Mardi Gras and the six-month anniversary of Hurricane Katrina recently put the media spotlight back on New Orleans. All over the country, people were shocked--shocked!--that the city was still in pieces, that it still resembled Mad Max: Beyond Superdome. As a Louisiana native, I spent time in the city for New Year’s, and while parts of the French Quarter seemed almost normal (normal being the constant urine smell, a drunken cousin stumbling around on Rue Bourbon and the Café du Monde serving clogged arteries with powdered sugar on top), I, too, was slack-jawed at the scope of the city’s devastation. Of course, it was nothing that a few brooms can’t fix. Like ten million brooms.
More than anything, I was struck by… well, by a skinny green Hand Grenade cup tossed from a wrought-iron balcony, but also by how much the city resembled the tsunami-devastated coast of Thailand, which I also visited last year. And how much both of those places resembled the immediate post-9/11 Lower Manhattan, which I also visited-–
--And then it hit me. Not another Hand Grenade, but a realization: I’m a disaster tourist.
At first I was ashamed at this; after all, I not only despise those who slow down to rubberneck at accidents on the freeway, but I actually accelerate through the accident scene. (I have since been informed that this is even more dangerous, but I’m not here to point fingers). I have always prided myself on being globally and socially conscious, so much so that while other people pretend to read the International Herald Tribune, I actually do. But I can’t hide the fact that I fit the ‘disaster tourist’ profile.
Disaster tourists travel the world with a morbid curiosity, eager to sample the planet’s chaos up close, to not only spread goodwill and a universal sense of brotherhood but also to revel in the (usually putrid) scent of devastation. We’re like Global Rubberneckers...or like a term I’m about to coin, Globalneckers.
Globalneckers come in all forms. Our most distinguishing characteristic is an all-encompassing desire to make a difference. Sometimes we’ve got a goatee, a tattered Lonely Planet and a backpack with a Canadian flag sewn on the back. Sometimes we work for an NGO. Sometimes we work for Halliburton. Wherever there is suffering, we are there. Taking pictures on a really nice digital camera.
Visiting a place in total ruins gives you an authenticity factor that no five-star resort can match. It allows you to virtually control dinner party conversation...even ignoring the fact that the average Globalnecker doesn’t tend to go to dinner parties.
Sustaining the Globalnecking phenomenon is the fact that our planet is a veritable Petri dish of calamity. From the uber-floods in China that annually leave eighteen billion people homeless to the pandemic grab bag that is Africa, you’ve always got somewhere to go. Even closer to home (really close to home for me), the normal circle of life in Los Angeles goes like this: tranquility, disaster, rebuilding, Hollywood film about disaster (and occasionally, ensuing box office disaster). A hazardous side effect of epic disaster in my home city is that real estate prices only rise about 18% that month instead of the usual 42%.
Prolonged thinking about disaster tourism presented me with a moral dilemma (always the least-fun kind of dilemma). When I visited post-disaster New Orleans and Thailand and New York, like most intrepid visitors I thought I was helping by lending a hand and spending my hard-earned, rapidly devaluing currency. But I started to realize that maybe I was just playing voyeur, sneaking a peek inside the worst moments of peoples’ lives. That took away the feeling of moral superiority, and without that, really, what’s the point of traveling?
So you can continue to hit the world’s disaster hot spots, Globalnecking with reckless glee. Or, you could do what I’m planning on doing when the next big disaster strikes: giving my money to the Red Cross, staying home, and watching on TV. After all, there’s no disaster that truly compares to CNN and Fox News.
