At 5.30 am, traffic is continuous, from the vulgarly painted lighthouse in downtown Port-of-Spain to the Piarco turnoff. Who said Trinis are lazy. Poor people. Wonder who they voted for in the last election though?

Going in the opposite direction, cars flit in and out of the sparse traffic, late for the flight or just reckless?

There are cobwebs over the Continental checkout counter and the flight is two hours late. In the departure male toilet, there are no paper towels and the air drying machine does not work. Opening the taps in the arrival toilet causes them to jackhammer like crazy and one of the toilets is in permanent flush mode. Ah well!

Two blocks from the superbly constructed Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, green, leafy, tree-lined streets are filled with jogging college students, couples walking hand in hand, a young mother in short shorts pushing a baby stroller and young girls, sitting in the gentle evening sunshine, working on their computers.

The air is clean, cleaner that Trinidad’s, almost as clean as downtown Houston streets. Ah well, Houston has just been named the hardest city in the US to navigate.

The mantra in the US seems to be “keep America safe!” If you believe their government and the media, Americans live with fear. At the meeting I attended, all the locals wanted to talk about disasters, hurricanes, bioterrorism and avian flu.

One could understand the interest in disasters and hurricanes after last year’s experience with Katrina “refugees” and Rita, but more people were killed in Laventille last year than have died in the entire world from avian flu since it was discovered nine years ago.

The smell of government manipulation of the media is all too present. Common sense has gone out the window. Despite billions of dollars spent and thousands of old ladies examined, not to mention hundreds of thousands of shoes removed, US borders continue to leak. So Dubya, or whoever is in charge of the American Government these days, has decided to militarise the Mexican border. The local Latinos I spoke to were not pleased and they constitute 42 per cent of the Houston population.

The honourable, or not so honourable, Pat Robertson, he of the “Kill Chavez fame,” informed America on TV that “God” had spoken to him and said that a tsunami would hit America in 2006. He’s apparently made the same claim for the last three years running. So “God” does talk to someone other than the local Trini professor.

Everything now seems to be a crisis in American TV. Everything is a disaster. “Good” friends report on “reality” TV that they “hate” each other’s makeup. Everyone “loves” the new TV series, which barely lasts a season. Fifty million Americans voted in that week’s American Idol show and an astonishing 35 per cent of them said their vote mattered as much as it did for the last American presidential election. Crisis indeed.

American TV contrives to present parents as goofy, bumbling idiots and their brats as super-cool, smart humans. The pick of the week was a programme entitled “How to dance in front of your children without embarrassing them.”

A group of white, middle-class, teenage girls were seen on TV declaring that oral sex, which most had experienced, was not really sex. No problem with embarrassing your stupid parents, who were watching their daughters talk, live, in a room next door.

“I was more concerned with the fact that her thought processes were not what I expected,” said one mother, daringly. You aren’t supposed to embarrass your kids in Hollywood land.

There was great concern expressed however about some new vaccine called the teenage sex vaccine which is reported to decrease the possibility of cancer of the cervix, no matter how much sex a woman has or how early she starts.

American TV continues to be full of ever-optimistic weathermen, cheerfully predicting good weather next weekend alternating with ecstatic sports reporters loudly describing how Barry Bond, the steroid freak, wants to break Babe Ruth’s home run record on Mother’s Day, for his mammy. Global warming, anyone? Athletes on steroids? Nah!

At the end of the week, it was announced, based on US social security data, that the girl’s name that’s growing fastest in popularity in this head-scratchingly hard-to-understand country was “Nevaeh.” It is now the 70th most popular US girl’s name, sandwiched between Evelyn and Madeline.

Word buffs will note it is “heaven” written backwards. It’s popular in particular with African Americans and evangelical Christians. A combination made in heaven?

Alexis de Tocqueville said in 1835, “Two things in America are astonishing: the changeableness of most human behaviour and the strange stability of certain principles. Men are constantly on the move, but the spirit of humanity seems almost unmoved.”

With all its problems, the US is still a wonderful country, full of decent, hardworking, reasonable people, who, once they understand you, are eager to help you. As someone once said, “Americans build you up.”

Trinis tear you down.