Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 17

The Trouble with Tourists

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article continues by noting that such mass traveling “spoils all rational travel; it
disgusts all intelligent curiousity; it repels the student, the philosopher, and the
manly investigator, from subjects which have been thus trampled into mire by the
hoofs of a whole tribe of travelling bipeds, who might rejoice to exchange brains
with the animals which they ride” (185). Such a vituperative assertion is not un
common, and Blackwood s creates a metaphorical association that remains com
mon in the late twentieth century: tourists are brutish, mindless “bipeds” with a
powerful herd instinct and “hoofs” trample underfoot true thinking travelers. (So
as not to be unfair to other herd animals, the editors generously imply that tourists
are less intelligent than the quadrupeds upon whose backs they ride.) A generation
later, as the tourist movement became firmly rooted in the United States after the
Civil War, cultural critics echoed similar disgust. Henry James, in his “Americans
Abroad,” regrets the tourist boom and how, in his view, it reflects poorly on the
nation as a whole. He writes, “[a] very large proportion of the Americans who
annually scatter themselves over Europe are by no means flattering to the national
vanity. Their merits, whatever they are, are not of a sort that strikes the eye-still
less the ear. They are ill-made, ill-mannered, ill-dressed” (209). Thus begins the
notion of the “ugly American.” Interestingly, James goes on to note that the Ameri
can tourist travels to Europe as “a provincial who is terribly bent upon taking, in
the fulness of ages, his revenge” (209). Perhaps James is correct, and the Ameri
can “revenge” upon Europe in the Age of Tourism continues well over a hundred
years later and is best typified by Euro-Disney (but that belongs to another discus
sion). In any case, we have inherited the legacy of a touristic self-identity that, no
matter our nationality, remains “ill-made, ill-mannered, and ill-dressed.”
The great movement itself has created its own self-loathing. Critics have
long recognized this struggle and illustrate the deep abiding desire to distinguish
between travelers and tourists, thereby revealing how fragile and perhaps even
arbitrary such definitions of behavior may be when used to differentiate between
the desirable and undesirable. Among twentieth-century cultural critics, Daniel
Boorstin provides the most compelling and energetic discussion of the nature of
tourism, and aggressively defends the separation of traveler and tourist identity.
By emphasizing the historical connections between travel and travail, he states
that to travel is to work, and thus he makes a crucial distinction, as he sees it: the
traveler is active, the tourist passive. Travelers seek and earn experiences, while
tourists sign up for programs and sit back to wait for experiences to come to them.
For travelers, there is work to be done; it will not be easy, but it promises rewards
worth the discomfort. This image is a powerful and attractive one; it is also a
romantic one-the lone traveler enduring trials and tribulations be cause he or she
has to, because “it’s there.” Many of us are up for the ideal, but few, really, are up
to the actual physical and emotional challenge such a self-image requires in praxis.