IT reads like something from the scenario for a low-budget, direct-to-video Road Warrior knock-off. Machete- and pitchfork-wielding teenagers racing mopeds along Harbour Road, terrorising the occupants of a taxi, forcing oncoming traffic off the road, manifest dangers to themselves and others who belong either in jail cells or psychiatric wards.

Except it's not the product of an action/adventure screenwriter's poverty-stricken imagination. It happened here, in Maui, Bermuda. Twice this week.

That the Tourism Ministry's multi-million dollar marketing exercise in what could most politely be termed creative geography should segue directly into back-to-back exercises in low-rent creative hoologanism seems altogether apt.

After all, an unapologetic Government has now decreed that objective reality is as disposable as a soiled Kleenex when it comes to selling the island, that Bermuda can adopt whatever alter ego it wants. So it's perhaps only to be expected that would-be Hells Angels normally associated with, say, Detroit or Montreal, should start careening around the island's roads on asthmatic, low-horsepower hogs armed with arsenals that seems to consist entirely of gardening implements plundered from their parents' tool sheds.

Of course, with manufactured attitudes (only in Bermuda would wannabe gangsters choose to identify themselves as belonging to either "Town" or "Country", the labels suggesting haute bourgeois glossy magazines rather than down-and-dirty clan warfare) and counterfeit grievances (in 20 increasingly congested square miles it's not only difficult to avoid trespassing on the other fellow's turf, it's difficult to avoid trespassing at all), their posturing is as phoney as the rap-speak lingo they have adopted.

Nevertheless, precisely because Bermuda is so small, the sclerotic roads so hazardous at the best of times, the ripple-effects of violence washing over so many people in so short a time, what could be laughed off as pathetic teenage muscle-flexing in a larger community has to be regarded as a real threat here. And it has to be dealt with.

But in the "New" Bermuda - this Sybil of resort islands with its multiple personalities, all of them fractured - seemingly anything can and usually does go; do what thou wilt whenever thy wiltest seems to be the whole of the law. In the "Old" Bermuda, buried amid much celebration and gleeful dancing on the grave four years ago, the rule of law was actually enforced with somewhat more vigour, the Police Service was better manned and organised and the anarchic contempt for authority that has turned so many parts of the island into de facto no-fly zones for anyone with even the most rudimentary self-preservation instinct was limited to a handful of well-established outdoor drugs bazaars.

Yes, Bermuda once had pack racing although now that nobody obeys the speed limit it seems to be a permanent feature on the roads rather than the favourite afterschool activity of the diddleybop demographic; yes, after 3 a.m. on weekend nights Bermuda has drivers who ignore the left-hand-side-of-the-road stipulations and drive wherever the hell they want; but no, the island has never had to contend with semi-organised motorcycle/moped gangs made up of drug- and alcohol-fuelled Mad Max manques who view driving as a blood sport. Even riots, once viewed as so disruptive and destabilising, now take place so regularly the times and dates should be posted in The Royal Gazette's Bermuda Calendar.

Bermuda is an island where people are hauled before the courts for cruelty to animals (although the authorities do turn a wilfully blind eye to those who both breed attack dogs as four-legged lethal weapons for drug dealers as well as fight them for sport); yet cruelty to children is regarded as a cultural norm, the sins of the fathers passed down even unto the umpteenth generation without any meaningful intervention or efforts to curb or minimise what amounts to systematised child abuse.

Although not an underclass in the US or European sense, those children and young men who spend their unsupervised evenings forming motorised lynch mobs or brawling with one another over some real or imagined grudge are symptomatic of the growing rift between the haves and have-lots in Bermuda. Currently Bermuda has something of a barricade between civic society and even wider spread anarchy than is now the case in the form of pay cheques, protection money if you will. As long as the construction sector continues to boom, those who are unskilled, uneducated and unemployable by any conventional yardstick can and will be absorbed into the Bermuda workforce, their wage packets keeping more of them off the streets than otherwise would be the case.

The money, if not buying either happiness or particularly skilled labour, is at least buying off unhappiness for the rest of the island. But if the already ailing US economy becomes an early casualty of the pending Gulf War Two and goes into a death spiral, Bermuda's will follow suit. Then the current outbreaks of violence will amount to so many coming attractions trailers for what will ensue.

