David Brooks on travel snobs

The following passage is from David Brook’s 2000 book Bobos in Paradise. It makes an interesting comparison to Paul Fussell’s rant about “anti-tourists” in his 1980 book Abroad.

[Note: A “Bobo”, as Brooks defines it, is short for “bourgeois bohemian” — a member of the corporate upper-middle class whose values blend the liberal idealism of the 1960s and the self-interest of the Reagan era.]

“You’re sitting in an outdoor cafe in the Piazza della Serenissima in one of those stone Tuscan hill towns, and you’ve just finished 20 minutes of rapture while touring a gemlike little basilica far off the normal tourist paths. You’ve pulled a few iron tables together to accommodate the urbane couples you met inside, and as you sip drinks that back home would qualify as cough syrup, you begin trading vacation stories. Somebody mentions a recent journey to the Goreme Valley of central Turkey and the glories of the caves the Hittites carved into the volcanic mud-ash, when suddenly a gentleman wearing a shirt with an enormous number of pockets leans back and interjects, “Ah, yes. But the whole Cappadocia region has just been ruined by all the tourists.”

“After a few minutes someone else at the table relates some fascinating bits she learned from the tour guides while on an eco tour of southern Belize. “It really hasn’t been the same since electrification,” the man with all the pockets laments. You have come face to face with a travel snob. There are a certain number of sophisticated travelers who wear their past destinations like little merit badges. Their main joy in life comes from dropping whopping hints that everywhere you are just going they went to long ago when it still meant something.

“…The travel braggart begins slowly. Just a few sly hints about his vast cultural capital. Then as the conversation goes along, he gets a little more voluble. He is biding his time, sucking you in. There will be a ray of hope when someone else in the group starts talking about Mount Everest. Ah, he’s been Tibetted, you’ll think. Surely he can’t be so smug around someone who’s been to Tibet. But, of course, he was doing Tibet before Into Thin Air.

“…In his stories he always depicts himself as a masterful Dr. Livingstone, but you know that when he walked into a village, the locals saw him as this big flapping wallet with dollar bills flying out. If this person were suddenly found dead with a dozen butter knives up his nose, it would be like an Agatha Christie novel; everyone would have a motive.

“I suspect that what keeps us from finishing off the travel braggart is that none of us is pure. All of us in the educated class are travel snobs to some degree. It’s just that while we are snobs toward the hordes of fat tourists who pile out of vast buses and into Notre Dame, he is snobbish toward us. He’s just a bit higher on the ladder of sophisticated travel.

“…The code of utilitarian pleasure means we have to evaluate our vacation time by what we accomplished