In Pol Pot Land: Ruins of varying types.(Cambodia)

When I arrived in Siem Reap, the town next door to Angkor Wat, one of the many new hotels that have sprung up there recently and that look like pagodas crossed with mirrored sunglasses, was draped with a banner announcing a conference: Gender Analysis in Farmers' Water Management.

This was strong evidence, I think, that the aid agencies were in town, for the conference (it seemed to me) was unlikely to have been arranged on purely Cambodian initiative. The aid agencies are one means by which our current fads, fancies, and obsessions are transmitted to, or should I say imposed upon, small and poor countries, usually with disastrous results. The last thing Cambodia needs, after all, is more deconstruction.

But aid is not the only means of transmission of our obsessions. It is curious how tourism, the constant search for exotic destinations by people disillusioned with their daily lives, always ends up by reducing the difference between the exotic destinations and the places from which tourists seek to escape. A brochure in my luxurious, French-run hotel informed me that Siem Reap was no longer the sleepy little place it once was (when, of course, it wasn't in the throes of massacre and civil war). It was developing quite a night life:

When it comes to partying in bars or downing drinks, the old favorites are holding their own . . . Among the most popular [is] . . . le Tigre de Papier, a sophisticated little spot in the up-and-coming bar strip of Siem Reap. Granddaddy of this strip is the Angkor What? and it is still going strong after four years.

Four whole years! If a week is a long time in politics, four years is an eon in popular culture. As for the temples, built between 800 and 1400 -- well, they're history.

Le Tigre de Papier "rages into the early hours of the morning." Again, it seems rather curious that, in a multiculturalist age when everyone is supposed to be alive to everyone else's sensitivities, a bar's name should make light reference to the words of Mao Tse-tung, who not only caused one of the greatest famines in world history, but was the chief ally and inspiration of the mad Khmer Rouge ideologues responsible for the deaths of between a fifth and a quarter of the entire Cambodian population. No one, I hope, would open a bar called Sonderkommando in Minsk, or Einsatzgruppen in Vilnius (though British Airways, in one of the most unfortunate advertising campaigns in history, did once promise their German customers Sonderbehandlung , the Special Treatment that was the Nazi euphemism for genocidal murder), but ironical reference to Communist horrors is still not only permissible but chic. Perhaps it demonstrates that one hasn't quite abandoned the idealism of youth.

Whatever the destructive cultural effects of tourism, it is Cambodia's greatest economic hope. Hotels are being constructed at a furious rate, in the expectation of a million visitors annually to Angkor within a year or two. The visa fee and airport departure tax alone will add 1 percent to the country's GDP, and all in U.S. dollars.