Jake Gittes: I just want to know what you're worth. Over ten million?

Noah Cross: Oh my, yes.

Jake Gittes: Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat? What can you buy that you can't already afford?

Noah Cross: The future, Mr. Gittes, the future. - Robert Towne/Roman Polanski, Chinatown screenplay

"No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible" - Stanislaw Lec

IT'S as pointless and ostentatious an exercise as exhuming a decades-old corpse, hiring a small army of beauticians to rouge and paint the ruined face and then reburying it in a vast new marble mausoleum. Constructing a five-star hotel on virgin real estate in Bermuda these days is a costly folly, one the supposed beneficiary is in no position to either enjoy or benefit from. It really doesn't matter to a corpse whether its final resting place is in the damp ground or in a marble hall: its entirely beyond such concerns. It's still sleeping the Big Sleep, as Raymond Chandler would have it, regardless of where it lies.

Such flamboyant gaucherie as is being proposed for the Southlands Estate in Warwick cannot camouflage the utter extinction of the decayed husk that is resort tourism in Bermuda; and make no mistake about it, the Bermuda that was once a preferred top-flight tourism destination is dead. Stone dead. The death knell was sounded 20 years ago although a large number of Bermudians chose not to hear it.

Resort tourism expired, convulsing and spasming, finally succumbing to that ultimately lethal combination of neglect and a penal import-based tax system that made the very concept of profitability in the hospitality sector as very remote as a smile in David Burch's eye. What remains of the gilt-edged Bermuda tourism sector, an ever dwindling number of upmarket spas like Cambridge Beaches and The Reefs, amount to the gold bridgework in an otherwise desiccated skull.

The body has longsince been buried under tons of concrete, thousands of guest workers and the multi-billion dollar edifice called the off-shore financial services sector, the industry which has quite literally changed the face of Bermuda over the last two decades.

No wonder critics are suspicious that planned obsolescence will be built into the segmented glass pyramid that will be the Southlands Resort as surely as it is into every automobile that comes off a Detroit assembly line. The property will be built at a considerable discount under the provisions of the Hotels Concessions Act but it won't operate in a tax-free environment. So after three, maybe four years the Jumeirah Group will decline to have its management contract for the property renewed citing the enormous overheads and other costs associated with doing business in Bermuda. The Southlands principals will sigh, shake their heads, say they did their level best to resuscitate tourism - and then move on to Plan B. They will immediately put a slew of multi-million dollar beachfront condos on the market. Either that or start advertising office space with an ocean view.

The bald fact of the matter is Bermuda is no more in the tourism business today than it is in the onion-growing or blockade-running industries. The island is now a mid-Atlantic entrepot where merchandise - in the form of unimaginable quantities of money - can be imported and exported without paying import duties in the form of taxation. Not only has the entire economy been restructured to accommodate the needs of the off-shore financial services industries, so has Bermuda's physical environment,

Even with the best will in the world, Bermuda could no more make tourism a going concern than it could land a man on the Moon. From both an aesthetic and environmental point of view "The Isles of Rest" are now an increasing claustrophobic and urbanised bedroom community predicated on accomodating the needs of the international re/insurance industry and its associated businesses. Directly Bermuda began to warehouse other people's money instead of earning its own keep in the tourism industry, it lost its relevance and its audience as a vacation resort. Soon it began to lose its looks as well. The barbered-and-manicured Bermuda featured in a hundred old Trade Development posters began to be demolished, quite literally, to make way for the new industry and its need for office space and staff accommodation. That the horse and buggy, once an internationally recognisable symbol of the Bermuda vacation celebrated in music (the Talbot Brothers' calypsoanthem Bermuda Buggy Ride) and film (Cary Grant and Doris Day in That Touch of Mink), is about to be banned from Hamilton tells you all you really need to know about how radical the shift in economic emphasis has been. Bermuda can no more sell itself as get-away-from-it-all, perfumed-garden retreat for overworked, overstressed East Coasters than Siberia can rebrand itself as the ideal sun, surf and sand destination. When tourism was Bermuda's primary industry - and primary employer - a case could probably have been made for detouring around Planning regulations and greenlighting a major new resort. At the right time, such a development would have acted like a shot of adrenaline directly to the heart and resusictated a dying industry - precisely what Jim Woolridge tried to engineer with the Ritz-Carlton, an undertaking sabotaged by a combination of depressed international money markets and characteristically deranged parochial Bermudian politics. Had that project gone ahead the island Peter Benchley once wistfully described as a place where "there's no mountain hiking and the skiing is terrible, but everything else a vacationer could want is here" might still exist as something other than a memory now as very faded as an old postcard.

