The Tourist Menace
Haag, Ernest van den
For another, Karnow accurately reports, for example, that the 1972 Christmas bombings of Hanoi and Haiphong were carried out against military targets with extraordinary precision, keeping...
...The tourists themselves feel as though in an immense airport, in transit, preoccupied with getting somewhere...
...They create excruciating bottlenecks, obstruct the views they came to see, disturb the peace they came to enjoy, and overwhelm the natives they came to observe...
...Shopping plays an analogous role...
...Hardcover $30.00 the set...
...Travel by bus, car, train, or plane is easy and takes less Ernest van den Haag is the John M. Olin Professor o f Jurisprudence and Public Policy at Fordham University...
...Mark's will be better off...
...Airport fees should be raised...
...Less tourism would result in losses and in gains but in no overall loss...
...On the screen the same incident commands major attention...
...This fee is likely both to reduce the number of visitors by two-thirds and to allow those willing to pay to enjoy what they came to see...
...To begin with, the vr presence of so many fellow tourists makes experiencing art and history hard, even for those capable and genuinely interested...
...Thought to be harmless and even beneficial, tourism is encouraged by all governments...
...The preservation of the monuments of the past is more important than stopping the throngs of tourists...
...Yet for all its detail, his book comes no closer to describing the inner workings of the Communist mind than does the series...
...The present policy of subsidizing airports, thruways, railroads, and museums ought to be reconsidered in this light...
...They haven't been given the background for either...
...Later...
...When...
...Buses and cars ought to pay reasonable fees when crossing frontiers...
...Dozens of tour guides, jabbering to their respective flocks in dozens of languages, are a barrier to concentration...
...In this respect American children are paradigmatic...
...American tourists used to travel to soak up European culture...
...Nor would it be desirable, or politically possible, to reduce tourism by making it so prohibitively expensive that only the very rich could afford it...
...26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1984...
...They want hamburgers, not French cuisine...
...But most tourists are not...
...They submit but do not enjoy being dragged through one more church, one more museum...
...The evidence is ambiguous...
...Tourist taxes should be increased...
...If, instead of the actual Titians or Leonardos, the museums, without telling, offered mediocre imitations, the majority of tourists would not notice...
...But the enjoyment tourism produces must now be compared to the harm it does...
...They volunteered to go where they went--but they do not really want to be there and have long given up trying to understand what it is all about...
...There is no reason not to charge them what it costs to preserve the church, and to keep it o p e n . . , again, something around $25...
...Tourists will come to Paris even if the Louvre becomes expensive, and to Venice even if St...
...But only a small proportion of tourists are prepared to appreciate the cathedrals, the monuments, and the paintings they came to see...
...Cultural enrichment--increased aesthetic appreciation and enjoyment of art and deeper historical understanding of foreign cultures--indeed may be fostered and enhanced by travel...
...suspect that tourists would come to Italy or France or Spain even if they could not enter a single church or Works o f Fisher Ames As Published by Seth Ames Edited and Enlarged by W.B...
...Professor Allen has added many pieces, which have come to light since the original publication or were omitted from it...
...But all national and class monopolies have been broken now...
...Then there is the noise...
...And children, even adolescents, are far too busy with growing up to have a genuine interest in past glories and foreign cultures...
...It also overlooks the essential perspective of those who fought against us and are now willing forthrightly to describe their struggle...
...For another, Karnow accurately reports, for example, that the 1972 Christmas bombings of Hanoi and Haiphong were carried out against military targets with extraordinary precision, keeping civilian casualties to a minimum...
...They want to escape the familiar--but not altogether: Venetian restaurants, for example, advertise German dishes in German...
...They have time and money enough to travel seeking novelty and pleasure...
...But one need look only at the bored faces of the elderly being harangued by their tour guides to realize that they walk through the foreign culture only because they could not find anything else to do...
...it certainly is more active than just looking: an art of sorts...
...Tourists are so busy with the camera angle, there is no time for actual experience...
...The attempts of local bishops to preserve the religious function of their churches so far have not availed against the tide of tourists whenever the churches held celebrity status...
...Germans are the same with their Wiirstchen mit Sauerkraut, and Italians with pasta...
...The young are more enthusiastic...
...The tradition of the churches is to let anyone ~ in for nothing, or next to nothing, because, after all, people should not be charged for a chance to pray and worship...
...George Witney, Emblems (1586) Every summer vast masses of tourists slosh across the frontiers of Europe...
...Perhaps you just weren't up to it...
...How can it be done...
...It would not be hard to provide members of local congregations, or local residents who apply, with identity cards, or to issue them to anyone who comes recommended by his hometown priest...
...Now, however, they do flood and threaten all of them...
