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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.