While traveling, my failsafe North Star is David Foster Wallace’s 1997 nonfiction collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, the most poignant and despairing essay of which, Shipping Out, concerns itself with the (nearly lethal) comforts of a Caribbean cruise he once took:
“I have dickered over trinkets with malnourished children. I have learned what it is to become afraid of one’s own cabin toilet. I have now heard—and am powerless to describe—reggae elevator music.”
-David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
The enduring emotion expressed regarding his time aboard the MV Zenith is melancholy. Whether his experience contributed to his eventual suicide a decade later in 2008 is fodder for speculation— but even if he would’ve hung himself anyway it certainly didn’t help.
“Supervisors force professional service people to broadcast the Professional Smile[.] Am I the only consumer in whom high doses of such a smile produce despair? Am I the only person who’s sure that the growing number of cases in which totally average-looking people suddenly open up with automatic weapons in shopping malls and insurance offices and medical complexes and McDonald’ses is somehow causally related to the fact that these venues are well-known dissemination-loci of the Professional Smile?”
-David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
The Professional Smile – the bane of authenticity, that saccharine and constant reminder that your human interaction is inseparable from economic transaction. The dance is baked into the caked between tourist and hospitality agent.
I’m going to rip off Wallace’s central discontent here in the context of Cancun, which, had he visited as he did various Caribbean islands turned into commercial hubs for portly American cruiser guests, would surely have profoundly depressed him as much, and in the same manner.
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As a consequence of having read the piece in my formative years, I conscientiously, whenever possible, avoid heavily trafficked tourist traps like the plague.
Vacation hotspots – like Khao San Road in Bangkok or Times Square, New York – universally foster unnatural, tense social dynamics that become instantly recognizable once you’ve experienced enough of them.
Their economies inevitably come to depend on the income provided by tourists, who are merely commodities, another resource to be mined, in their eyes – walking ATMs to be extracted from.
The tourist assumes near non-personhood status, with no connection to the land, no stewardship. They are there to be rendered industrial fun, to receive their services like an automobile in a mechanic’s shop and then to depart in a few days’ time to be replaced by the next planeload in need of servicing.
Consume, squander, exhaust. Rinse and repeat.
Thus the machine runs on.
And who could blame the locals for their indifference, and often outright disdain, for such aliens? They won’t be seeing them again.
While passing through, the tourists, for their part, leave behind a whirlwind of trash and trashed hotel rooms, to be remedied somehow by the local, often-strained services – perhaps funded, in some part, by the revenue provided by their stay.
By furnishing the financing upon which the locals feed, inevitably, the tourist feels he has earned a sense of entitlement – of duty, almost – to get his money’s worth by burdening the infrastructure as heavily as possible.
A swollen trash pile on Koh Wai, and otherwise gorgeous Thai island, of discarded beer and water bottles and various other forms of debris
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Having no other solid logistical options, my wife and I, against our better judgment, flew into Cancun, which contains, by far, the international airport in closest proximity to our ultimate destination, a non-descript island with no tourists in the Mexican gulf called Ciudad del Carmen.
(Aside #1: Cancun’s entire existence as a tourist hub was manufactured at the behest of the Bank of Mexico in the 1970s, which recommended turning pristine jungle and coconut groves into a shopping plaza with a beach out back.)
(Aside #2: “Cancun” fittingly means “nest of snakes” in its original Mayan.)
Turning lemons into lemonade, since we were already there, we made a two-day stay of it before hitting the bus station.
We walked along the beach – not astoundingly pretty despite the renown but, rather, just pretty nice – until we came upon a modern Sodom and Gomorrah outpost, a resort for mid-life crisis sufferers called Temptation™, which ostensibly insisted that their guests relive their sex-crazed adolescence.
A bleached-blonde Ricky Martin-esque DJ, who alternated between English and Spanish just like in the 1990s pop hit La Vida Loca, yelled enthusiastically into the mic between house beats, chastising the middle-aged partygoers that they weren’t letting their inhibitions loose hard enough.
Beefy security guards with earpieces in neon yellow shirts looked on, arms folded in the peculiar kind of spread-legged stance law enforcement takes to convey authority and readiness, as if to enforce the dictates from the DJ booth.
Temptation’s™ beach is apparently topless, as several (very large) women sunbathed with their breasts fully exposed.
On the steps between the beach and the hotel leading up to the pool area that housed the DJ booth, a menopausal woman with a huge gut yet spindly legs (the kind of thing that happens in individuals with chronically high stress hormone levels) twerked on her obese male partner — presumably her husband but just as likely a stranger. Temptation™ is the kind of place, like Las Vegas, that pedestals infidelity as a virtue and fidelity as a vice.
The scene conjured the avatar of the Star Wars creature in Jabba the Hut’s palace in Return of the Jedi, right before Princess Leia crashes the party and threatens everyone with a thermal detonator.
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I don’t want to pass judgment too harshly. The Temptation™ tourists, for all I know, have soul-crushing 9-to-5s back home in Ohio or wherever, and a week in Cancun might be their only respite. There, but by the grace of God, go I.
More’s the pity.
The social and personal costs of hedonistic self-indulgence as a commodity are rampant. It speaks to a social and, as it were, a spiritual decay that extends beyond a healthy appetite for pleasure, though.
“God is dead,” as the much-misinterpreted Nietzschean phrase goes, by which he really meant that transcendent meaning was ripped away from the Western mind with the decline of religion during the Enlightenment.
People like us are then left to our own meager devices, to fill the void with corporate beach sex.
Ben Bartee is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs. Follow his stuff via Armageddon Prose and/or Substack, Patreon, Gab, and Twitter.
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