I’m a late-comer to the discussion about Chuck Thompson’s Smile When You’re Lying. In January, I read Rolf Potts’ review and followed its epic comments thread at World Hum with interest. I also read the BNT review, and by the time I was through keeping up with the flame-fest that followed a post about Thompson’s “10 Most Over-Rated Tourist Traps” at Gadling, I was really curious.

Well, I finally read the darn thing over the past couple of days, and I have to admit that for the most part, the pages practically turned themselves. Thompson writes with flair and humor (though I get tired quickly of humor that relies so entirely on ceaseless negativity) and a lot of his anecdotes are pretty entertaining.

But I still disagree with his central thesis about the dismal, dishonest state of the modern travel writing industry, and – more importantly – I certainly disagree with the way he goes about making it.

I’ve heard some people object to the level of vitriol in the responses to Thompson’s book, suggesting that it’s too personal, too vicious. But let’s be clear: to use the language of the playground, Chuck started it. He names names. He calls out specific magazines, writers, editors and even individual articles for ridicule. He paints most travel writers working today as either lazy, devoid of talent, or both. At one point, he refers to Rick Steves as “the Dufus King.”

Of course, Thompson is right about the sorry state of a lot of newspaper and magazine travel copy. It’s cliché-riddled, and designed to sell ad space, sure. But though Thompson points some blame at “the system” – advertisers, corporate interests, etc. – he’s also very, very hard on the writers working within it. Throughout the book I kept wanting to say, Hey Chuck, we’re all just trying to put food on the table! To quote some rapper or other, Don’t hate the player, hate the game, baby.

Almost anyone who’s ever written a travel article will recognize a word or phrase they’ve used somewhere in his (very accurate) lists of no-nos. So am I getting defensive out of guilt and embarrassment? Sure, to an extent. But normally I do all right with constructive criticism. That’s where Thompson’s inflammatory language comes in. It’s one thing to have someone call your writing clichéd, and quite another to have someone call it “self-fellating.”

Which brings up another issue. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t see anything particularly original in laying the crude sexual imagery on as thick as possible to make a point. Throughout the book, the day-to-day practices of the travel biz are routinely compared to hand-jobs, blow-jobs, and so on. Throw in some anecdotes about hookers (because, you know, the sex trade in the Third World is soooo funny), some cocaine, and Chuck earns himself a Hunter S. Thompson comparison on the front cover.

But really, are blow-job metaphors any less tired at this point than the “sun-dappled barf” that Thompson criticizes? Maybe it’s a generational gap that makes Chuck think he’s being novel, here, but I’ve been reading music reviews that describe sub-par songs as “sucking ass” or “licking balls” for years. This is the post-Howard Stern era. I am immune to the hyperbole of it all.

I’d like to give Thompson the benefit of the doubt in all this. At points in the book I found myself thinking: Do you even like travel writing? Do you even like travel?

But maybe the “edgy” angle was imposed by an editor, wanting to sell “scathing expose” the same way Travel + Leisure wants to sell cruise ship bunks. Maybe Chuck isn’t quite as angry and unlikeable as he seems at so many points. Maybe he just wanted to put this random collection of mostly-enjoyable travel stories out there, and required a “phony raison d’etre” (to use his term) to tie the whole thing together.

Maybe, when he describes a life of “delayed flights, middle seats, bad hotels, cold buffets, awkward property tours, pushy PR hacks, off-season travel, miserly budgets, butchered copy, kill fees, and every other indignity visited upon the itinerant travel writer” he doesn’t really mean it, and is only trying to make a living.

Just like the rest of us.