Another Cheap Holiday in Other People’s Misery?

“I Don’t Want a Holiday in the Sun”

The holiday season is here again, time to pack your bags and head off to the Lake District, Spain or India etc. Most people will say they go on holiday to “get away from it all” for a while. This simple and innocent enough statement is a major indictment of society. People happily admitting that their lives are so poor that they need a fortnight break from it, rather than making better by revolting against the conditions that make it necessary to get away from. Bizarrely, many people will work extra hard and add more drudgery to 50 weeks just so they can have 2 weeks away from their everyday surroundings.

And what do we do with these 2 weeks that we have sacrificed ourselves for over the rest of the year? Either we just sit on a beach soaking up the melanoma inducing sun just to look brown and glamorous for a couple of days back in dear old Blighty, or we got to gawp at some other poor sods in a faraway place.

Some of the former is slightly more obnoxious. Xenophobic cretins lambast foreigners all year round and then spend their ‘free’ time on foreign soil. The modern package holiday is simply another commodity and a tool to pacify restless and frustrated proletarians, to give us fools a goal, something to look forward to instead of striving to MAKE EVERY DAY A HOLIDAY.

Glamour has created the image of the bronzed god or goddess; we envy the golden brown returned tripper as particularly beautiful. But, of course, it is a fleeting vanity as the tan vanishes – Ha! Watch your year’s savings pale before your very eyes! Imagine the effect if we were neither jealous nor complimentary, but just apathetic to their skin deep commodity.

Thousands of people packed like sardines on golden beaches, exactly the same as they are on their way to work and shopping, but the weather is a bit better. The really hip people pay a bit extra for quieter beaches in more exclusive places to do exactly the same thing … except there are not as many people to cop off with. Desperate people desperately doing desperate things in a desperate desperation to get drunk, laid and broke. Why do we frantically cram ‘pleasurable’ things into a frenzied 14 days when there is all the time in the world to have fun.

More ‘refined’ people get to more ‘exotic’ locations to soak up the culture and different lifestyles. In Europe, and increasingly beyond this, there is no difference in lifestyle. A grim semblance of uniformity is gripping Europe. My goodness, even the Commies get the vote and have MacDonald’s now. All these jaunts are mere trips made by alienated souls staring at other alienated souls, reflecting each other’s total submission to the totality of sameness and the dominant, global culture.

The constant and frantic need for something new drives more people further afield for a holiday ‘away from it all’. Societies with a bit more spirit and life than ours are turned into spectacles by the all-consuming system of TOURISM. Tourism has the entire world and everything in its scope; the gift of ‘choice’ as to which part we want to see makes it more attractive, when it is a mere subsidiary of the supermarket of ideologies. One travel agent proudly proclaimed “WHEREVER YOU’RE BOUND, WE’RE BOUND TO HAVE BEEN.” Whoopee!

Holidays for the proletariat are generally a product of the industrial and post-industrial eras. They are one justification for the continuance of wage slavery. These justifications are now so subtle, charming and all-embracing that few question their role and even fewer do anything about it. The easy and more attractive option is to take the bribes, ignore the contradictions and keep your head down.

A rather strange phenomenon is how many people return to the safety of their everyday routine with “It was nice to go away, but it’s nicer to come home” as if we are afraid of having a good time and of breaking the very routine we got away from in the first place … for too long, anyway.

The anarchist to their credit say that they do not want to spend time lecturing the working class about how wronged they are because the proletariat already know that things are bad. However, I am increasingly sceptical of this because the dominant society has hypnotised people with satellite TV, mass culture (or high culture for the more ‘enlightened’), higher material standards of living, the right to buy your own council house, more and more useless accessible commodities, and the reward of a holiday from your hard earned wages.

And if you rebel or step out of line? Well, there’s another trip ‘away from it all’ … to prison.

So, this year, another cheap holiday in other people’s misery? Probably, but send me a postcard anyway!

AntiClockWise #16

A few further thought

The terrorist attack on the beach in Tunisia had me thinking of this article again. Our choice of holiday destinations has dramatically increased and I have wondered about how much affluent tourists really appreciate the culture and the people they are visiting. It all seems fine to visit Egypt and Tunisia on holidays that are cheaper than going on holiday in the UK, but when it goes wrong everyone throws their hands in the air in horror. Few people consider the geopolitical situation of the country they are going on holiday to and perhaps they ought to when they are paying for their cheap holiday.

We seem to insist on our right to go anywhere and act in any way we like, but accept no responsibility that the place we are going is very different from our own everyday life and there may be people who are not exactly chuffed to see us sizzling half naked and drunken on their homeland. As we visit more places, many of us end up in places that are not as peaceful as Cornwall or the Costa del Sol and, increasingly, terrorist attacks claim British and other western victims in Africa, South-East Asia and beyond.

When the original piece above was written, the former Yugoslavia was in a state of brutal civil war, yet it is now open to a global audience of holiday makers, and many other places are now open for the discerning consumer to travel to. Almost the whole world is now there to be cherry picked for tourism and the relative cost of travel has fallen for many people to join in the tourist industry. Even formerly ‘closed’ nations such as China have opened to allow their citizens to join in this capitalist free for all.

It is argued that many places depend on tourism to thrive, but I question this as they seemed to be doing perfectly well before global culture embraced their own community. As spectacular capitalism envelopes the world, traditional cultures become side shows. Soon, the whole world will be a safe clinical monochrome place where every city is the same (just as the high streets of most towns in England have), so you could never actually know where you are without being told. Only the natural world will differentiate one place from another, and tourism will soon render that less unique. One example is Tibet, which has become the holiday destination of choice for the burgeoning Chinese middle class and where the Tibetan culture has only been allowed to continue if it is a sanitised product to be consumed by the new visitors from a country which has occupied their land for 60 years.

People do still work hard for their holidays rather than striving to make every day a holiday.  I have met very few people who have really had their minds expanded by travel. Overseas travel is often now a matter of ticking places off on the map rather than learning anything significant from visiting more places.

I also wonder how people are often different on holiday than they are in their everyday lives. This ‘actor’ role is fascinating – which is the real person? Increasingly, we have to judge people not on their background or what they have done, but where they have been. And does this travel and holiday tourism make anyone really happier? One incident that struck me particularly strongly was of the beach in Italy where sunbathers continued their holiday while sharing the sands with the corpses of drowned migrants who had lost their lives in a desperate flight for a better life.

Of course, the original article barely touched on the impact of tourism on the environment. The number of aircraft and air journeys has exploded (perhaps a poor choice of words!). Mass tourism demands more flights and car journeys, more hotels and facilities to be built in often fragile environments, more roads to be built, shifts in population to service tourism rather than traditional occupations. Travel is not an adventure, it is just a sequence of consuming goods and images.

Spectacular commodity society has reveled in tourism, with yet more opportunities to sell products and services from insurance to baggage to sports equipment to travel toiletries etc. We are now encouraged to take more than one holiday a year to increase the allure of relaxation and keep us working harder. As capitalism is desperate to find new ways for us to spend more products and consume more images, we also think we have to play this game and in turn become desperate to either fit in more trips and/or find more exotic places to visit.

We rarely stop to think about the cost of tourism, apart from what we have paid in money for it. The locations reduced to being tagged as tourist destination are also the home of people like us, places where they have lived for centuries or millennia.  Of course, increasingly, the formerly poor of the world may in the future be able to come here and gawp at us on their holidays, which would be deliciously ironic if it wasn’t exactly what spectacular society wants.