At the recent White House Conference on Travel and Tourism, the American government lamented the fact that the U.S. spends a relative pittance marketing itself to foreign visitors.

The White House called for a public-private partnership, exhorting the industry to invest in marketing the U.S. as a tourist destination.

The general manager of the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Atlanta totes tourism as "the last industry that you can call 'The American Dream.'"

"Technology is the future of tourism."

The marketing of sights and destinations as touristically "valuable" is aimed not only at potential foreign visitors; a country or a city must sell itself to itself, must establish the will of a native people to prostitute its least-invested-capital asset----its privacy.

When the White House calls for a "public/private partnership," they want more than advrtising and promotion at the expens of th hotl and airlin industry; They want Americans to make public their private domain, to open theeir homeland as a marketplace to guests who want to participate in the exhange of fantasy for hospitality.

The industry succeeds at extracting this commodity---hospitality---from its workeers by promising them the very thing they are selling: participation in an idealized representation of this community. By selling their seervice, their smiles, their acquiescence, hotel workers at th Ritz-Carlton purchase a stake in the last stronghold (the last resort?) of The American Dream. The sky has no limit. Rise quickly to the top floor. You too can be prosperous at home. Just be a gracious hostess.

"Where do we go from here? You may be surprised how far you can travel on the World Wide Web."