Rick Steves Blows Up Town Hall
The post we wrote yesterday about Rick Steves ("Rick Steves. The man lives in a pleasant world.") seems reasonable if you only know the man through his travel shows on PBS. He was on the Town Hall stage for all of about four seconds last night before destroying that illusion. Actually, he lives in a few different worlds; one here, in Edmonds, Washington, U.S.A., and another in Europe where he spends a third of every year, and the conflict between those two equal something other than "pleasant." Steve was pissed last night during his "Travel as a Political Act" talk. It was an angry, wrathful travel guru working the microphone--A much different animal than the "This is reeeealy great" PBS guy in sensible shoes.
What's he so pissed off about? Ugly Americans, the current U.S. government, the war in Iraq, the war on drugs, the medical care system, the huge disparity between rich and poor in America, our enormous rate of incarceration, etc, etc. He said things like: "We're an empire. I'm not saying 'Evil Empire' and I don't mean that it's good or bad, but we just are. Terrorism is the natural result of defending the far reaches of your empire." "Third World debt is the slavery of the 21st Century." "The 'Ugly Groups' of tourists are the Americans, the Russians, the Japanese and the Germans. And the Indians are getting up there." Not the biggest bombs we've seen lobbed from the Town Hall stage, but more than we expected from Rick Steves. Most of that came somewhere near the end of what you might call Act II. He followed with the solution: that through travel--a specific style of travel that requires maximum interaction with the people and customs of a place--Americans can be exposed to creative solutions to various American problems, expand their world views to encompass that potential and implement them where needed at home.
We agree. A lot. We've got a lot of problems, the solutions to some of which can be found in Europe. Town Hall agreed, to the tune of a full house and a standing 'O' after he wrapped up. And yet, there are some problems. The Other Americans kept coming up; the Ugly Americans, the Bush electorate in their "Love it or leave it" tee shirts and their lack of respect for the rest of the world who were, earlier in the evening, banished by Rick to Hawaii or other hedonist travel destinations so that there would be more room for the Enlightened U.S. citizens in Europe or other proper travel destinations. Rick Steves knows he's in front of his congregation when he speaks in Seattle. "Seattle doesn't need my road show," he said in response to a question about how to get people to travel more. Fly-over country needs it. He doesn't call it that, he calls it "Middle America, where they don't have passports," but they're just different code words for the same 80% of the country that can be written off any number of ways. Red, Right, rural, no passport havin' assholes. There's both some truth and something ridiculous in suggesting that the only thing Joe Bush-Voting American-Flag-Tee-Shirt-Wearing Kansas farm guy needs to turn himself and the country around is a hundred days in Southern Italy. No shit! Ya think that might do some good?
But which is it? Do we want to get that guy fired up about Europe, buy him some tickets (because, although Steves claims that a trip to Portugal can be no more expensive than a trip to the Yucatan, the Yucatan is out of reach for a lot of Americans) and immerse his ass in some Mediterranean culture for a healthy string of weeks, even though his rude, loud, Americentric ways may cause Steves some embarrassment in Europe, or do we just continue sending the rednecks off to Hawaii on steerage cruises and keep the good stuff for ourselves while whining about the administration sitting in D.C. and the current state of things? Hey, we can forgive Steves that, though. That's a tough nut to crack, and similar to the conundrum the entire Left has to deal with both individually and as a whole. It's not even so dissimilar from that UW study that came out this week: How do you get Americans to lose weight? Simply pluck them out of their poor, uneducated zip codes and drop them down in 98103! Or Cinque Terre! That'd probably work, too.
At the end of the night one of the last audience members to approach the mic asked what Rick Steves would recommend to European tourists coming to the Pacific Northwest and Steves struggled to answer. He'd never considered the question. That is unforgivable.
Comments [rss]
-
guest
-
guest
-
Dan
-
velo
-
Katelyn
-
sciencevsromance
-
guest
-
MvB
-
Seth
-
guest
-
guest
