tsunami

It was in a C. Clarke novel where I read by first time the description of a tsunami. The protagonist, an adolescent of about my age then, is playing in the seashore. In between rocks, there were one always hopes to find at least a tiny, pale reflex of whatever is in the deeper waters. To play at the seaside is to have a cat, knowing that you will never be able to own a tiger. In any case, suddenly the waters go away, back in the ocean. Fishes are stranded in the suddenly dry seabed. Reefs are finally uncovered, corals receive by first time direct sunlight. In order to give the novel a reasonably happy ending, just at that moment a friendly alien happens to be watching from the sky, and warns the child of the waters that soon, very soon, will come back. He runs, and the story can go on from there.

I retain the image, since now and then I wonder if in similar circumstances I would be able to resist the temptation of get into the forbidden place suddenly opened, even if for few moments. To run in the contrary direction seems to be one of the ultimate challenges that reason faces, since it has to overcome our ultimate, and irrational, curiosity. The logic shouts that we should run away and save the skin. And at least a piece of us call exactly for the opposite. To assume that until a last moment we could be privileged witnesses of a mayor catastrophe. And right now I wonder if there would be something of the same feeling in the minds of those occidental tourists that up to today remain in Ache. Bathing in waters that one can imagine as crowded with rests, half eaten, half rotten, of victims from the tsunami. Perhaps these tourists refuse to abandon their position of privileged and reasonably safe, witnesses.

The international press, the bon pensant, is obviously in disagreement with me. In newspapers all across Europe I have seen the photo -in first page- of a pot bellied man in his fifties with swimming trunks and without shirt, holding by the neck a bottle of cold beer, meanwhile at his back the bulldozers remove corpses and debris from the beach. The journalists are not so pleased with this man, stereotype of Europeans on holiday in Thailand. I wonder if so much indignation used to describe the fat guy who decided to invest his money in a cold beer instead of relieving some of the surrounding human catastrophe, is an idiotic indignation or is simply hypocritical indignation.

Truly enough, the progressive thinkers of this continent are almost rabid at the lack of social conscience of our fat tourist with sun-tanned skin. All of them report the answer of the fat guy –tourist money is now needed more than ever- as cynical at best. Some (perhaps right wing) commentators have dared to say that if our fat guy drinks his beer in Thailand, after all, some of the money will end up in the hands of a local entrepreneur, who might do something about the disaster. And at this thought that claims the desirable economical influence of peoples flow across the world, the progressive thinkers of Europe seems to discover another tragedy, that devastating international traffic called tourism, imbued in our Heineken drinker. So now everybody can rant against the predations that westerners do in tourist countries.

What I wonder about is if this recent discovery is stupid or simple hypocritical. Because, after all, is sadly stupid that hundred fifty thousand people (and some) needed to die, so that finally we are aware of the falsehood of that dictum from our neoliberal times. The one that claims that tourism is development. Perhaps after all these years we believed (until the tsunami, that is) that tourists like Lawrence of Arabia were really able to bring development to those under educated Bedouins. Perhaps we have been resting in the image of Marco Polo, as ultimate refuge of cultural exchange?

I feel that there is something to be grateful to the potbellied drinker of cold Dutch beer. Perhaps this fat pal has managed, after so many years of self-complacent lies to make us look at our own face, as disgusting as the face of any other human. That disgusting, repulsive if you want, disaster-tourist, is no more nor less than this. A Tourist. As we have and will be. Lets see who is going to keep on saying that -after this revealing fat lad- tourism does really bring, to the third world, development. That mythic cornucopia that is enjoyed… in the first world.