Where your country went

This is an older book (1998) but still an excellent comment on what's happened to the American West.

Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West. By Hal K. Rothman. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas. 434 pages. $34.95.

Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis, University of Oklahoma

In this carefully researched and somewhat repetitious study, Rothman puts a new twist on the mantra of “Field of Dreams,” “If you build it, they will come.” In his view, access is at least as important as the destination, and he would regard as inevitable a process in which control of the baseball field would be taken over by outsiders, some “neo-natives,” some corporate suits; the rest of the farm would be overrun by condos and upscale chain stores; and the farmer and his family would be reduced to selling tickets and hotdogs and sweeping the stands for minimum wage without benefits—if they were not supplanted by illegal immigrants.

At least that is what has happened in every case Rothman presents. He traces the rise of “industrial tourism”—Edward Abbey’s term, which Rothman defines as “the packaging and marketing of experience as commodity within the boundaries of the accepted level of convenience to the public” (13)—in sites reached through modes of transportation ranging from the Grand Canyon through Santa Fe to archeological sites and dude ranches (railroads), national parks (automobiles), ski resorts (autos and planes), and Las Vegas, which he sees as inaugurating or at least fixing the terms of what he calls postmodern tourism, in which authentic may be distinguished from but is not valued more highly than the inauthentic.

Of course, in most of the sites he discusses, “authentic” is a meaningless term, for in all except the Grand Canyon (though it was scripted in its own way), those who developed the sites—cf. Santa Fe, “the city different”-- fostered in their customers “a range of delusionary pretension” (321). The exception is Las Vegas, without pretension to spiritual or intellectual values or even “manufactured individualism” (344), which has prospered precisely because it is bogus—so genuinely bogus that other gambling resorts have to imitate it. Rothman is far more severe on eco-tourism, which, he says, is in fact indistinguishable from other forms despite the fact that “someone defined it for [greenish tourists] in a manner that affirmed their beliefs” even though their effect on physical and social environments (340) was no different from that of the crassest skier in Aspen.

Readers used to literary criticism, even the most tangled, will find Rothman’s book heavy going. For one thing, he repeats even minor points (e.g., Las Vegas casino workers make middle-class wages in blue-collar jobs) so often that the book could be ten or twenty percent shorter, resulting in a great saving in paper and the reader’s patience. For another, the process of change from wild beauty to condoization is depressingly similar in all cases except that of Las Vegas so that the reader wants to page ahead to the climax.

But Rothman’s point is that there isn’t any climax, and though he mentions a number of names and outlines various take-over processes, he has little sense of drama. This, he says, is the New West, and the few writers he cites are reduced to laments or grumbles. Of course, writers since Wister have argued that the real West is over, but he and thousands of others kept writing about it.

But anyone who writes about the West that Rothman portrays isn’t going to be able to write about the brave nester who stands up against the cattle baron or the bank (even though, as in Shane, cattle made a lot more sense than subsistence farming) because he has no weapons and there is no altruistic gunfighter. Any story that comes out of Rothman’s findings will be more southern than western---masters in the big house, the hands in the field, and the only underground railway leading not to Canada and freedom but to cities where older community values, dead at the point of origin, cannot be sustained.