“Shalom, Y’all”
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 11.06.01 | 8:33 PM ET
The Holy Land Experience, which opened in February 2001, is the latest and, perhaps, most unlikely theme park to grace the sticky air of Orlando, Florida. While it has received ample visitors and a wave of press coverage, few writers have dissected the Experience like GQ‘s pop culture critic, Joe Queenan, who chronicles his visit in the magazine’s November 2001 issue (The story is not available online). Queenan, who is Catholic, hoped the ersatz Holy Land would “give off a sweet savor and settle me in green pastures beside still waters, where I would be delivered from the snare of the fowler.” Eventually, though, he finds many things to make fun of. And he’s very good at making fun of things. “Presumably, we were supposed to feel we were back in Jerusalem in A.D. 70, when Titus laid waste to the Temple,” he writes. “But when push came to shove, it seemed more like A.D. 1972, when Foghat laid waste to Nassau Coliseum.”
Borderline tasteless tourist attractions seem to be contagious. The former U.S. Embassy in Tehran, which Iranian students overran in 1979 has been transformed into an American Imperialism theme park, The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times report. And, when in Lithuania, don’t miss Stalin World. “During a recent gala opening, thousands of invited guests were greeted at the gate by an actor dressed as Stalin; a Lenin look-a-like, complete with a goatee and cap, sat fishing by a nearby pond,” the Baltic news source City Paper reports. “Guests were invited to drink shots of vodka and eat cold borscht soup from tin bowls, while loud speakers blared old communist hymns. Nearby, red, Soviet-era propaganda posters read: “There’s No Happier Youth in the World Than Soviet Youth!”
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Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
