“And you’d be the moderator?”
“Yes.”
“You’re a literary critic?”
“No, I’m a physical education teacher.”
“So you’re into sports then?”
“No, cultural exchange.”
“And where would the literary evening be?”
“In Poland.”
“Where exactly?”
The Dutchman mentioned the name of a village. As it turned out the Dutchman had a holiday home there, where he spends most of the year. Other Dutch also had houses in the village. Then it came out that the physical education teacher actually organized group tours for Dutch tourists, accompanying them around the surrounding countryside and introducing them to authentic Polish village life. His mission wasn’t just to enlighten Dutch tourists about Polish culture, it was also about enriching the everyday lives of the local population. I was supposed to be the enrichment. The physical education teacher’s benevolent enterprise had already received accreditation for its innovative embrace of European integration.
“Who are you accredited by?”
“European Union agencies. We get some funding from them, the rest comes from membership dues.”
“And this is how you earn a living?”
“One has live from something,” he said meekly.
Irrespective of the fact that I was and remain wholeheartedly in favor of initiatives supporting European integration, not to mention intercultural communication, I declined the invitation, which only goes to prove my arrogance and worrying deficit of visionary imagination. Let me repeat: This was all before the crisis. Today I’d no doubt be more receptive to the offer.
Yes, we live in a time of crisis. Many are thinking about means of survival, yet most suffer failures of imagination. For example, in Croatia a couple of middle-aged women (one of whom was educated as a political scientist) went to jail after botching a bank robbery. For my part, I appreciate an imaginative approach. I think it’s elegant when someone, even in times of crisis, has an imagination. Perhaps I have lots of other things, but I have no imagination.
That’s why I was thrilled to read about a little Croatian start-up. Buying pigs’ ears from a local slaughterhouse (cheap, of course — pig’s ears rarely make it onto anyone’s menu), a guy figured he could grind them into prime dog food. Crisis or not, there are plenty of buyers. People obviously figure that even if their own lives aren’t up to much, they can at least try and give their pets a decent one.
I was equally taken by the example of well-known gourmet chef, Daniel Angerer, and his wife. The pair had a young baby, and in case her milk dried up the wife put some away in reserve. With the fridge soon overflowing with breast milk, the pair decided to make cheese from it. Angerer launched the new venture by approaching volunteer tasters with little cheese, fig, and pepper sandwiches. Many turned up their noses. Angerer’s wife maintained that the prevailing skepticism toward mother’s milk cheese stems from the fact that most people “associate breasts with sex,” instead of accepting the fact that “women’s breasts exist to produce food.”
Angerer’s idea was taken up by artist Miriam Simun in the installation The Lady Cheese Shop. Visitors were offered breast milk cheese, the goal being to examine “the relationship between ethics and modern biotechnology.” London restaurateur Matt O’Connor has a dish called “Baby Gaga” on his menu, breast milk ice cream. It’s around twenty-two dollars a portion. O’Connor maintains that “no one’s done anything interesting with ice cream in the last hundred years,” and pays his donors well. One wet nurse shyly explained that given she has excess milk, the extra income was very welcome in these recessionary times. The woman is right. If people sell their kidneys, blood, and children to survive, why wouldn’t women sell their milk. I mean, if they’ve got it to spare.
Some people’s imaginations really take the cake. It isn’t just breast milk that brings in the punters, nostalgia works a treat too. Lithuanians, for example, figured out that there was a dollar to be made in commercializing their traumas under the terrors of Soviet communism. As part of the project 1984: Survival Drama in a Soviet Bunker, visitors crawl down into an authentic six-meter deep Soviet bunker in a Lithuanian forest somewhere, exposing themselves to the risk of physical and mental torment. Visitors are happy to put their hands in their pockets to hear (for a first or second time) Soviet guards yelling: “Welcome to the Soviet Union! Here you are nobody and nothing!”
Hungarian director Péter Bacsó’s 1969 film The Witness (A tanú) features a communist amusement park. There’s a scene in a funhouse in which Marx’s, Lenin’s, and Stalin’s heads leap out of the darkness, prompting general shrieking in the audience. The scene inscribed the film in the memories of my generation as a brilliant and emancipatory satire on the absurdities of communism. Of course the film itself spent some time in a bunker, and is today almost forgotten. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, communist theme parks have sprung up in a number of post-communist countries, but as there’s no risk, they’re no longer entertaining, and least of all emancipating. Viliumas Malinauskas is a wealthy Lithuanian farmer (mushrooms and snails) and the owner of Grūtas Park, a sculpture garden located in a forest next to the village of the same name, the park home to socialist realist statues scavenged from the ruins of Lithuanian communism. Visitors can have their photo taken in the embrace of tons of bronze — Stalin, Lenin, Marx, and Engels are all there — or if they prefer, with living sculptures, performance artists impersonating the same crew. In Lithuania, a land of Catholicism and former communism, a battle for market share is raging. It remains to be seen whether dead communism or living Catholicism will win the day.
Incidentally, let’s not forget that from a commercial perspective, communism still appears to sell amazingly well in the country of its former rival, America. Every now and then a new literary star emerges from the undergrowth to testify about his or her communist trauma due to lack of bananas and toilet paper. The reality is that these stars are getting younger and younger (and cuter and cuter!), so can’t have had any real personal contact with communism in the first place. But yeah, genes and a place of birth are always solid guarantees of purported authenticity. The marketplace knows that the inauthentic recycling of trauma always sells better than authentic experience from first-hand.
Some people really do have great imaginations. The London culinary expert assured us that there had been nothing new in the ice cream world for the past hundred years. But there’s no way that’s the case with tourism, where they’re innovating on a daily basis. Hence the appearance of so-called dark tourism and its specific sub-genres. There’s grief tourism (tourists visit concentration camps, infamous prisons, historic graveyards, battle sites of mass slaughter, or the small town of Soham, England, where two ten-year-old girls were once killed); disaster tourism (tourists visit places struck by natural catastrophes, post-Katrina New Orleans, post-tsunami Thailand, etc.); then there’s poverty tourism (tourists visit infamous shanty towns such as Soweto in South Africa, or the favela of Rio de Janeiro); and then there’s doomsday tourism (tourists go to places threatened with disappearance, the Galápagos Islands, Greenland, tiny coral islands such as Great Barrier Reef in Australia).
The newest branch of tourism on offer is political tourism. It’s all about educational visits to political hotspots. Tour operators organize both group and individual trips to countries such as Turkey, Georgia, North Korea, Northern Ireland, Ethiopia, Kosovo, and Bosnia. The tour guides are always experts, acclaimed historians, diplomats, academics, respected commentators, and journalists. The clients are whoever is prepared to pay. The cost of an eight-day trip to Bosnia is just over four thousand dollars. The tour is led by a well-known British journalist and involves meetings with local politicians, NGOs, religious leaders, regular people, and authentic victims of the Bosnian war. Surviving victims, naturally.