Tourist Traps

...What is more, those writers of indisputably first-rank intelligence who are mentioned fail to support Hollander's thesis...

...The table cloth was clean...

...must always give way to any serious pressure from the people: they have to deliver the goods...

...It is hard enough to know what is going on where a free press flourishes...

...Though John Kenneth Galbraith seems to have been unduly positive about his Chinese experience, he reserved his " zealous affirmations" solely for the scenery, which, as Hollander somewhat disapprovingly notes, he found "divine...

...In the face of such declarations from the 1930s, a reader can only shake his head...

...Chinese...

...Writers & Writing TOURIST TRAPS BY BARRY GEWEN Paul Hollander, a Hungarian-born professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts and Fellow at Harvard's Russian Research Center, is at once an iconoclast and an ideologue...

...Previous regimes-Spain during the Inquisition, for instance, or Napoleonic France-did not employ a highly organized combination of public relations, psychology and just plain lies to present themselves as better than they were...

...Leisure, secularization, the mass media, and the weakening of authority have all contributed to a widespread sense of alienation that sends intellectuals to Russia and China seeking after strange gods...

...And only last June, while addressing Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, Vice President George Bush bubbled: "We love your adherence to democratic principle and to the democratic processes...

...Even the most skeptical, Hollander advises, seldom have the psychological strength to resist such blandishments...

...But, then, what should one say about the statements Hollander has provided from our own more knowledgeable era by those who have traveled to Cuba, China and North Vietnam-except that the lessons of the earlier visitors to the USSR are not easily absorbed...

...And after viewing North Vietnam at the height of the Vietnamese War, Susan Sontag, who really seems to have a penchant for this sort of thing, believed she had acquired sufficient insight to declare: "The phenomenon of existential agony, of alienation just don't [sic] appear among the Vietnamese...

...Two years later, as another wave of repression was sweeping over China, Harrison Salisbury chirped: "They brought food with a smile...

...There is ample evidence in this study," Hollander writes, "to suggest that the critical component in the make-up of intellectuals has been greatly exaggerated and that its operation is just as dependent on their basic values and predispositions as is the case with other mortals...

...Edmund Wilson and Susan Sontag, to be sure, but Shirley MacLaine and Huey Newton...

...The subject he examines in Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba (Oxford, 524 pp., $25.00) allows him to show off both of these aspects of his personality...

...a kind of lean, muscular grace, relentless hard work, and an optimistic and even amiable outlook on the s/b future....The people seem not only young but enthusiastic about their changing lives...

...in a country where discussion is not free and the inhabitants have reason to be afraid of speaking openly, learning the truth may be nearly impossible, even for those who pride themselves on their intelligence and sensitivity...

...Hollander's contention is that the attitudes he describes are representative of Western intellectuals in general...

...in the long run...

...One closes Political Pilgrims with little faith in Hollander's powers of discrimination, suspecting that his method of selecting "intellectuals" had less to do with the quality of mind than with the opinion being expressed...

...But whereas the iconoclast has written a useful and biting work on the misperceptions of visitors to Marxist nations since the 1930s, the ideologue has blown this up into a bloated polemic that primarily demonstrates the anti-intellectualism now peculiarly rife among many Right-wing intellectuals...

...Andre Gide, who received the Soviet Union's full red-carpet treatment in the '30s and then returned home to write two blistering indictments, is a rare exception...

...after 500 pages, who or what he means by "intellectual" remains a blur...

...But since Stalin, "world opinion" has mattered enough for modern dictators to expend considerable amounts of scarce resources on the effort to influence it...

...The real lesson to be learned from Political Pilgrims is the iconoclastic one that the truth does not come easy...

...Hollander divides the "techniques of hospitality" into two components: the screening of reality so that everything distasteful or problematic is shielded from view, and the courting of foreign observers through flattery and lavish treatment...

...Apart from the quotations themselves, the most important section of Political Pilgrims is the chapter entitled "The Techniques of Hospitality," describing exactly how governments go about pulling the wool over the eyes of their guests...

