¿Quien es más macho: Kristoffer A. Garin o Carpetblogger?

There are a variety of types of tourism I find reprehensible.

For example, eco-tourism. Why? first, fuck off, hippie. Second, the idea that tourism is somehow a solution to the severe environmental and cultural problems caused by tourism seems to me to be pretty fucking stupid. Third, ecotourism jaunts to destinations recommended, and by means of transport owned, by affiliates of global corporations that are responsible for the destruction of tourist destinations in the first place seems hypocritical.

Tourism to molest children is also bad. Did I need to say that? Well, yeah, I did; because I don’t think that all kinds of sex tourism are bad. Comic, laughable, of course; but not bad. There’s a difference between comic and laughable. Woody Allen films, for example, are comic up through Love and Death. Afterwards they are laughable. Lost in Translation is bad. Worse-than-child-trafficking bad. But going to a place where the living is easy and the people of the opposite sex are friendly? Shit, what’s Spring Break all about?

Kristoffer Garin, the poor man’s David Foster Wallace, that’s who. What a joyless little man. He just came out with a piece that talks about a more formalized form of sex tourism: bride-hunting in Ukraine. He has already found a wife, about which event he says:

By the time of our orientation, my decision to come had started to feel like pure recklessness. Not only was I nearly ten years younger than the next youngest man on the trip; just three months earlier I had married the love of my life, and I couldn’t shake the sensation that my happiness and good fortune must be obvious somehow, dripping off me like exploding ink from a bank robber’s sack of cash. Wanting to fit into the group as I’d imagined it, I had altered much of my grooming routine in the weeks before leaving. My beard was so untrimmed as to make me feel itchy and dirty; what little hair I have had grown longish, curled in unruly wings on the side of my head and the back of my neck.

So he basically looks – best case scenario – like a balding Poli Sci professor out to convince undergrads that he’s the hip daddy they’ve been looking for. And can I just say, all the married people I know have thus far avoided looking like anything was dripping off them “like exploding (nice solecism, fuckhead, the ink doesn’t explode) ink from a bank robber’s sack of cash,” unless it was booze that had been spilled.

In a charming anthropological footnote, Garin adds that

“[i]n order to move among these men without incurring suspicion, I had concocted an elaborate cover story that involved my having booked the trip in the aftermath of a bad breakup; between when I had paid for the nonrefundable trip and when the group was to rendezvous at JFK, my ex and I had decided to get back together. Since I was stuck with the trip, but didn’t want to ruin my chances of making things work, I would treat it like any other group tour and stay away from the women. The guys thought I was pretty absurd, but they accepted the story. If anything, I became a sort of mascot/fool for the group.

Oooooooooookay. Ladies in the place: would you let your man go on a booty tour of Ukraine solo? Would you be with a guy who would book a booty tour of Ukraine? I mean, shows he’s got taste – nobody ever booked a booty tour of the U.K. – but all kidding aside, I’m thinking: no. And so, my guess is that the guys on the tour treated Kristoffer (what a fucking name) as if he were a limp-dicked shitweasel.

Which he seems to be. The whole tone of the article seems to be that this is a disagreeable way to find a bride, and that what we (of both sexes) in America call sport-fucking, or what the Russians/Ukrainians call спортивние отношения, is a generally disagreeable practice. If you agree, then kindly go drink elsewhere.

Here’s a howler of a paragraph:

The glow from the first social having receded, many of the men found themselves a bit demoralized. A night on the town was one matter, but finding an actual wife was going to be more difficult than they had thought. Many of the women they had met, while friendly enough and certainly accessible for conversation, turned out to have had little or no interest in leaving Ukraine. They had come out to practice their English, or for the free champagne, or simply because they were curious. Even among the ones who had agreed to “date,” many seemed to be in it for little more than a free meal at a nice restaurant they would never be able to afford otherwise. It was hard to imagine that the men would be shocked by such innocent opportunism, but they were. “I wouldn’t say disappointed, but I got up with mixed feelings today,” the California contractor told me. Later in the week, another would confess that when the first date he had scheduled stood him up, he returned to his room and wept.

Oh. My. God.  On the one hand, this is an interesting observance (though Kristoffer doesn’t seem to know what to make of it). North American men are obviously coming over expecting this to be the Wal-Mart consumer experience, much as undergraduates that I have taught: we paid, so why do you insist on judging us so capriciously? On the other hand… look, I couldn’t watch The 40-Year-Old Virgin because it had too many characters that were supposed to be funny, or pathetic, for stock traits that embody what I find to be contemptible in Americans. And maybe that’s why I find Kristoffer’s article so vile.

Here’s a guy who masks himself as “one of the guys,” albeit a pale, castrated, spavined member of the club. Then he writes nasty and surreptitious notes about folks who are involved in that most difficult of endeavors: looking for love. He holds out their weaknesses, and says: look, aren’t we lucky we aren’t them?

So basically, fuck Kristoffer A. Garin right in his ear. He misses the opportunity to be interesting or incisive, and is, instead, just another uptown jerkoff with a word processor looking at highway wrecks that offer themselves up to him, mistakenly thinking he’s there to do something other than poke fun. He’s trying to be arty-documentary, like a coy Will Self or Todd Solodnz or Neil LaBute. Those three say: look, here’s the darkest heart of all of us, the part that kicks puppies and tells Terry Schiavo jokes. It’s not good, but here it is. And it’s human, and sometimes it’s pretty goddamn funny. This is what we need a lot more of, I think: the ability to laugh at tornados, to look death in the eye and throw back a shot and say Shit, that aint nothing. But Kristoffer doesn’t have the sack.
There’s a kind of fish called the cleaner wrasse, Labroides Dimidiatus, which swims up to bigger fish in the ocean and eats the plaque and whatnot that accumulates in their mouths. As disgusting as that may be as an occupation, it’s necessary, and is essentially the job of the critic, especially the social critic: to show up after the hard work is done, look through the remains, and see the results. Kristoffer is a different breed of shit-eater: the Spidontus Taeniatus, first identified by Quoy & Gaimard 1834, a/k/a the False Cleanerfish. It mimicks Labroides Dimidiatus in both color, markings and behavior, but instead of performing a service, however marginally useful or aesthetic, the False Cleaner  waits until the unsuspecting victim thinks its about to be cleaned… and takes a bite out of their flesh or scales.

If you’ve read this far, you deserve a treat: a writer whose work surpasses Kristoffer’s in every way. As it happens, that writer has recently prepared a memo that addresses issues tangential to those Kristoffer dabbles with. There are even pictures! Please go there forthwith, and enjoy!