I CAME, I SAW, I SPOILED EVERYTHING

By LANCE MORROW

At 3 in the morning, a serpent of lights begins to coil up Mount Sinai--up the path Moses took, a sparkling procession of tourists' flashlights. As dawn arrives, you see less lovely effects--the litter of candy wrappers, soda cans and Kodachrome boxes people have discarded on the ascent.

In the highlands of Papua New Guinea, in a village near Goroka, the warriors, all but naked, smear their bodies with a pale mud and don surreal mud masks. Taking up clubs and spears and bows, they crouch and advance, ghostly, out of the Stone Age (which they inhabited until the day before yesterday) and into a clicking horde of tourists from a cruise ship that docked on the coast this morning. The "mud men" mime ferocity for a little while; then they mingle shyly in the crowd of rich white aliens and try to make sense of the paper money the strangers offer for weapons and boar's-tusk necklaces. It may not be too many months before the mud men start accepting the American Express card.

By the Doge's Palace in Venice, down the little canal from the Bridge of Sighs, the Ponte de Paglia groans under the weight of Japanese, Germans, Americans, Frenchmen, Scots, English, Indians, Spaniards, Scandinavians--the whole world milling about in T shirts, polyglotting. It takes five minutes for a pedestrian to push across the bridge, a distance of 30 yds. Venice vanished centuries ago into its tourist shop-museum self, forfeit to the ever flattening demographics of mass tourism.

Against expectations, this will be a booming summer for tourism and travel. At a moment when the dollar is faring badly against other currencies and when hotel and airline prices are climbing, this season's tourism is likely to break records. The great, global middle class is in motion.

Is this a wonderful thing? Familiar pieties collide here, two wisdoms, good news and bad news: 1) Peaceful mobility on a planetary scale proclaims victories for freedom, democratic pluralism, frequent-flyer programs and unfettered competitive markets; 2) A radioactive cloud of banalizing sameness threatens the earth; the sacred and beautiful places, all the uniquenesses, have been invaded, desacralized, franchised for the masses, dissolved into the United Colors of Benetton.

Both versions are true; the second follows from the first. The travel industry cherishes Piety 1. The traveler drifts through the world trying to fend off the truth of Piety 2, which declares itself in spasms of denied disappointment. At worst, a nostalgic heartache goes to work, the travel snob's regret, grandchild of an Evelyn Waugh-Somerset Maugham steamship elitism. Lucretius wrote: "Whenever a thing changes and alters its nature, at that moment comes the death of what it was before." A new metaphysic of distances and destinations has taken over the world.

Werner Heisenberg's famous uncertainty principle stated that some physical events can never be accurately observed because the scientist's intrusively observing eye changes the event itself. The summer of 1995 may be remembered as the moment when Heisenberg Tourism achieved a sort of global critical mass. A few weeks ago, a monk at St. Katherine's Monastery on Mount Sinai looked gloomily at the tourists and stated the new Heisenberg principle: "They come, and everything changes."

The idea that tourism inevitably strips off some holiness of place, some magic, may be descended from the primitive conceit that a camera steals the soul of the person photographed. The sacred place (Mount Sinai, Mount Fuji, the Grand Canyon) is an onion, and each new wave of Visigoths with video cameras peels away a layer of mystique, until the magic that drew the stranger in the first place is gone, and instead the tourist finds--other tourists. And with them, the hotels and fast foods and souvenirs and globally identical amenities. A real traveler hates all that.

Why travel, after all? In order to have a paper sash over the toilet seat? To enjoy a comfortable, momentary change of perspective--a vacation as the equivalent of rolling over in one's sleep? Or to lose oneself? To pass through distance into some new place where the eyes become capable, for a moment, of a fresh transparency. Slide into the Pleistocene: under a thorn tree in Masai Mara, say, a cheetah tears at the Thomson's gazelle it has nailed for lunch. All around in a semicircle, the minibuses sprout glaring bwanas from their sunroofs. The onion peels.

Is it inevitable that tourists corrupt the places they visit? Probably. But wait: maybe we could turn it around. Make tourism a moral force, a technique for civilizing war zones, for example. In Papua New Guinea, tribes firing arrows at one another across an unpaved track through the forest have been known to break off hostilities to allow a tourist bus to pass.

Would not Bosnia--I hear it's lovely this time of year--profit if tens of thousands of tourists were to descend with dollars and cameras? Would the Heisenberg gaze of strangers shame the ethnic purifiers and spoil the snipers' aim? Would commercialism defeat tribalism? Or maybe Disney could take over the war and give the fighters blanks and dummy mortar shells to fire: they would enact their hatreds daily as a permanent tourist attraction.

And Rwanda would be developed as a jungle theme park. Like it? I love it. Send Heisenberg in here, and hold my calls.