...D e s p i t e all these reservations, tourists obviously wouldn't be tourists if they did not, in some way, expect to enjoy being tourists or, at least, to enjoy touring more than staying at home...
...The familiar is not yet familiar enough for them to be interested in the non-familiar (except in escapist fantasies...
...The price of gas ought to be increased via taxes...
...Does travel broaden the mind...
...Above all, shopping kills time...
...And it will keep the church intact for future generations...
...Ames' letters, speeches, and essays offer an excellent sustained commentary on the American founcling from the time of the Constitutional Convention through Jefferson's reelection as president...
...All deteriorate rapidly under its impact...
...To be sure, the intellectual travelers who came back from Russia, Cuba, or China often were deliberately deceived by their host governments...
...None of the things tourists seek out--old towns, churches, museums, forests, islands, the Leaning Tower of Pisa-were made for mass traffic...
...Today great masses are on the move every summer...
...History is replete with instances in which acquaintance, or familiarity, led to mutual intolerance...
...And unlike Michelangelo's David, the Gucci handbag or Givenchy scarf can be taken home to impress the folks back in Bloomington with your superior taste, acumen, and worldliness...
...The price seems high only because we are accustomed to paying next to nothing...
...But students, out for adventure, often go it alone...
...Whole families spend their vacations abroad...
...Else they'd go and pay...
...Are divorced couples more tolerant of their partners after than before they married...
...Why American parents think that children, or even teenagers, would appreciate French cuisine or culture is beyond me...
...In the past tourists--people traveling for the sake of pleasure--were few...
...Tourists want change...
...French, Italian, or Dutch nationals rarely saw good reasons for leaving their native haunts...
...Travel often seems to reinforce the pre-established notions the tourist brought along, with only marginal modifications...
...They come because the church is famous...
...Still, one wishes Karnow had taken it upon himself to illuminate both sides of the story...
...Museums are now supported with public funds...
...While all feel obligated to have wine, they are also found sneaking Coca Cola...
...Tourists must kill time, lest it kill them...
...To be sure, some tourists do reap the aesthetic rewards they expected and more...
...Not least there is a self-defeating element in mass tourism...
...Nothing created in the distant past can stand up for long under the intensive and unforeseen use to which it is put now...
...Italians often were immigrants but not tourists...
...But the Louvre and St...
...ideas enter through the sieve of pre-established notions and prejudices (some held strongly, some weakly...
...Once it becomes a mass diversion tourism ineluctably becomes selfdefeating...
...But mainly about each other...
...For the churches to be preserved and their religious function continued, the number of tourists must be reduced...
...Nor does travel necessarily produce greater tolerance, despite the dogma that more acquaintance, or more knowledge, leads to more tolerance and better understanding of others...
...The image is imprinted on paper, not on the mind...
...So Michelangelo didn't make all that much difference to you...
...The perpetual crowd about the Mona Lisa means that time is rationed, so the best one can get is a distracted glance...
...They want the familiar...
...Perhaps this enjoyment, however produced, needs no cultural justification...
...None of these proposals would altogether solve the problems outlined...
...They pay lip service to aesthetic and cultural goals, but do not take the time to prepare for their visits in the way required for their experiences to be aesthetically rewarding...
...The mind is largely a sifting device...
...So they resort to helping the camera...
...Young and old snap pictures incessantly...
...However solid, a marble floor can be trod upon by only so many feet before becoming discolored, scarred, split, flattened, and, ultimately, pulverized...
...A picture is worth a thousand perceptions...
...What about local worshipers, the pious poor, pilgrims...
...One goes to the Sistine Chapel...
...It has better eyes...
...For Vietnam's true history is only to be found in the interaction between ourselves and our antagonists...
...We learn that the police chief whose summary execution of a Vietcong prisoner was immortalized by Eddie Adams's camera had lost several men that morning to assassination teams, including one gunned down with wife and children...
...on the contrary, it may become easier...
...Tourism does provide a major share of income not only to the distinctly travel industries--airlines, hotels, buses, restaurants--but also to camera and luggage manufacturers, to shops, and to the service industries that depend on tourists...
...That fee should be increased so as to equal the actual cost, amounting to, I should guess, no less than $25 per visitor for the Louvre or the Uffici...
...Allen In Two Volumes Fisher Ames was not only the Federalist leader in the House during Washington's presidency, he was his party's greatest orator, a brilliant essayist, and perhaps the most accomplished man of letters among his contemporaries in public service...
...The tourists who do not go will not lose anything they would have appreciated...
...So will those actually attracted by either...
...Tourism has become attractive and affordable to all classes...
...Just as they are recruited from all classes so tourists now come from all age groups...
...They take pictures and admonish the children to pay attention...
...But so many others do, it comes to resemble Grand Central Station...
