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Some, like Billy Graham or the latest tour from the National Council of Churches, go to the Soviet Union and make up entirely new meanings for words like freedom. "We believe they are free,"said N.C.C. Tour Leader Bruce Rigdon of the McCormick Theological Seminary, referring to Soviet demonstrators thrown out of Moscow's Baptist Church. And some go to the Middle East, on which they pronounce solemn, chin-tugging judgment full of right and wrong and anguished ambivalence, to make up rules—for others. There are so many of these travelers that the Middle East has become, in Saul Bellow's words, the "moral resort area" of the West: "What Switzerland is to winter holidays and the Dalmatian coast to summer tourists, Israel and the Palestinians are to the West's need for justice." The West Bank alone offers the moral tourist a sandbox full of paradoxes, ironies and ambiguities too neat, and cheap, to refuse. For the Israeli these are questions of life and death; for the traveling moralist (lives there a columnist who has not made the hajj?), they are an occasion for indignation and advice, the consequences of which are to be observed safely from overseas.
In the end, it is the two-way ticket that makes the holiday of whatever type at once so safe, so pleasurable, and, literally, so irresponsible. It is a walk on the wild side, but a walking tour only; a desire to see and feel and even judge, and then leave. To stay—i.e., to be serious—is to miss the point. "A perpetual holiday," said George Bernard Shaw, "is a good working definition of hell." Getting home isn't half the fun. It's all of it. —By Charles Krauthammer