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108 From Trtrueler to Tourist:

The problems of satisfying the tourist expectations of a great middle-class market were summarized in a government study (1936) under the auspices of the Union of South Africa and the South African Railways and Harbours:

Supply of Tourist Attractions In the wake of advertising and demand, creation must ordinarily follow an organized and systematic supply. If publicity has been given in foreign countries to the na-tional tourist attractions of a country and if a demand has been created therefor, then it is impcrative not only that that which has been advertised should come up to reasonable expectations but that it should also be ordinarily available and normally accessible. So, for exam-ple, if animal or native life is madę to feature in foreign publicity then as such it must be ordinarily available to tourists. Under no circumstances should any aspect of animal or native life which is not ordinarily present be madę to feature in a country’s tourist publicity. Thus it is wrong to make a feature of native initiation ceremo-nies or native dances which are only seen on rare occa-sions sińce in their true character they have ritual sig-nificance.

The sight-seeing items which can be confidently guaranteed and conveniently and ąuickly delivered to tourists on arrival have these merchandisable qualities precisely because they are not naive expressions of the country. They cannot 5eTBg~ real ritual or the real festival; that was never originally planned for tourists. Like the hula dances now staged for photographer-tourists in Hawaii (courtesy of the Eastman Kodak Company), the widely appealing tourist attractions are apt to be those specially inade for tourist consumption.

And the tourist demands morę and morę pseudp-eyents. The most popular of these must be easily photographed (plenty of daylight) and indfTejlsive—suitable Tdrmmily viewing. By the mirror-eflect law of pseudo-events, they tend

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The Lost Art of Trtwel

to become bland and unsurprising reproductions of what the iraage-flooded tourist knew was there all the time. The tour-'] ist’s appetite for strangeness thus seems best satisfied when / the pictures in his own mind are verified in some far country. I

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So far I have been writing about foreign travel—tours to distant places. I have shown how Americans going to re-mote parts of the world have been transformed from travelers into tourists by the very same advances which have madę travel cheap, safe, and available. A similar transformation has been going on here at home. Even within the United States to go from one place to another is no longer to travel in the old sense of the word. Not only because, as we often hear, the culture of different parts of the country has been homogenized—so that wherever you go in the United States you see the same motion pictures, hear the same radio pro-grams, watch the same television shows, eat the same pack-aged foods, select from the same ice cream flavors. We all know how desperately Chambers of Commerce work to cre-ate local color, how auto license plates advertise unreal distinctions. Alabama is the “Heart of Dixie,” Arkansas is the “Land of Opportunity,” Illinois is the “Land of Lincoln,” Maine is “Vacationland,” Minnesota has “10,000 Lakes,” North Dakota is “Peace Garden State.” All this is obvious.

But in addition to this, the democratizing of travel, the lowering cost, increased organization, and improved means of long-distance transportation within our country have them-selves helped dilute the experience. Even here at home we are little morę than tourists. “Traveling,” the Swiss novelist Max Frisch observes, “. . . is medieval, today we have means of communication, not to speak of tomorrow and the day after, means of communication that bring the world into our homes, to travel from one place to another is atavistic. You laugh, gentlemen, but it’s true, travel is atavistic, the day

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