Holiday: Living on a Return Ticket

By Charles Krauthammer

August is holiday time. France heads for the beach, Congress for home, and psychiatry for the asylum of Truro on Cape Cod. What makes for a holiday? Not time off from work. That happens on weekends, and no one calls that a holiday. Nor merely leaving home. That happens on business trips. Ask Willy Loman. On holiday one escapes more than work or home. One leaves oneself behind. The idea of holiday is a change of person, the remaking of oneself in one's own image. The baseball camp for adults, for example, where the bulky stockbroker, facing an aged Whitey Ford, can imagine himself the slugger he never was: that's a holiday.

On holiday one seeks to be what one is not. The accountant turns into a woodsman, the farmer into a city slicker.

And when they all go overseas, they insist that their tourist spot be tourist-free, the better to experience the simulated authenticity of another way of life. To holiday is to go native, to be native--temporarily, of course.

Reversibility is crucial. One wants to be native only for a time. The true holiday requires metamorphosis, but, even more important, return to normality. Return is what distinguishes excursion from exile. If the change of persona becomes irreversible--if the Mardi Gras mask becomes permanently, grotesquely stuck--holiday turns to horror. One must be able to go home.

And there are many ways, besides a Cook's tour, to leave home. One cheap, popular alternative these days is the psychic holiday: the cosmos on $5 a day. The preferred mode of travel is drugs, the destination lotus land. Madness is exotic. True, it is no longer celebrated, as it was in the heyday of R.D. Laing and the "politics of experience,"as the only real sanity in this world of (nuclear, capitalist, fill-in-the-blanks) insanity. But it retains a mystique, a reputation for authenticity and depth of vision. We know that the mentally ill inhabit a terrible place, literally a place of terrors. But that makes madness, like its two-dimensional facsimile, the horror film, all the more titillating.

For some, therefore, the ideal is to go there on a visit, a trip. The most widely used drugs, in fact, promise to re-create the experience of a major mental illness. Marijuana lets you circumnavigate the land of schizophrenia; LSD parachutes you in for the day. Quaaludes and downers promise a languid overnight stay in the Lethean land of depression, cocaine in the energized hothouse of mania.

As in any holiday, however, there must be an exit. For a drug to be widely popular it must be thought to be nonaddictive. That was cocaine's early, and false, claim to fame: the perfect high, it gets you there and back. (It is only those living in utter despair who choose a drug like heroin that takes you there for good: they are seeking not to holiday, but to emigrate.) The spirit of the psychic holiday was uncannily captured by Steven Spielberg, when he called Michael Jackson's peculiar child fantasy world (Disney dolls, cartoons, asexuality) a place where "I wish we could all spend some time." Living there, like living in New York, being another matter altogether.

For others there is the thrill of the political holiday, which offers not personal but social upheaval. It is a favorite recreation of what V.S. Naipaul calls the "return-ticket revolutionary," the comfortable Westerner who craves a whiff of social chaos and will travel to find it. First we had the Venceremos Brigade, eager to swing a sickle at people's cane. Now we have the European and American kids who hang around Managua wearing combat boots and T shirts that read NICARAGUA LIBRE. In the '70s it was Gale Benson, the bored, white English divorcee, who followed the cult of Black Power Militant Michael X to Trinidad to play at a revolution. Now it is the carpenter from South Shields, England, wearing a kaffiyeh and an AK-47, who is evacuated from Tripoli after five weeks with the P.L.O., and tells a reporter aboard his Yemen-bound ship that he plans to fight Israel for a year or two more, then go home to England.

They will always be with us, these political truants, and you shall know them by the return tickets in their pockets. Strife, preferably war, is for them fun, or at least a relief from the boredom of civilization. And for them, though not for the natives they patronize, when things get hot there will always be England.

Foreign correspondents, who commute to war by day, then return for drinks at the Hilton, know something of the thrill the traveling revolutionary seeks. "Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result," said Winston E Churchill, himself a war correspondent.

Journalists, however, remain observers. They do not pretend to have remade themselves 3 from a gringo into a Sandino, precisely the "conceit of the return-ticket revolutionary.

Finally, there is the cheapest vacation of mall: the moral holiday, when the rules are suspended and one is transformed into anything one wants. There are two ways to achieve this happy condition. One is to stay home and wait for an official suspension of the rules, an official "letting go" (that is what the Russian word for vacation means) like the Fasching in Germany or Mardi Gras in the Americas. The other way is to travel to a place where one can make up one's own rules. Some go to Club Med to shed pinstripes for swim trunks, a billfold for beads and a metropolitan persona for any laid-back one they choose to invent.

Some, like Billy Graham or the latest tour from the National Council of Churches, go to the Soviet Union and make up entirely new meanings for words like freedom. "We believe they are free,"said N.C.C. Tour Leader Bruce Rigdon of the McCormick Theological Seminary, referring to Soviet demonstrators thrown out of Moscow's Baptist Church. And some go to the Middle East, on which they pronounce solemn, chin-tugging judgment full of right and wrong and anguished ambivalence, to make up rules--for others. There are so many of these travelers that the Middle East has become, in Saul Bellow's words, the "moral resort area" of the West: "What Switzerland is to winter holidays and the Dalmatian coast to summer tourists, Israel and the Palestinians are to the West's need for justice." The West Bank alone offers the moral tourist a sandbox full of paradoxes, ironies and ambiguities too neat, and cheap, to refuse. For the Israeli these are questions of life and death; for the traveling moralist (lives there a columnist who has not made the hajj?), they are an occasion for indignation and advice, the consequences of which are to be observed safely from overseas.

In the end, it is the two-way ticket that makes the holiday of whatever type at once so safe, so pleasurable, and, literally, so irresponsible. It is a walk on the wild side, but a walking tour only; a desire to see and feel and even judge, and then leave. To stay--i.e., to be serious--is to miss the point. "A perpetual holiday," said George Bernard Shaw, "is a good working definition of hell." Getting home isn't half the fun. It's all of it. --By Charles Krauthammer