"I'm not a good tourist, I don't like tourism"

The line signals a refusal of passivity and spectacle. Being a “good tourist” often means accepting curated itineraries, smoothing over friction, and allowing a place to present its most photogenic mask. Tourism, as an industry, packages human complexity into consumable moments: a viewpoint at sunset, a folkloric performance scheduled nightly, a market sanitized for foreign comfort. Joe Sacco’s work has been about the opposite, staying with the mess, listening to contradictory voices, drawing faces that carry history and pain. Disliking tourism becomes a critique of the tourist gaze that turns people into scenery and conflict into backdrop.

There is also an ethical discomfort with extraction. Tourism extracts images, anecdotes, and souvenirs; journalism at its best attempts to reciprocate with attention, testimony, and accountability. Sacco’s stance hints at a fear of complicity: that to glide through places accumulating experiences is to benefit from mobility and privilege without taking on responsibility for what is seen. A “bad tourist” asks the wrong questions at the wrong time, lingers where there is nothing to buy, refuses to bracket off suffering from leisure. That refusal disrupts the tacit agreement between host and visitor to keep things light.

Yet the sentence separates the personal from the structural. “I’m not a good tourist” is about temperament: impatience with surface, an urge to go off-script. “I don’t like tourism” targets the machinery that organizes encounters into predictable, profitable scripts. The unease is not with travel itself, movement can foster humility and exchange, but with travel that turns lives into attractions and places into brands.

The alternative is slower and less flattering: to arrive as a learner, not a collector; to accept that understanding takes time, language, and relationships; to pay fairly and listen more than you speak; to risk being changed rather than entertained. Sacco’s discomfort is a moral posture. It reminds us that seeing is not neutral, and that the right to look comes with the duty to witness.