The Human Condition at Poipet

For all of the exoticism advertised by the Tourism Authority of Thailand, the baking plains of East Central Thailand remind me far more of Arkansas or Tennessee more than the sun-dappled beaches one sees on billboards. This is the Thailand of scrapyards and used car lots, hand-painted signs directing motorists to stop for coffee or noodles, Coca-Cola billboards, and bonfires burning in gravel lots with solitary huts of plywood and tin rusting in the corner. In the distance, the worn-down nubbins of old mountain ranges emerge from the level plain, eaten away at by millions of monsoon seasons, countless mudslides, and the humidity that transforms the ancient granites and metaconglomerates into quartz fragments and vermilion-colored silicate mud.

The highway terminates at the syphilitic border settlement of Aranya Prathet. Beyond is the Cambodian city of Poipet, a casino town just a few hours from Bangkok. In the wastelands around the border, you can feel the ghostly presence of the countless Khmer Rouge refugees who once streamed across the border in the late 1970s, and Aranya Prathet, with its desultory town square and squalid market, seems a testament to the cruelty and ugliness of old wars.

I get out my pen and notebook in the buffet in a lightless casino basement, which is as depressing and tawdry as a lightless casino basement in a Cambodian border town sounds. The food here has a sickly, sugary, fatty quality to it-- rubbery, greasy eggs, croissants that leave oil slicks on the roof of your mouth, gristly, gray pork-- that mirrors the activities going on outside the buffet gate.

Upstairs, 50 year old Thai women in jewel tones, all of them looking like they're participating in an Imelda Marcos lookalike contest, affix themselves to video poker and roulette wheels that rotate electronically under glass like pies at a diner. This isn't Las Vegas or Macau or Monte Carlo or even Atlantic City. This is the equivalent of those bleak Mississippi and Illinois towns that look to legalized gambling as a way to rebuild their devastated, post-industrial communities.

All, here, is luxury. Or rather, "luxury," ease, cheap entertainment: low-stakes gambling, gaudy stained-glass chandeliers that look stolen from the bar of an Applebee's, sugary cocktails, sour-faced hostesses, stages festooned with lavender bunting, and grotesque singers in the Wayne Newton mode, hair thinning, with the overfed yet sickly look common to decaying third-tier celebrities and Henry VIII.

A casino is made all the more disgusting by the sheer earnestness of it, its plainspoken and hard-nosed attitude, Nevadan decadence on top of Chinese cynicism and wreathed with Southeast Asian bourgeois kitsch. Why yes, the architecture seems to say, we want your pension money. The great race to build bigger and more high-tech casino resorts in Vegas throughout the '80s and '90s built greater and greater temples to Mammon. But in Poipet, they don't even bother to cover up the corrugated ceiling-- this is a temple to, at most, the 99 baht sale.

But, at the end of the day, what makes Poipet more horrifying than its American equivalents it that it is a Southern casino town transported to the third world, staffed by refugees and surrounded by filthy-faced Khmer children picking up trash and hawking cheap plastic trinkets, looking sad and stoic. Beyond the green zone of entertainment venues, the surrounding landscape of Cambodia's Banteay Meanchey Province is littered with landmines and inhabited by some of the poorest, most exploitable people on the Asian continent.

This is the face of modern fascism. The fascist architecture that marks Poipet isn't the grand scale neoclassicism of Albert Speer, but rather the hearty gemütlichkeit of fake Bavarian cottages, the plastic imitations of a mythic past-- look no further than the stabbing concrete attempt at an Angkorian gate that marks the entrance to Cambodia. Inside the hulking entertainment palaces, the middle classes ensconce themselves in the fantasy of affluence. Outside, a peasant girl, her face smeared with red clay dust, stares into the smoke from the trash heap, and watches as it obscures the rising evening star.