Despite the introduction of low-price, low-quality airlines and some corresponding fare reductions by the major carriers serving Bermuda, visitor arrival figures are routinely tweaked, inflated or just flat-out invented by this Government, a situation that continues to aroused the ire of those in the hospitality industry who are better placed to count the empty rooms at their hotels than the Tourism Minister's publicity flacks. The figures routinely trotted out to create the impression of a radical turn-around in tourism are simply no more credible than the statistics on Soviet grain production released by the Kremlin during one of Stalin's Five Year Economic Plans.

Corporate Hamilton is continuing its march eastwards: the entire area bookended by the old Canadian Hotel and the Seon Place is slated to be redeveloped in the coming months, sky-spearing towers providing hundreds of thousands of square feet of new office space and creating, by extension, the additional need to house all of the newcomers who will be arriving to work in those offices. More condominiums will go up, more open space will be lost, more vehicles will congest already sclerotic roads. By the time the proposed Southlands Resort opens, Bermuda will be even more overdeveloped and even less attractive as a vacation destination. And even more expensive given the knock-on inflationary effect all of these new corporate arrivals will create in the local economy.

Those who argue, either naively or disingenuously, that Southlands is an insurance policy against a future downturn in the off-shore financial services sector, a brand-spanking-new fallback for the Bermuda economy, entirely miss the point. The Bermuda that once drew a mass tourism market does not exist anymore. While there will always be a market for a relative handful of upscale vacationers, an enormous new hotel will fail to attract enormous new numbers of visitors. Its very existence will further detract from the easy-going charm that is meant to be Bermuda's chief allure. And the costs necessary to make such a project even begin to pay for itself will be prohibitively expensive. Even the very wealthy have demonstrated they are not prepared to pay a premium for a Bermuda vacation today because the island they once frequented in such great numbers is as extinct as the volcano it sits atop. With the second- or third-highest population density in the world, less open space than Central Park and the type of uncontrolled growth more normally associated with aggressive cancers than a prudent Planning policy, Bermuda - aside from a few frozen-in-time enclaves - is becoming as appealing as an industrial park.

The Southlands Resort will no more bring about a renaissance in Bermuda tourism than John Lennon and George Harrison will ever show up at a Beatles reunion. That Bermudians are not even expected to seek employment opportunities at the hotel en masse is underscored by the fact battery farm-type housing for the Third World employees the Jumeirah Group traditionally ships in by the container-load for its properties is slated to go up in a disused Warwick quarry. And there will be no flowering of satellite retail operations to cater to the hotel, not given Government's refusal to abandon a taxation system that results in every good landed in Bermuda immediately becoming 33 percent more expensive than it cost to purchase overseas (and this is before transportation costs and profit-margins are factored in). This built-in hyper-inflationary engine is what made Bermuda tourism so very uncompetitive in the first place.

And it's what continues to make this island so expensive even for those in the largely untaxed financial services industries who receive housing allowances and other subsidies to armour them against the cost of living here. Of course, most Bermudians get no such benefits: they are increasingly overextended financially and overwrought generally. And as debilitating as its environmental impact will be, the Southlands development will deliver an even more crippling body-blow to this already reeling Bermudian sense of identity. Given the removal of virtually all checks and balances on encroachments on the environment, given the predominance of a foreign-owned and -operated primary industry, given the Red Queen economies at play in this two-tiered community - with the majority of Bermudians running as fast as they can just to stand still - is it surprising Bermudians are growing increasingly alienated from this inhospitable physical and cultural landscape?

Alienation now defines life in modern Bermuda: Bermudians are finding themselves increasingly alone in this overpopulated, overdeveloped island, cut off, denied, marginalised. The ecosystem is blighted by a plague of monstrous steel and concrete boils and all of the old orthodoxies, all of the old traditions, have deserted Bermudians. In their stead they find new industries, new economic imperatives and a legion of newcomers they are separated from not so much by a glass ceiling but an impenetrable and unscaleable glass wall. Continue to pen people up as a consequence of the type of laissez-faire on-steroids development we've experienced in recent years and you'll end up with an island penitentiary. And such overcrowding invariably results in the build-up of frustrated emotional energy, energy that is usually discharged in violently destructive ways.

However, there doesn't appear to be even a modicum of enlightened self-interest at play in the calculations being made by the Southlands principals and Government, no consideration for the possibility they could do well by doing good - doing good with a more modest development at the site rather than one that looks like the freakish product of a one-night stand between the Kew Garden glasshouse and the TransAmerica Building. Or even doing good in terms of pleading temporary insanity, scrapping the hotel scheme altogether and arranging to have this land absorbed into the pathetic and frayed green ribbon that is Bermuda's parks system.

But, sadly, when it comes to our corporate and political Grand Poohbahs such concepts as compassion, common sense and even the self-preservation instinct all appear to be sleeping the dreamless Big Sleep. - Tim Hodgson