Via Jeff on Facebook, sweet baby Jesus:

Last week, on the first stop of the $45 tour, guide Lynn Battaglia, from Pittsburgh, pointed out a housing project. She then mocked the Grand Concourse, modeled after a Parisian boulevard.

“Do you feel like we’re on the Champs-Elysées?” she teased a couple from Paris.

As the bus idled across from historic St. Ann’s Episcopalian Church, Battaglia launched into a description of the crime, poverty and violence that plagued the South Bronx during the 1970s recession.

As she spoke, a line of two dozen poor people — including one man visibly agitated by the onlookers — waited for handouts from the church pantry.

“I don’t know what that line’s about, but every Wednesday we see it,” Battaglia told the tourists. “We see them go in with empty carts, and we see them come out with carts full.”

The bus stopped in front of St. Mary’s Park, where she credited Mayor Rudy Giuliani for curbing crime.

“If it were 1980 and you said to me, ‘Lynn, I want to die.’ My answer would be, ‘You’re in the right neighborhood,’ ” she said.

Chicago does some of these types of things too, true-crime tours and mob-themed tours and things, and it’s always gross, but not quite as gross as making people’s poverty your fucking theme park. Do all your proceeds, and not profits, I mean proceeds, go to helping this neighborhood? No? Then how dare you use it as your set piece? Even then, how dare you? THEY LIVE THERE. This is their HOME. If it seems so horrible to you, if it seems so unsafe and scandalous and you’re being so very daring, think about how it must be to be there, all the time.

(“They should move then.” I can hear it now from Smuggy McPublican. Bitchass, not everybody sees problems where you do, and also, abandoning your parents’ and grandparents’ homes is hard, even if you do have the means. All things being equal, moving is fucking expensive. Even if you and a few friends and a case of Bud Light do it, moving is expensive. Do YOU have the equivalent of first and last month’s market-rate yuppie-ville rent plus security deposit on you at all times, and a job from which you can take time off to look for a new place without losing more money? If not, STFU.)

This goes back to the whole “I can’t go there without a sidearm” kind of thing I was talking about before, where you assume people who don’t live in your neighborhood aren’t real. They don’t, say, get up and go to work or come home and sit on their porch reading or listening to the game. They don’t love their children or drive through the hamburger place or check books out of the library or get their hair cut or drink coffee. They think violence is normal and gang affiliation is awesome and everybody be slingin’ tonight. Their ways are strange to us all. I mean, God Almighty:

“I don’t know what that line’s about, but every Wednesday we see it,” Battaglia told the tourists. “We see them go in with empty carts, and we see them come out with carts full.”

GO ASK JESUS HOW HARD IS THIS SHIT. Go over to the strange “natives” and ask what’s up. Nine times out of 10, someone will tell you, gladly. This is America, almost everybody speaks enough English to satisfy your curiosity about almost anything at all, and even those that don’t will find you somebody who does or get by with hand gestures, because 90 percent of people are basically decent and want to help your clueless ass so long as it doesn’t unduly interfere with their days.

I am all for visiting everywhere in a place when you visit it. And I know that sometimes that can be a knife-edge of difference between looking and gawking, and I’m absolutely sure I’ve come down on the wrong side of it in my life. But there are about a hundred miles between going to see a place you are curious about, and making a buck alienating human beings from one another. This company is gross.

A.