Great Faiths by Private Jet
I can't make this shit up.
A few weeks ago I almost trashed a USA Today article about a sweet, hip, socially conscious, obviously rich "Gen Y-er" who made sure she tutored pre-school English in India before enrolling in college (presumably to foster the development of the next generation of call center employees). I wanted to write about a trend I've been watching develop in American higher education ever since my affiliation with the "mega-industry" began seven years ago: boutique poverty.
Our rich kids travel the globe, working in the soup kitchens of Botswana, Thailand, India, Brazil. Then they post pictures of themselves doing it on the marketing database called facebook.com.
Yes, though black men are dropping out of high school at alarming rates, hispanic immigrants are being zoned out of their homes, and most living Vietnam vets seem to dwell under highway bridges, it's just cooler to do your community service on the other side of an ocean. Especially if it's warmer there.
You can make fun of the trendy-but-marginally-helpful rich kids all you want, but as the Tufts University Alumni Association indirectly points out, participating in boutique poverty is a behavior that spreads top-down across generations. For while the TUAA endlessly mails me postcards asking for money to supplement my $120,000 tuition, they also arrange $43,000 per person* private jet charters to historic religious sites. Giza! Kyoto! The first Memphis! Who wouldn't want to go and try to buy back part of his or her soul?
Strangely, it seems that the rich kids who are able to take their digicams along on their transoceanic volunteer trips do more social good than any executive spending a week living our of a converted 757. Is "Gen Y"'s guilt driving it away from fixing the problems it creates at home? Or are the world-savers such highly evolved superconsumers that they can only pitch in where they'll have the most fun?
These are questions you probably don't think about if you can spend $43,500 on airfare. You probably don't rely on scholarship help for your college-age heirs, either.
----------------------
*All trips in the Private Jet series are, strangely, related to spirituality. Trip cost includes bottled water so you won't catch the local diseases.
A few weeks ago I almost trashed a USA Today article about a sweet, hip, socially conscious, obviously rich "Gen Y-er" who made sure she tutored pre-school English in India before enrolling in college (presumably to foster the development of the next generation of call center employees). I wanted to write about a trend I've been watching develop in American higher education ever since my affiliation with the "mega-industry" began seven years ago: boutique poverty.
Our rich kids travel the globe, working in the soup kitchens of Botswana, Thailand, India, Brazil. Then they post pictures of themselves doing it on the marketing database called facebook.com.
Yes, though black men are dropping out of high school at alarming rates, hispanic immigrants are being zoned out of their homes, and most living Vietnam vets seem to dwell under highway bridges, it's just cooler to do your community service on the other side of an ocean. Especially if it's warmer there.
You can make fun of the trendy-but-marginally-helpful rich kids all you want, but as the Tufts University Alumni Association indirectly points out, participating in boutique poverty is a behavior that spreads top-down across generations. For while the TUAA endlessly mails me postcards asking for money to supplement my $120,000 tuition, they also arrange $43,000 per person* private jet charters to historic religious sites. Giza! Kyoto! The first Memphis! Who wouldn't want to go and try to buy back part of his or her soul?
Strangely, it seems that the rich kids who are able to take their digicams along on their transoceanic volunteer trips do more social good than any executive spending a week living our of a converted 757. Is "Gen Y"'s guilt driving it away from fixing the problems it creates at home? Or are the world-savers such highly evolved superconsumers that they can only pitch in where they'll have the most fun?
These are questions you probably don't think about if you can spend $43,500 on airfare. You probably don't rely on scholarship help for your college-age heirs, either.
----------------------
*All trips in the Private Jet series are, strangely, related to spirituality. Trip cost includes bottled water so you won't catch the local diseases.
posted by Rob at 6:06 PM
6 Comments:
You have to admit, though, that poverty is fascinating, especially from a spiritual perspective. I predict that within 20 years there will be a Norton Anthology of Comparative Poverty (ed. Ratzinger, Robertson, et al.) for all the Comparative Poverty departments springing up in the Poverty branch of the mega-industry.