Products of homes where supervision is conspicuous by its near total absence, contemptuous of authority, sleepwalking their way through a school system that long ago abandoned such meaningful concepts as discipline and examinations designed to gauge ability rather than offer feather-bedded landings for perpetual underachievers, they either graduate or, more often, drop out with no visible means of support - and no enthusiasm to gain any.

Even those without academic leanings can and do prosper in Bermuda. Skilled craftsmen such as plumbers, electricians, masons are increasingly in the same income brackets as many of the upmarket clients they work for. The international sector boom and the attendant mushrooming demand for housing has created a white collar workforce that provides satellite services for the largely imported workforce, creating lucrative opportunities for Bermudians who a generation ago would have been consigned to a lifetime of blue collar drudgery.Yet while the opportunities exist, success in these fields - as in any other - is dependent on industry, application and determination.

The misfits, miscreants and sociopaths are products of a simple social equation - alienation plus resentment equals violence. When the undirected rage of the marginalised is compounded over the generations, the results are plain for all to see either on Harbour Road or in the streets surrounding St. Monica's Mission, where law-abiding inhabitants have effectively been consigned to living in a semi-permanent state of siege.

In Bermuda, what is delicately referred to as "dysfunctional" parenting (which usually translates as a complete absence of parenting) is something of an unhappy family heirloom, passed down from one generation to another. Its effects have been accelerated by the disintegration of the extended family (today granny is earning a good living at an exempt company and has neither the time nor the inclination to provide free after-school babysitting) represents part of the shift from a tourism- to an international-business dependent economy. Nightshifts at the hotels or nightclubs that left afternoons free for looking after children when they left school are as much a thing of the past as the old 5 o'clock siren and the Wednesday afternoon half-holiday. This is an increasingly corporatised, nine-to-five world and those unable to find a niche in the real "New" Bermuda are destined to be menaces to both themselves and society for the rest of their lives.

Children who are literally left to run riot by parents capable of making but not raising babies, parents who should be called to account by the family courts for their criminal neglect; the absence of root-and-branch education reform by a Government elected in part on a pledge to narrow the social and income disparities in Bermuda but which continues to throw millions of dollars into the sinkhole that is Point Finger Road; the lack of effective policing; and the seemingly inexhaustible supply of mood- and personality-altering drugs that fuel abherrant and violent behaviour. All of these factors are contributing to Bermuda's transformation into a 20-square mile free-fire zone. All can and should be addressed.

But, by-way of example, take the "softly softly" approach advocated by the Labour Minister when it comes to dealing with the gangs in St. George's. This is interpreted as weakness on the part of the authorities, as license by the hooligans in St. George's to engage in mini-riots, vandalism and assault. Indeed, such behaviour has become so much the norm it rarely even make the news anymore. That residents are forced to live with permanent unruliness, that St. George's World Heritage status, a credit to Bermuda as well as a potential lure for the upmarket clientele which opts for "cultural tourism" could be jeopardised by this "Wild, Wild East" environment does not appear to have factored to anyone's thinking.

Every night outside the cruise terminal on Penno's Wharf drunks congregate, agitate and urinate; they are neither arrested nor dispersed. Every night in the maze of side streets leading off from the Town Square, crack deals are conducted in the open, the drugs consumed as nonchalantly as popcorn in a movie theatre. St. Georgians still do not know the ultimate fate of their on-again-off-again Police Station. The Commissioner said it was being shuttered and moved to Southside; the Premier said that was a malicious fabriaction by the Press and the station was remaining in situ. The Corporation of St. George's said it did not know what the hell was going on and asked for clarification. None has been forthcoming as of yet.

Such conflicting signals, such institutionalised apathy, is symptomatic of Bermuda's failure of will in the face of increasingly intolerable provocations. What will it take for Bermuda to rouse itself from its trademark lotus-eater's stupor? Bermuda's size and the law of averages being what they are, one day the victim of a crime of brutal violence will not be a Tekle Mallory or a Josie Ray or even a Rebecca Middleton, the martyred Canadian teenager who's murder briefly caused a blip on Bermuda tourism's radar.

One day it will be an exempt company president's wife or daughter. Or a part-time celebrity resident.

And on that day, no matter what identity Bermudian officialdom tries to assume in the wake of the inevitable international outcry, the island and all of its people will find themselves living not in a biker flick but a horror movie, a Jaws-type affair in which a spoilt resort community is only shaken out of its ennui concerning the shark that's been long resident in its waters when the carniverous fish develops a taste for steak tartare in the form of visitors.