Why Don’t Americans Take Vacations? This Land is Already ‘Leisure Land.’
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 08.06.07 | 10:57 AM ET
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That’s the half-baked argument of
Up in the Air author and sometime travel commentator Walter Kirn. He writes in a part-serious, part-amusing, part-you’ll-yank-your-hair-out piece in Sunday’s New York Times magazine: “Grasping the truth about why more Americans are taking holidays from their vacations is as easy as stepping outside your workplace (the lushest of which tempt employees to stay inside by offering lap pools, massage rooms and the like) and seeing that the recuperative promises of the old-style extended getaway—the cleansing, amusing, soothing, stamina-raising therapeutic interludes that Eleanor Roosevelt once touted as a way for Americans ‘to build up health and resistance’—are redeemable everywhere, in every form and so close by that it’s a wonder thousand-mile drives in gear-packed station wagons still take place at all.”
It’s an off-the-wall take that doesn’t stand up to the slightest scrutiny. An hour of shiatsu hardly equals a week in Kauai, and it’s questionable whether most American workers could get the time off for—or even afford—either endeavor.
It’s not even the most provocative part of his story, either. That would be his invocation of a phrase from not-so-long ago.
He writes:
Type the phrase “Strength Through Joy” into a search engine, even if you’re on a trip right now. Hint: The motto, as its utopian terseness instantly leads you to suspect, is a translation from the German. Another hint: Lederhosen. Conclusion: Invigoration-through-vacationing is not the expression of some bursting life force but, in large part, a Triumph of the Will.
That’s right. Kirn plays the Nazi card. Just “a bit of historical trivia,” he writes.
Kirn’s piece has stimulated some strong reactions in the blogosphere, but I can’t get too worked up about it. I don’t think that Kirn truly believes all that he wrote. After all, he notes, this summer even he took a few weeks off.
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Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