...James Reston and Harrison Salisbury hardly went to China " in pursuit of political Utopia...

...Nothing that is quoted of Susan Sontag, for all of her intemperateness, demonstrates that she found Cuba "strikingly superior" to Western democracies...

...Mary McCarthy did not display "unrestrained enthusiasm" in her writings about North Vietnam...

...Combing through dozens of memoirs by travelers to the Soviet Union, North Vietnam, Cuba, China, and even such off-the-beaten-track tyrannies as Albania, Hollander has collected outlandish and embarrassing encomiums from individuals who, having taken brief trips to those countries, became instant experts...

...Ivan the Terrible did not establish Potemkin villages...

...The chopsticks clean...

...For Hollander presents Susan Sontag giving a Harold Laski impersonation in 1969, as she announces that no Cuban writer "has been or is in jail or is failing to get his works published...

...They are predisposed to respond to Marxist "techniques of hospitality," he says, because of their estrangement from their own societies...

...His search, regrettably, did not have to be an arduous one...

...You don't have to be an intellectual to sound stupid...

...Foolishness can take many guises, and anyone, no matter what his political position or how intelligent he may be, is capable of stumbling badly in situations that are fluid and difficult to understand...

...We listen also to Edmund Wilson aver that "the Communists...

...The amount of foolishness that has been written on Communist societies over the last half century by people eager to generalize about nations whose history they normally did not know, and whose language they ordinarily did not speak, stands as one of the century's monuments to human gullibility-and chutzpah...

...I felt myself relaxing...

...It was a more innocent, no doubt more desperate, age, and so much that mankind had yet to learn about itself would only be revealed after 1945...

...Never underestimate the impact of good food...

...Hollander takes almost a mischievous delight in trotting out the most egregious statements of-as he impishly puts it-"public figures with established reputations, who cannot be expected to applaud the vivid recalling of utterances they probably prefer to forget...

...In particular, the precise object of Hollander's scorn never comes clearly into focus...

...From the other side of the Gulag, we hear Harold Laski explain that the Soviet penal system is constructed on the principle that "the prisoner must live, so far as conditions make it possible, a full and self-respecting life...

...And it was good food...

...The Soviets began the practice in the '30s, and it was something genuinely new under the sun...

...Unfortunately, he gets himself into trouble by trying to expand the point into a larger, more ideology-laden thesis that is not supported by the quotations he has collected...

...the skeptical and questioning stance with which they are identified at home is transformed into "unrestrained enthusiasm" and "zealous affirmation" in Communist countries they are eager to find superior to their own...

...Hollander's researches serve as a warning on the limitations of relatively brief first-hand experience as a means of arriving at reliable judgments about a despotic society...

...Not to mention Daniel Berrigan, William Kunstler, Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden, Bruce Franklin, Jerry Rubin, Staughton Lynd, and George McGovern...

...Clean...

...This feeble conclusion, I suspect, will not abash even lifetime subscribers to the New York Review of Books, and the argument is weak in other respects as well...

...A collection of the tributes American officials paid to the Shah of Iran could rest comfortably alongside the more risible examples paraded by Hollander...

...Eggdrop soup, chicken and green peppers, breaded oysters, pungent pork meatballs and orange pop...

...A year after the calamities of China's Cultural Revolution, James Reston reported to the readers of the New York Times that "China's most viable characteristics are the characteristics of youth...

...That is a valuable cautionary lesson, and had Hollander stopped there he would have performed a genuine service...

...More lamentable still is the fact that many of these brash naifs have been among the most thoughtful and influential writers of their time...

...Why, I suddenly thought, it's pleasant to be in this country...

...Anyone with something favorable to say about a Communist state seems to be grist for Hollander's mill, including David Rockefeller...

...Thus, from out of the past we have George Bernard Shaw and the Webbs waxing lyrical about the triumphs of Stalin's Russia...

...Indeed, whenever Hollander needs a remark that truly hammers home his argument, he almost invariably turns to either an oldline Stalinist or a second-rater...

...To take one example, I doubt that anyone is cited more frequently on China than Shirley MacLaine...