Seriously, the private jet world tour sounds like something out of the 19th century--hardly a gen y phenomenon. Adventure tourism for aristocrats (as opposed to missions by lobotomized evangelical kids). As Robert Lowell says, "I envy the conspicuous / waste of our grandparents on their grand tours-- / Long haired Victorian sages accepted the universe, / while breezing on their trust funds through the world."
pat
Since all posts are smashed together during small, fixed intervals between tasks of human domestication (see link appended via comment to post below), sometimes I miss things. Like the sheer panic the aristocracy must feel at the industrialization of the third world. In a few short decades, they'll be chartering private jets to inner Baltimore and the South Bronx, because the mud hut people are too busy gluing ipods together to welcome them at the airport.
I was going to comment on the whole 19th-century aspect of the situation, but it seems your previous commenter has beaten me to the punch. Rather than just lamenting the wastage of funds and the general, overall presumptuousness of the whole Community Service Abroad endeavor, I'm curious as to what harm these sorts of travels actually cause the people that live in the places that are visited. I mean, isn't there a strange sort of sucking void caused by this sudden influx and withdrawal of extreme ostentation and consumerism?
Elizabeth
Hey, sorry to step on your toes Elizabeth (and to sound like I was editing you, Rob--keep the posts flying fast). It's a good question about what real damage could possibly come from some yuppies-in-training (YITs) snapping photos of the Taj Mahal. On the face of it, what are they going to do--interact with the natives?
My initial feeling is that the presence of YITs to begin with signals that the damage has already been done. That is to say, their tourism is to a large extent--if not wholly--made possible by a by-now very long history of colonization, especially in the non-western destination cities. I take it, for example, there will be stops in India. Depending on where they go, I imagine they'll stay at swanky resorts and be waited upon by a servant class established by the British ages ago and which persists because they've learned English and Western buisness practices and are willing to perform them at exploitative rates. Such practices will continue, I imagine, as long as rich tourists want to visit. Even with the protection a resort offers, I imagine our YITs will be unable to avoid seeing human misery on a very large scale, endured by the masses who don't benefit from a Western presence.
For a better picture of all this, see "My India" in Best American Travel Writing 2005, ed. Jamaica Kinkaid. I taught it in a couple travel writing classes last year.
I should say I don't really have a problem with Americans touring Rome, Athens, London, etc., beyond the sense some YITs will acquire that this Great Civilization belongs to them. And as for missions to exotic frontiers like Thailand and Africa, they pose vexed problems all their own.
This isn't to say I dislike tourism or travel--I'm all for it, really. Mobility is built into the human body, so it's hardly avoidable. I would even advocate the cultivation of nomadic sensibilities, and am OK with some aspects of "globalization." The ways we travel and the ways we think about travel, though, bear a lot of scrutiny. But this post certainly does not.
Pat
Prepare for a real tangent that completely veers off the subject.
Mobility is built into the human body. Analytical skills and communicative ability are not, hence my fascination with the untold stories of everyone else. Everyone else includes you, me, and all the people from the working class on down.
I was at a 'career event' Tuesday night at the University in question, when a loquacious undergrad demanded that I tell her my career story. I asked her to tell me hers first, and she said she was preparing her best "do you want fries with that?" for the post-graduation job market.
I decided to start by telling her about my year working at Wendy's, and she was horrified. I didn't even bother to point out to her that the tired fries line had been replaced by questions about Biggie-sizing over a decade ago.
The movement to study working class [travel!?] literature hasn't gained much momentum because there isn't anything to study. Worker bees don't travel because they like to laugh at poorer people and use flash bulbs to drive home their eminent superiority. They travel to experience consumer fantasylands that anesthize their spirits to the realities of their slavish existences.
Doesn't that set the stage for a thousand better stories than a spiritual mystery tour? Even a volunteer trip to save the wallaby?
Wendy's, eh? Are you familiar with Letters to Wendy's?
Today I had a Biggie. Usually I just have a small, and refill. Why pay more? But today I needed a Biggie inside me. Some days, I guess, are like that. Only a Biggie will do. You wake up and you know; today I will get a Biggie and I will put it inside me and I will feel better. One time I saw a guy with three Biggies at once. One wonders not about him but about what it is that holds us back.
I wonder what "beauty" really is. I know that the little girl, Wendy, who is pictured on your cups and bags, is beautiful, and so is the green green descent into the valley. Within this descent, I can feel the overpowering order within which I am a temporary eccentricity. This overpowering, anticipated but absent, is beauty. I'd like to spank Wendy's-white ass and fuck her hard.
***
What you say about working class travel makes sense, esp. when you think about Disneyland, e.g., as induction into middle class life & the american "dream".
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home