"I CAN remember LA before World War Two, when it was an entirely different place from what it is now. As I grew older I realised that the city had a kind of pastel beauty that would soon be lost forever, and that left me with a sense of loss and longing and sadness. I think (the movie) Chinatown is really about the growth and destruction of the city. To me they are the same thing. Growth has always been considered a good thing, and nowhere has it been considered more good than here. Unlike some countries, where people have been more aware of their natural resources and husband them more carefully, here it has always seemed as if our resources were infinite. It's just like cancer. Uncontrolled growth." - Robert Towne, screenwriter of Chinatown

IT hardly requires the investigative expertise of Towne's Chandleresque private eye J.J. Gittes to identify another locale where unrestricted growth is not only considered good but almost obligatory.

Twenty-first century Bermuda is another remote city-state that now routinely exhausts both its resources and people in the name of progress and where the powerful enjoy blanket immunity from critical scrutiny and even, it seems, criminal prosecution in some instances.

The island is fast becoming a diminutive mid-Atlantic counterpart to 1930s Los Angeles in economic and social terms, a multi-tiered, transient and segregated conglomeration of grudgingly complementary communities. There are even those who would argue its increasingly sclerotic road system is a small-scale replica of LA's perpetually gridlocked freeways.

This is now an island where unbridled growth is viewed as being synonomous with advancement. While Bermuda still positions itself as being as time-suspended and placid as a postcard view of the Great Sound at sunset, at least for public relations and tourism purposes, the cross-currents of political and business interests that rage beneath the still surface have converged to create an irresistible economic undertow, one as powerful as it is deep, one that indiscriminately swallows every new business opportunity that presents itself.

As a consequence Bermuda has become an island of paradoxes, of increasingly pronounced extremes - in wealth, in behaviour, in lifestyles. As unlikely a boomtown as its sprawling West Coast twin, both marooned on the outermost fringes of the financial world, Bermuda is now an implausible power player in the international insurance and reinsurance industries, the third side of a triangle also bounded by New York and London.

When Bermuda's tourism industry was declared obsolete and the US, British and Canadian military forces almost simultaneously struck their Bermuda camps - taking more than $100 million in annual infusions to the local economy home with them - there's no disputing the fact the emerging mega-insurance and reinsurance conglomerates saved the island.

Quite literally built on the salted ruins of the hospitality industry - witness the twin corporate juggernauts that now stand on the site of the old Bermudiana Hotel - Bermuda's regulatory environment and business and social infrastructure made the island the ideal off-shore laboratory for the first experiments in high-end umbrella insurance concerns. When the first corporate trials at ACE Ltd. and what is now XL Capital proved successful, Bermuda Inc. prospered. Yet relatively few Bermudians did.

The island's new economy remains completely impenetrable to most Bermudians. Its simultaneous proximity to and remoteness from the island ensures it is perceived as a corporate mystery cult into which most Bermudians can never be initiated, its largely workpermitted employees disciples of a money-spinning religion whose rites and practices both baffle and increasingly infuriate locals. Bermudians, shaped by far different social and economic forces than the guest workers who now own and man the island's principal industry, are products of their past. And their past condemns them to increasing isolation in modern Bermuda.

The local mercantile aristocracy, the so-called Forty Thieves, who directed Bermuda's tourist economy remain both venerated and despised in about equal measure two decades after the industry they crafted was euthanised. Some of the major players, who have been dead for half-a-century or more, remain household names in many Bermudian homes.

But very few Bermudians would even recognise the name of the new economy's founding father, the man who bears overall responsibility for the remaking of Bermuda's economic, social and physical infrastructures since the mid-1980s. Robert Clements, a senior executive at Marsh & McLennan, the world's largest insurance broker, conceived the idea of major US corporations pooling their resources to create their own off-shore umbrella insurance companies.

Like most pioneers in most fields, Clements, a bright and industrious technocrat, never paused to properly consider the practical ramifications of his abstract concepts on the environment earmarked as the off-shore head office for his newly conceived insurance and reinsurance giants. There's a certain feigned disingenuousness about pathfinders like Clements, who argue there is a clear demarcation line between their number-crunching theorising and its practical applications.

Yet men like Clements neither work nor live in cultural vacuums. Their shoulder-shrugging insouciance cannot help but bring to mind the lyrics of the Tom Lehrer song about the deNazified rocket scientist whose dual-purpose missiles could carry men to the Moon as well as multiple nuclear warheads to the Soviet Bloc. "Once the rockets go up/Who cares where they come down/That's not my department/Says Werner Von Braun ..."

For instance, such a fundamental economic tenet as the introduction of demand-pull inflation into the closed environment of Bermuda - too much money chasing too few resources - seems to have eluded Clements altogether. The impact of this inflationary cycle can now be witnessed across the Bermudian community, impacting on everything from rents to school fees to the cost of professional services. With the average financial services guest workers now earning two-and-a-half times as much as his average Bermudian host, an economic chasm has opened up that is well-nigh unbridgeable. If this inflationary trend continues, Bermudians still largely unreconciled to their new economy will never square themselves to the presence of an increasingly dominant industry that, in effect, makes the local population feel like strangers in an increasingly strange island.

This week one of the leaders of Bermuda's insurance and reinsurance industry, a man whose own pay scale seems to be as eternally elastic as a blue whale's bladder, exhorted members of a Bermudian political party to increase their community involvement.

Earning one-and-a-half times per day what the average Bermudian takes home annually, the tycoon seemed entirely oblivious to the fact that one of the more civic minded Parliamentarians in the audience had been terminated a few days earlier because his public mindedness was eroding his profitability at the law firm where he was employed. The company in question, one of the insurance/reinsurance sector's satellite service firms, has prospered remarkably in the last 15 years. But its executive suite's credo that time in corporatised Bermuda is now to be measured strictly in terms of billable hours with no allowance for community mindedness is one that is increasingly taking hold here.

This stringent commitment to profitability and a concurrent lack of regard for maintaining the political and legal infrastructures that help to make such enormous profits possible is one of the spin-off effects of the new economy the United Bermuda Party's guest speaker helped to create.

The ordinary multi-tasking Bermudian, holding down two or more jobs to make ends meet, has little enough time for community participation as it is. Now that black balls are being freely dropped on those like John Barritt who endeavour to make time for civic activities, it's unlikely many will answer the premium magnate's well-intentioned but patently impractical call for increased community service.

More's the pity.

The community - or, more accurately, the collage of communities that make up Bermuda - is under ever increasing strain. As was the case with Los Angeles, Bermuda's uncontrolled growth rather than anything resembling galloping poverty or want are proving to be its undoing.