“Fussell Was Right. We Are All Tourists”
Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 01.31.02 | 1:19 AM ET
Wen Stephenson was in Bombay in January 1991 when the Gulf War began, a young American tourist armed with a Lonely Planet guidebook and a taste for the exotic. In light of the September 11 attacks, Stephenson looks back critically at his journey, and at the rise of mass travel and globalization, in The American Prospect. “September 11 has already come to mean many things to many people,” he writes. “One thing it confirmed for me is that the gaze we felt upon us once, in those Eastern longitudes, has only intensified—has, in many places, turned from curiosity to fear and from fear to menace. To face this honestly means confronting the part we played in the unfolding drama and abandoning whatever comforts and conceits we may have assumed from our cosmopolitan vantage point between worlds. Far from innocent, no matter how sincerely curious we may have been, the fact is that we were globalization’s vanguard, its shock troops, its goateed expeditionary force.”
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Jim Benning is the editor and co-founder of World Hum.
