boorstin17

roó From Trtweler to Tourist:

roó From Trtweler to Tourist:

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merous American authors of guides), has dominated the un-easy, half-cultivated modem tourist. Hermann Goring, in-structing his Luftwafje in 1942, is said to have directed them to destroy “every historical building and landmark in Britain that is marked with an asterisk in Baedeker.” These were sometimes called the “Baedeker raids.”

Anyone who has toured with Baedeker knows the com-/ placent feeling of jhąying checked off all the starred attrac-' tions_in anv given place, or the frusfratlon of having gone to great trouble and expense to see a sight only to discover after-ward that it had not even rated a single asterisk. Tourists versed in one-upmanship who visit some frequented place like Paris or Florence have been known to concentrate their sight-seeing on unstarred items, so that in conversation back home they can face-down their plodding acquaintances who go by the book. But the star system, like the public museums and the whole phenomenon of middle-class touring, has been a by-product of the democratic revolutions. It, too, has helped blaze “an easy path to cultural sophistication for mil-lions.” As Iyor Brown shrewdly observes, this star system has ' tended to produce star-gazers rather than expIorers.

The tourist looks for caricature; travel agents at home and national tourist bureaus abroad are quick to oblige. &Tie tour-ist seldom likes the authentic qtp him often unintelligible) "producToFuie foreign culture; he prefers his own provincial expectations. The French chanteuse singing English with a French accent seems morę charmingly French than one who simply sings in French. The American tourist in Japan looks less for what is Japanese than for what is Japanesey. He wants to believe that geishas are only quaint oriental prosti-tutes; it is nearly impossible for him to imagine they can be anything else. After all, he hasn’t spent all that money and gone all the way over there to be madę a fool of. The Noh or Kabuki or Bunraku (which have long entertained the Japanese in their distinctive theatrical idiom) borę him, but he can grasp the Takarazuka girlie show, a Japanesey musical extravaganza on the Ziegfeld-Billy Rosę model, distin-

guished from its American counterparts mainly by the fact that all the performers are women. The out-of-dateness of its manner he mistakes for an oriental fiavor. Even the offirial Japanese Tourist Bureau guidebook, anxiously reminding the American that in Japan he wiLl not fail to find what he wants, notes that “strip tease . . . performances are ad-vancing somewhat artistically.” The Takarazuka extrava-ganza is described at length as “an opera peculiar to Japan, known as the girls’ opera.” Like its Frenchy counterpart, the Folies Bergśres which is sometimes featured in Las Vegas, a Takarazuka-type show from any country will be a box-office success in the United States.

As the obliging foreign producers work harder to give Americans just what they expect, American tourists, in tum, oblige by becoming morę and morę naive, to the point of gullibility. Tourists, however, are willing gulls, if only because they are always secretly fearful their extravagant (and ex-pensive) expectations may not be fulfilled. They are de-termined to have their money’s worth. Wherever in the world the American tourist goes, then, he is prepared to be ruled by the law of pseudo-events, by which the image, the well-con-trived imitation, outshines the original.

Everywhere, picturesque natives fashion papier-machć images of themselves. Yet all this earnest picturesqueness too often produces only a pallid imitation of the technicolor motion picture which the tourist goes to verify. The Etemal City becomes the site of the box-office hit Roman Holiday; tourist-pilgrims are eager to visit the “actual” scenes where famous movies like Ben Hur and Spartacus were really pho-tographed. Mount Sinai becomes well-known as the site about which The Ten Commandments was filmed. In 1960 a highly successful packaged tour was organized which traced the route of events in Leon Uris’ novel Exodus; the next year El Al Israel Airlines announced a new sixteen-day tour which promised to cover the very places where Otto Preminger and his film crew had shot scenes for the movie

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