WHEN THE HERDS ON HOLIDAY Get totally out of control
“Travel is adventure, embracing otherness. Tourism is conformity, clinging to familiarity.”
“FOLLOWING the herd, Down to Greece, On holiday.” So sang Damon Albarn on Blur’s 1994 hit ‘Girls & Boys’. Yes, all of thirty years ago. Doesn’t time fly, even if mentality doesn’t necessarily alter drastically. Or actually, maybe it does.
I never knew what this song was supposed to be about, and the only reason I now do know is that I had in mind this article about the herd. Blur came into my head because of the line in the song, and our good friends at Wikipedia have provided an answer, a pleasing if somewhat unfortunate coincidence of an answer, given the article.
This is how Albarn explains it. He had been on holiday with his girlfriend in a place with “really tacky Essex nightclubs”. “All these blokes and all these girls meeting at the watering hole and then just copulating. There’s no morality involved. I’m not saying it should or shouldn’t happen.” So, Damon had been on holiday in Greece, had he? Well no. One guesses that Greece scanned whereas Mallorca didn’t, as he had been on holiday in Magalluf.
No morality involved. In other words, he hadn’t set out to cast judgement. All he had done was make an observation. What would there have been to disapprove of anyway? If that was what the girls and boys wanted to do, it was their business. Yet at the same time, there was the herd. Which brings us to the mentality. Going on holiday was a mass groupthink with one aim in mind. And it wasn’t enjoying Mallorca’s landscapes or historical culture.
There is a body of work that considers tourism in terms of herd mentality. For example, Anthony Bourdain, a celebrated American travel writer, once called on people to be travellers rather than tourists. What was the difference? Travel meant experiencing the world, really experiencing it. Tourism, on the other hand, was “being shepherded around in hermetically sealed vehicles”.
Picking up on this, a commentator, Douglas Giles, wrote: “Travel is adventure, embracing otherness. Tourism is conformity, clinging to familiarity. The tourism industry tells you where you should go and what you should do, accompanied by how you should feel about it.” The herd.
The conformity is perhaps the key to a particularly despicable manifestation of the herd. Damon Albarn’s Magalluf of 1994 hasn’t necessarily changed in the sense of an oft-referred-to rite of passage that didn’t gain the resort the nickname of Copulationalluf; it was rather more blatant. Yes, there is all the talk of transformation, the eradication of excesses, etc., but thirty years of history (and longer) can’t be discarded overnight and dumped far out into the deep blue of the Mediterranean. No morality involved. Up to a point, and to when the point is exceeded by a herd mentality that has no place in Magalluf, Playa de Palma or any civilised place on Earth.
Toni Riera is a psychologist from the University of the Balearic Islands. He has commented on the most recent case of gang rape by a group of young male tourists. This was in Playa de Palma almost two weeks ago, and it followed three similar outrages last summer that were committed in Playa de Palma and Magalluf. Riera says that group actions exempt individuals from responsibility. “Personal responsibility is diluted. Many of these young people behave in groups in ways they would never do individually.” He adds that there is no concrete explanation as to why this sort of thing is happening. There is no direct relationship with pornography, and so the idea of belonging to a group and a herd mentality is one he looks to.
A member of the security forces had a different take on this last summer. “These offenders don’t consider themselves perpetrators of anything, because they believe that abuse is part of the holiday package”. The conformity of the package, and on conformity Douglas Giles added that tourism is exploitation: “Tourism also exploits tourists.”
Gang rape is not what he had in mind. Nor did Damon Albarn. There are herds and there are herds, and some are totally out of control.