‘It's the little differences. A lotta the same shit we got here, they got there, but there they're a little different’.
The John Travolta character, who articulates this ‘theory’, goes on to point out a number of such ‘little differences’ including ‘Le Big Mac’- same burger but with a wee Gallic addition, essential sameness but with a little topping of ‘French-icity’. It could equally be ‘Italianicity’ or whatever, just some little twist, flavour or style to be registered and consumed before moving on. The idea here is of the Europeans, or whoever, perversely adding some small nuance or inversion or behavioural shift in order to differentiate themselves from what is, after all, the Norm, the U.S. This was indeed brought home to me, again, by one of my American students who reckoned that the British drove on the left hand side of the road ‘just to be different from the U.S’. - History and cultural humility are thereby dispatched with the speed of a stray thought, and the way in which reality is experienced is mistaken for a property of the thing itself. For the tourist, ‘Experience’ in the sense of novelty and momentary shocks are libidinal goals in their own right and do not have to cede the initiative to the labour of knowledge. Nor can they, if the tourist is to ‘fit it all in’. Of course, this idea of cultural difference is hardly peculiar to the U.S. One finds something similar, perhaps, in the Time Out city guides, in which the same basic template is, like a 'cookie cutter', imposed on each place in turn – from Salford to Sao Paulo - Clubbing, Bars and Cafes, Gay Area and so on, regardless of whether cafes or homosexuality have the same meaning, status, structural place etc in those other cultures. Meanwhile, whatever excremental remainders don’t correspond to this invariable pattern can be left to the locals or the academics.
The tourists needn’t worry, however. In the centre of Dublin, not too far from Trinity College, there's a ruined vaguely Celtic looking monument, a fragment of Ancient Ireland miraculously poking through the urban fabric, reproaching the Present with the repressed Otherness of the dark past. Except it is nothing of the kind. A local historian, Lorcan Collins, tells me that it was constructed quite recently, presumably to meet the expectant gaze of visitors, for whom Ireland is still haunted by semi-Pagan energies, a place full of ruins and inconsolable melancholy, albeit covered over by bluff and blarney.
Thus, as if parodying the received version of the Hegelian dialectic, wherein things gradually approach their Concept, each place visited will gradually and obligingly approximate to the tourist's Misconception of it, and the Culturally Myopic will turn out after all to have been the most far-sighted visionaries.
n.b., just to clarify, there are of course no Time Out guides to Sao Paulo or to Salford.