The Onion Tackles Omnipotent Tourist Syndrome

In The Know: Is Our Wealth Hurting Africa’s Feelings?

Back in 2006, I wrote up some thoughts on what blogger Val Prieto dubbed “Omnipotent Tourist Syndrome“:

Matt Welch described a similar sentiment amongst equally leftwing and reactionary tourists to Cuba:

this common sentiment has always irritated the hell out of me. Oh, the crumbling, no-longer-beautiful houses! Ah, the lovely two-feet-deep potholes, and rickety Chinese bicycles (because the 50-year-old Chevys and 30-year-old Ladas don’t work, and at any rate there’s no gas). How people can derive pleasure from evidence of the suffering of innocents is beyond me, and few sights are more unseemly to my eyes than seeing a Lonely Planet-waving travel snob whine about how some current or formerly misgoverned hellhole has been “ruined” by all that yucky reconstruction, material success, and (worst of all!) tourism. Oh how pretty! The baseball players make $20 a month, and they live on a prison, but at least there’s no annoying electronic scoreboard!

Val Prieto, who frequently blogs on Cuban issues at his own Babalu Blog dubs it “Omnipotent Tourist Syndrome“.

Sort of like the propagation of SARS, it appears to be spreading beyond travelers to one nation, into a global meme. And it’s worth noting that a variation of it was the dominant theme of the 2002 U.N. Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, where numerous Gulfstream Transnationalists such as California’s own Jerry Brown urged–for the sake of the global environment, if not local civilizational ruins–that the Third World remain as backward and shackled as possible.

Found via Small Dead Animals, the Onion does a surprisingly dead-on parody of that worldview in one of their Weekend Update/Daily Show-style mock news videos, in which their panelists debate, “Would it be mean to tell Africa about the global economy?”