The Further You Travel The Less You Know

American writer and composer Paul Bowles used to insist on the distinction between a "tourist" and a "traveler." Bowles lived for more than half a century in Tangier, Morocco, just across the Strait (of Gibralter) from Europe, where lots of people pass through. We had cause to ponder this distinction recently when we hosted a couple of young backpackers we had met in Ecuador. They were personable and intelligent but absolutely incurious about anything except their own travel trajectory.

Though my wife and I have lived and worked in and written about Bolivia for the past three years, our visitors did not ask us any questions except where to catch a bus or how to book a tour. They have already been "on the road" for more than a year in dozens of countries, but it's not clear what they found in any of those places beyond exotic backdrops for their photographs of themselves.

Of course, it's not where you go or how long you spend there that makes for the richest experience, it's how open you are to wherever you happen to be. As the song says: "Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see." We observe the world through the lenses of our own personalities and predispositions. We see what we are able to see.

In the case of many young travelers, what they see is themselves and each other, wracking up countries and sites like notches in their belts or trophies on their walls, blogging all the way. When they meet up with other travelers they trade travel tips and stories. They are not really able to Be Here Now. Passing through becomes the point. Which is not altogether pointless.

Something might happen somewhere to pull a self-absorbed our of himself or herself. For instance, Three Cups of Tea is a book about an American kid who went to climb K-2 and got lost on his way down and ended up dedicating his life to building schools in the Pakistani Himalayas. But this is exceptional. Most backpackers just rack up their list of destinations then go home and resume their acquisitive lives. They are tourists, unlike the travelers who are able to engage the people and places they encounter at some deeper level of being.

Not everyone can learn from travel, but some can and do. Some travelers are capable of outgrowing their own superficiality. After first encountering themselves in the world, they are perhaps then able to apprehend that world beyond their infantile horizon. So I do not pity or despise short-sighted backpackers. Rather, I am excited that perhaps they may put themselves in the way of accidental knowledge, beckoning from some unexpected bump along the highway of life, that might awaken them in spite of themselves, that might allow them finally to see.

Where the Movie Villains are American

On my first trip to Germany, shortly after college, I learned the power of media conditioning. I had grown up watching World War Two movies on television, filled with villainous Nazis. "You vill tell us vat ve vant to know. Ve haf our vays to make you talk " Surrounded by German speakers, whom I had only ever heard as menacing movie stereotypes, I felt my heart rate gallop.

An evening at Munich's Hofbrau Haus, where beer drinkers hoist liter steins and occasionally break into song, felt like the ominous prelude to a putsch. Wasn't this how National Socialism got its start? Had I visited Japan then, my reaction surely would have been the same, since two-dimensional "sneaky Orientals" were also staples of war and post-war era American movies.

Now I live in Bolivia, where the most treacherous movie villains in local films are Americans. Hollywood movies show here too, but in Bolivian productions Americans are violent and diabolical.

For instance, currently playing in Bolivian theaters is Antonio Eguino's, Los Andes No Creen En Dios, (The Andes Don't Believe in God), set in the mountain mining town of Uyuni in the 1920s. Germans in this film are savvy, industrious prospectors. The sole British engineer is a pompous drunk. But the Americans are rough, unshaven, gun-toting spaghetti-western thugs. Three gringos rob a mining payroll, blow up a train and shoot the passengers.

The robbery has historical resonance with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. After fleeing the United States, they stole a mine payroll in southern Bolivia and died in a shootout with Bolivian authorities in 1908. If the American desperado is one stock U.S. villain, another is the corrupt U.S. official.

American Visa, released in 2006, tells the contemporary story of a Bolivian schoolteacher named Mario who wants to go to the United States to see his son in Miami. Like many other Bolivians (and Latin Americans), Mario must endure expensive, humiliating procedures to obtain a visa.

When the U.S. consul sneeringly refuses him, Mario turns to the black market, where an illicit American visa goes for five thousand dollars. Mario pawns his gold jewelry, then desperately decides to rob the pawnshop. When he finally buys the black market visa, he is appalled to learn that the person supplying it is the U.S. Consul himself. "Don't worry, teacher, the visa's good," the Consul tells him. But Mario, undone by the theft he has committed to procure the visa, never goes to the United States.

"American Visa" is cinematic revenge against U.S. bureaucrats who stonewall Bolivian visa seekers in the belief that they intend to stay and work illegally. Like many developing countries, Bolivia depends on remittances sent home by nationals working abroad, legally or not. In a real-life act of vengeance, the Bolivian government recently imposed a visa requirement for U.S. citizens visiting their country.

American officials are more flamboyantly corrupt in Rodrigo Bellot's movie, Quien Mato a la Llamita Blanca? (Who Killed the Little White Llama?).

In Bellot's satirical road picture, the American DEA official in charge of cocaine eradication in Bolivia is also a major drug trafficker.

He hires a pair of indigenous, small-time hustlers to drive a shipment of cocaine to the Brazilian border where he intends to have them busted. This cynical, hypocritical gringo is awarded the country's highest honor. Bellott presents the U.S. war on drugs as an elaborate American ruse to make huge profits and set up Bolivian fall guys in order to look virtuous in the process.

Though Bolivian President Evo Morales has not joined Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in calling George W. Bush the devil, contemporary Bolivian movies depict Americans as various sorts of demons. Such heavy-handed portrayals reflect a long-term cultural distrust of U.S. motives in South America and a frustration with U.S. attempts to dictate terms of assistance to Bolivia. Only now those sentiments are expressed in movies, not just graffiti scrawled on adobe walls.

Someday a Bolivian visiting the United States may feel nervous to find himself surrounded by the scheming, soulless gringos he knew about only from Bolivian movies.

[This piece was published a couple of years ago on CounterPunch before I started my blog, so I just thought I'd throw it in now.]