Suzanne Harrington: 'North Korea currently looks more enticing than the USA as a destination'
Suzanne Harrington: "As a destination, North Korea currently looks more enticing, for the simple reason that North Korea is not pretending to be anything other than what it is – a mad dictatorship overseen by a mad dictator."
Old friends of my partner invite us to stay at their beach house on Malibu – admittedly a very small beach house, but a beach house on Malibu nevertheless. The photos are breathtaking.
Yet being of sound mind, we politely decline. Thanks, but no thanks. They laugh, nodding, rolling their eyes. They get it.
Another friend, a freelancer with a UK passport, is offered a fat fee to fly to Atlanta for a weekend’s work – he’s a photographer - but also declines.
He could do with the money, but finds the prospect of entering the US, even without a fancy camera in his bag, so stressful that he decides to forfeit the cash and stay at home.
He says he keeps thinking of those German teenage backpackers, Maria Lepere and Charlotte Pohl, who were strip-searched, handcuffed, body scanned, and locked in a cell overnight in Honolulu for the crime of not having booked advance accommodation, before being deported.
Now Irish students are cancelling planned cultural exchange trips to the US too, rather than potentially allowing the current regime’s border guards to scrutinise their social media feeds or access their phones. Imagine uniformed meatheads scrolling through your private messages, like perverts sniffing through your knicker drawer. No thanks.
This is not the kind of culture fit for any form of exchange. Meanwhile, Harvard is running free online courses to educate their own citizens on the basics of their own democratic structures. Offering ordinary Americans a kind of Democracy for Dummies as they sleepwalk over the cliff into dictatorship.
The current US administration’s ongoing propensity for picking fights with Harvard, women’s reproductive rights, Canada, people of colour, Taylor Swift, people dependent on US foreign aid, Chinese students, trans people, migrants, the EU, Bruce Springsteen, Vladimir Putin, free trade, Oprah, Beyonce, facts, free speech, science, medicine, climate safeguarding, and probably gravity itself – while endorsing genocide, white supremacy, illegal deportations, medical quackery and the pardoning of criminals – continues to give the rest of us whiplash.
The kind of whiplash you get when someone you’d long regarded as perhaps a slightly racist neighbour turns out to be a raging psychopath; culturally speaking, the abrupt speed of this about-turn is causing our necks to snap.
We have our list of travel no-go zones, places our consulates advise us to proceed towards with great caution, or to swerve completely. You wouldn’t book a sunshine holiday in South Sudan, pursue sex tourism in Iran, shoplift in Saudi.
We know about the tricky places. We proceed accordingly, or don’t proceed at all. The US was never, ever on that list; we were schooled to regard it as a place of adventure and opportunity, a place where you could make it, maybe even hit the jackpot.
Now, thanks to its rapid slide from jackpot to jackboot, visiting America has become about as enticing as a colposcopy. Why would you want to go there, to contribute even a single dollar to its continued existence?
As a destination, North Korea currently looks more enticing, for the simple reason that North Korea is not pretending to be anything other than what it is – a mad dictatorship overseen by a mad dictator. No offence Malibu, but right now I’d rather be a tourist in Pyongyang.
