Books, Arts & Manners: Yo-Ho-Ho, and a Bottle of Rum!

SOME years ago, a writer in Condé Nast Traveler warmly recommended the island of Grenada for a Caribbean vacation. But it had, he warned, one drawback. You might well run into primitive conservatives, such as R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. of The American Spectator and myself, who were regular visitors to this bastion of anti-Communism. Reading this, I bristled at the implication that I chose my vacation spots on political grounds. Had I not vacationed in Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Hungary, and the Soviet Union during the Cold War? Indeed, I had even tried to get into Enver Hoxha’s Albania in the mid Seventies. (They wouldn’t open the door of the Albanian consulate.) Yet I had never bothered to visit gallant but chilly little Finland, which maintained a precarious independence from the Bear next door.

My irritation sprang partly from the fact that the political tourism he was attributing to me is usually a left-wing and puritan activity. There used to be a travel agency called something like Utopian Tours which organized package trips to the latest Potemkin paradise. For all I know, despite the shortening list of progressive destinations, it may still exist, ferrying radical labor-union officials, experimental theater directors, agnostic bishops, and socially conscious supermodels to North Korea or a Chinese model prison. But the internal contradiction of political tourism, Comrade, is that there is not much of a correlation between “social justice” and sun, sand, and sensuality. As Garbo, playing a Communist commissar, says in Ninotchka about the attractions of Paris: “We have the high ideals, but they have the climate.”

About the Author

John O’Sullivan

John O’Sullivan is a senior fellow at National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review.

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SOME years ago, a writer in Condé Nast Traveler warmly recommended the island of Grenada for a Caribbean vacation. But it had, he warned, one drawback. You might well run into primitive conservatives, such as R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. of The American Spectator and myself, who were regular visitors to this bastion of anti-Communism. Reading this, I bristled at the implication that I chose my vacation spots on political grounds. Had I not vacationed in Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Hungary, and the Soviet Union during the Cold War? Indeed, I had even tried to get into Enver Hoxha’s Albania in the mid Seventies. (They wouldn’t open the door of the Albanian consulate.) Yet I had never bothered to visit gallant but chilly little Finland, which maintained a precarious independence from the Bear next door.

My irritation sprang partly from the fact that the political tourism he was attributing to me is usually a left-wing and puritan activity. There used to be a travel agency called something like Utopian Tours which organized package trips to the latest Potemkin paradise. For all I know, despite the shortening list of progressive destinations, it may still exist, ferrying radical labor-union officials, experimental theater directors, agnostic bishops, and socially conscious supermodels to North Korea or a Chinese model prison. But the internal contradiction of political tourism, Comrade, is that there is not much of a correlation between “social justice” and sun, sand, and sensuality. As Garbo, playing a Communist commissar, says in Ninotchka about the attractions of Paris: “We have the high ideals, but they have the climate.”