Dialogue: Ghouls all part of the picture

The first time I realised that Americans genuinely believe that life is not real but a sort of quasi-fictional dramatic narrative (a great big Truman Show, if you will) was while perving with a group of them at the still-smouldering Branch Davidian Compound in Waco in 1993.

There was something just a little mental about this scene. I'll tell you what it was: it was that we - the perverts, the rubber-neckers, the ghouls, the deviants who had driven two days across country, deep into Texas, to get a load of the spot where some 80 people had just burned alive - were utterly expected by the locals.

We weren't utterly welcome, exactly - that probably would have been too much to hope for - but we were utterly expected.

Certainly, the locals did their very best to help us to find the site. They weren't always happy about it but they didn't try to stop us; they did not, say, tell rubber-neckers to wake up to themselves in the way locals apparently do here in places like Aramoana.

In the United States, ghouls are considered an inevitable part of the narrative of tragedy, an inevitable part of the script.

Compounding things is the fact that the average American feels that there is no limit to the sort of perversions that the script might throw up; anything might happen, just as it might in a film. Nothing surprises people; they absolutely expect each day to be weirder than the last.

Thus it was that a small, Texan gas-station attendant barely flinched that day in 1993 when a couple of Antipodean birds (myself and friend) marched into his store and demanded directions to the scene of the Branch Davidian holocaust.

Thus it was, too, that the cop who'd been posted up at the site to keep the peace among rubber-neckers had obviously kissed all hope of meeting anyone normal goodbye.

He just stood there in front of the razed compound while people took photos and asked him to move in and out of shots.

There were simply no limits placed on behaviour - no boundaries, no obvious perimeters. It was odd, and oddly anarchical.

You didn't spend much time pondering the Davidian tragedy, or your own rather twisted interest in it. You just kind of hung around by the compound's chain-link fence and tried to imagine what sort of weirdo would turn up next.

True, you were a weirdo yourself on account of the fact that you were at the compound at all. You just got the feeling that you were likely to be outdone any second. It would have been no surprise at all to find, say, couples who wanted to get married on the site driving up, or maybe crews from television cooking shows wanting to use the site as a backdrop for the old summer barbecue series.

And hell - why not? Nobody had called a halt so far. Nobody seemed to think that they could.

A strange place, America, and rather disturbing in its tenet that anything goes. Nobody even hesitates anymore; all you have to do to bring an insane notion to life there is to suggest it and bang, it's written in, it's in the script.

Every half-assed theory is a starter by these criteria. Every notion gets a whirl. So if you don't like the outcome of an election, you recount and sue until the outcome changes.

It's a preposterous idea, but there it is. If you don't like being found guilty of murder, you get your lawyer to propose that the evidence you dropped while fleeing the scene was actually planted at a later date by people who wanted to frame you.

It works because anything goes. Absolutely anything goes in the US of A. You help yourself. If your heart gives out, you get a gorilla's. If your liver gives out, you get half of your sister's.

And so the great American movie goes; an unstoppable juggernaut in which all mad notions come to pass.

Little wonder that America went nigh on 40 years thinking that only the A-bomb could end it.