...The anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote a perennial best-seller, Coming of Age in Samoa, describing Samoan adolescence and general culture...
...The kids, under the indulgent eyes of their parents, try to eat ice cream cones in the churches...
...Young people isolate themselves to avoid being overwhelmed, just as some among their parents use guide books as weapons against the onslaught of the unfamiliar...
...Visitors pay only a small fee which does not begin to cover expenses...
...Taken to soak up European culture they resist every which way they can...
...In practice the churches have given up enforcing dress codes...
...The parents dress as though for the beach...
...Tropez is more popular than Chartres or Versailles...
...It became a best-seller 24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1984 laxgely because it embodied the wishful thinking--free sex, no jealousy, no rape, no competition, everybody has a good time--she shared with her readers...
...Seeing the Uffici should not be worth less...
...Yet even this modest program would be bitterly opposed by the tourist industry...
...How can the monuments of the past be preserved for future generations under the onslaught of tourism...
...The beach at St...
...The fool that far is sent some wisdom to acquire Returns an idiot, as he went...
...But mostly they deceived themselves...
...They see not art but brand names, not a painting but a Botticelli...
...They allow themselves distractedly to be led through the Louvre, or the Uffici, or San Marco, where they produce bedlam...
...They do visit the monuments, churches, or museums famous enough to be described in the guide books...
...I have not found traveled people less opinionated or prejudiced about the countries they visited than people who have never been there...
...Her report reflected all the notions she brought there...
...and less time...
...This would make it possible for those actually interested to enjoy their visit...
...the paintings are admired because they are by Botticelli (and, anyway, part of the tour...
...Yet we are willing to pay more than $25 for a Broadway show...
...Still, there is nothing unreasonable about making it expensive enough to deter those unwilling to pay for the costs they cause...
...As he puts it in the introduction, "The role of the historian is to depict the motives and debates that go into the formation of policies...
...Worship would not be hindered if tourists had to pay...
...And it is all too easy to mistake self-analysis for understanding...
...Even professional students of culture do not always manage to look at foreign cultures with pristine eyes...
...Cities visited by tourists should have high parking fees (which natives may lower by monthly rentals), especially for buses...
...There is a detailed interview with one of the surgeons, and a lengthy close-up examination of wounded children, all of which puts the bombings f'h-mly in the domain of emotion rather than assessment...
...Softcover $15.00 the set museum...
...Packaged tours further reduce the cost...
...Throughout the book Karnow capably records the background information that puts the images in context, refusing to substitute drama for objectivity...
...Yet tourists do not come to pray and worship...
...In his description he notes too that there were some mistakes: One stray bomb fell on a hospital situated near an airfield, killing 18 patients...
...Those who do go will finally be able to enjoy what they came to see...
...Botticelli is not admired because of his paintings...
...And snapping photographs makes one feel creative as well...
...Though this will not stop the growth of tourisrn it will slow it...
...English tourists to get out of England...
...Even what is not physically touched tends to erode from the pollution produced by cars, buses, and human traffic...
...Packaged tours lure the retired from everywhere to everywhere while insulating them from any inconvenience and from contact with anything unaccustomed...
...There is another problem even more important than any feasible reduction of the growth of tourism...
...Without this economic interest in maintaining and increasing tourism I doubt that any invaded nation would stand for tourism...
...Consider the material harm...
...But the picture proves you were there...
...This edition is based on the edition published in 1854 by Seth Ames...
...What enters depends on the width of the holes in the sieve, on their location, on how easily they are enlarged, and so on...
...But you certainly are as shrewd as anyone when it comes to shopping...
...Rather like taking home the menu instead of eating...
...and it is cheap and getting cheaper every year...
...In the same way, those who seek nature and solitude in our national parks quite involuntarily find themselves among the crowd they had hoped to escape...
...If competent anthropologists find their pre-estabfished notions confirmed abroad, can we expect tourists to do better...
...How can they be preserved...
...Yet the money not spent on tourism would be available for something else...
...It is as though the experiences were quick frozen and stored up for later...
...Germans traveled for adventure, often cheaply, forming a tourist underclass...
...And it will indefinitely preserve the paintings and the buildings...
...It seems tiresome...
...The upper class still tours but constitutes only a small (though economically important) segment of the tourist mass...
...Can we expect more from tourists...
...Mark's charges admission...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1984 25 means...
...Old ladies travel around the world having nothing better to do...
...Karnow never succumbs to the temptation, regularly idling in small details as well as large...
...Picture snappers seem dimly aware that {hey cannot, will not, feel now the experience inchoately hoped for...
...But it does not seem to me that tourism, as now practiced by the overwhelming majority of tourists, can make history or art more fruitful for them...
Vol. 17 • January 1984 • No. 1
