From: pharvey@quack.sac.ca.us (Paul Harvey)
Subject: About Alien tourists was (Oppression is Oppression is Oppression...)
Organization: The Duck Pond public unix: +1 408 249 9630, log in as 'guest'.
Date: Sat, 25 Jul 1992 07:18:37 GMT

In article <1992Jul24.154729.22616@lclark.edu> 
klotz@lclark.edu (Gretchen Klotz) writes:
>I'd like to share some quotes from a wonderful (IMHO) booklet called
>_Cultural_Etiquette_ by Amoja Three Rivers (copyright 1990, 1991).
>	As an exercise, pretend you are from another planet and you want
>examples of typical human beings for your photo album.  Having never heard
>of racism, you'd probably pick someone who represents the majority of
>people on this planet--an Asian woman.  (21)

OK, being a big fan of games, I wanted to play this one. Anyone care to
join me? I'm not sure I get it so that's an even better reason to play.
So I'll give my answer first, if you want to give your answer before you
hear mine, you'd better do it now!

OK, so I'm an Alien tourist on my first big trip to Earth. I've got my
camera and I want to get some shots of those fascinating beings that
cover the landmasses and are called human beings, in the English
language which is a strange vocalization that originates from a very
tiny island nation. Anyway, I'm in trouble already because I'm hardly
the "tourist" type. I don't take "tourist" photos and I consider that
pastime to be an invasion of privacy, an insult to humanity, stealing
one's soul if you like, but I won't get into that. I'll do my best to
pretend like a tourist with my big tourist smile and my strange tourist
shirt and my big glass of some tourist drink and I'll laugh my best
tourist laugh, "Ha Ha Ha". See, it's just not working for me, I just
don't get this tourist stuff. What is the purpose of tourism anyway? Oh
I go to other places and I've even been outside of the US, but I still
don't get this tourism stuff. Anyway, I'm off track. OK, concentrate,
concentrate, concentrate. Alright. BANG! Now lets say I wanted to get photos
of these human beings for my collection so that I can remember my big
trip. Now, way up above, it says since I have never heard of racism, I
would probably pick a human who represented the majority or the average
human and that would be an Asian woman, or more correctly a Chinese
woman. Well, that's were I would have to disagree. This is exactly not
what I would do. I would take as many pictures as I could of all humans
that I saw, doing whatever different things it is that humans do. See,
this is one of the places I get into trouble as a tourist. I can't pick
out the average human, I can't pick the typical pose. I can't begin to
capture what it is to be human in a photograph. I can make people
nervous and uneasy by trying to photograph them in typical poses. Think
about the average photo. You smile a fake photo smile that you only use
for photos, what's that all about? Why does one have to put on that fake
"cheese" smile when getting photographed? And how does that say anything
about what it is to be a human being? I'm still working on developing a
smile that is acceptable to the mainstream but is not cheezy. I don't
like posing. You can take all the photos of me that you want, but you're
gonna have a tough time gettin' me to pose for you. I guess that's just
me. Well, I don't know, so did I fail this test, or what? an i'm out ...

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