I’ve been out there a lot.”

Visitors are delighted to see him, even if they don’t immediately peg him as the ministry’s mastermind. “Is that the top man?” asks a woman from California. Others, though, know him well from his Bible study videos and teachings, his ministry’s magazines and his books. A little old lady from Fort Lauderdale lights up the heavens when she sees him. “Oh, Mr. Rosenthal, God bless you!” she says. “It’s good to see you here,” he says. “I’m glad you could come.”

And indeed he is. After leading more than 75 tours of the holy lands, Rosenthal says he “came early to realise that a good teaching tour to the Bible lands was kind of like a fifth gospel. It’s one thing to read about Mary and Joseph traveling from Nazareth to Bethlehem, some 90 miles or so, with her nine months pregnant. It’s another thing to see the terrain and feel the weather. You get a real feel for what it would have been like.”

Thus was the Holy Land Experience born, to bring the Middle East to the faithful who wouldn’t otherwise be able to make the pilgrimage. “The park looks great,” comments Joe Bell from behind a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses. Bell, a 34-year-old “messianic rabbi,” has brought his wife all the way from Bristol, Tennessee, just to see the park. “Israel is a very expensive trip,” he says. “A lot of people will never be able to afford that trip in their lifetime. This is a way to bring a little piece of that place to the masses.”

Not everyone agrees, however. The Jewish Defense League reportedly staged a small protest on the day the park opened and local rabbis have assailed the park for attempting to convert Jews and others to Rosenthal’s brand of Christianity. According to Rosenthal, though, response to the park has been overwhelmingly positive–and positively miraculous: “The day we opened there were three protestors, and a guy came galloping up on a white horse, a gentleman whom we do not know–don’t know where he came from, where he went–and he said, ‘What are you picketing here for?’ And the press of course got kind of fascinated by the guy on the white horse and ignored the protestors. So the result of the protests was that what would have taken us 10 years to achieve in publicity happened in a few days.”

As Bell, the messianic rabbi, points out, “Israel loves it when Christians spend their money going there but it really bothers them when they come here.”

“We’re not going up to people trying to stick literature in their hands,” Rosenthal continues. “We’re presenting a number of significant biblical concepts, and if people want to disagree they have every right to do that. But if you want to know about morality and what is right and what is wrong, in my view you go to the Bible. I happen to believe America is moving into a period like the judges in ancient Israel, when every man did that which was right in his own sight. But when you take away a standard, when you take away a foundation, then you ask people to build their lives on quicksand.”

“Tragically, many of our young people today are being trained in such a manner,” Rosenthal says. “We are telling them there are no absolutes, there are no standards, that everything is relative. No wonder we’re having the kind of problems that we’re having in our country. And they’re getting more and more severe.”

OF COURSE, PROVIDING STRUCTURE AND A MORAL FOUNDATION FOR your children is no guarantee they won’t stray from the flock–after all, Rev. Rosenthal has drifted quite far from his orthodox upbringing.

Perhaps, he has drifted further than even he knows. What’s on offer in Orlando, at the Holy Land Experience, is not a “fifth gospel”, as Rosenthal likes to call it, but the dilution of Jewish and early Christian history into something more easily swallowed than the usual catechisms and sermonising. It is religion for the MTV age–all sound bites and flashy editing. It is the facsimile standing in for the real thing, a place that’s literally built on quicksand — on the famous Florida swamps.

One visitor to the park summed up what they saw as Jesus’s power to unite disparate peoples this way: “The first Christians were all good Jews. Of course, they were also kikes, wops, wogs, niggers and the trash of the earth.” If Rosenthal were hoping to find converts, there would be few better places than this city, which draws 45m to 50m tourists annually from all over the world.

And if faith often rushes in to fill a vacuum, more than a few desperate searchers might be found amid Orlando’s concrete wasteland of amusement park after cheap motel after fast-food joint after gas station after freeway.

Though there’s only one reason people come here–to be entertained–the irony of the place is that in the middle of America’s biggest amusement park, there’s absolutely nothing to do. So get thee to the Holy Land Experience. The end of the world just might be nigh after all.

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