Down With Mickey Mouse
Jan. 2nd, 2006 04:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chelidon(wrote this over the holidays, finally getting it posted now)
A few weeks back, I and a clump of eight of my tribe spent a week down in Orlando at Mooby..., er, Disney World. My partner really wanted to take our son -- we'd canceled a similar trip last year after she broke her wrist doing some snow sports, so we took the trip over her birthday week this year. Two of our peeps have a time-share condo deal good at any of the Disney properties, and they generously offered to put us all up, so, after a bit of griping on my part, we nine miscreants converged for a week at Mooby World. I'd never been to Florida, other than for disaster relief when I used to work for the Red Cross -- I tended to be out there semi-regularly, though at times when there wasn't much left to see. It was odd yet familiar being in a warm place around the holidays, reminded me a bit of being back in Hawaii -- someone crooning "White Christmas" as you sit by a pool in 78-degree weather with palm trees waving overhead. Definitely a big change from New England!
I feel like a real curmudgeonly Grinch for saying so, but speaking personally, as a vacation, this one pretty much wasn't. A week filled with huge crowds of people, screaming spoiled kids and their obnoxious parents, overwhelming noise, constantly bombarded with chirpy Christmas music and plastic holiday decorations, flashing blinking lights, total sensory overload everywhere, standing in enormous queues, immersed in endless acres of pure ceaseless consumerism, spending huge gobs of money on overpriced, well, everything, ugh! Too much noise, too much plastic, too many lights and crowds and people and money spent and...just too much. Even our nice quiet condo was all pastels and plastic and 30 Disney Merchandizing Channels on TV, backing up onto an artificial pond with a fertilizer-pumped golf course on the other side, where sitting on the back patio I could sip coffee or wine and heckle an endless parade of fat old white men waddling around in bermuda shorts, riding on golf carts and playing golf very badly (my Lovely Housemate Kelly actually made up scorecards so she could properly express her opinion of particularly poor play, or players)
I think the last couple of years of peace and quiet out here in the woods have greatly reduced my tolerance for the things of man, and especially of concentrated masses of humanity and technocrap. I'd much rather have spent the week at home on my land with my friends, or out backpacking on Cape Breton in Nova Scotia, or camping up in the White Mountains, or hiking along the Appalachian Trail, which runs not too far from my house. Or seeing good live local music or a play or driving or flying out to visit far-away friends, or just about anything else that doesn't involve concentrated masses of teeming humanity trying desperately to consume everything in sight even faster than normal.
I mean, there were certainly high points. I really enjoyed watching my son have a hoot -- he's the perfect age to go to Disney, he's big enough to do all of the rides he wants to, and still young enough to be excited about getting his picture taken with a giant mouse. It really is magic for him, and I spent much effort helping him and others have a good time, while making sure my lack of enthusiasm wasn't apparent and I didn't bring anyone else down. And my boi pushed his own boundaries -- the first day, he wasn't 100% sure about going on some of the rides, and by the middle of the week, you couldn't keep him off of the Tower of Terror (easily the most intense/scary-fun ride in any of the parks), and for that matter, every single other thrill ride in the park. Pretty brave 6-year-old. Strong stomach, too ;> I predict he will soon be skiing/snowboarding off the cliffs that daddy won't dare.
Anyway, there was certainly fun to be had. I enjoyed watching my partner and friends have a good time, and I got to take C out for a really incredible meal for her birthday, at a very, very good restaurant up on the glass-surrounded top floor of one of the resorts, from which while we sat, we could see the enormous fireworks show in the park, which was synchronized in precise time to the piped-in music in the restaurant. The wine list was huge and one of the best for California wines I've seen anywhere, if almost criminally jacked up to 3-4 times retail prices... I do adore roller coasters, and while none of the Disney parks have any really huge ones, there are some very cleverly-designed small coasters and coaster-type rides, some of them fairly intense in places. Pleasure Island (the "adult area" of the park), plus travelling with a whole flock of trusted companions willing to babysit meant that I and my partner and Lovely Housemates got to go out late-night dancing about as often as we wanted to, with a wide variety of music (and rotating dance floors, banks of smoke machines and killer light/sound systems were a blast). The new "Irish pub" was very well-done (built in Ireland, natch), with a proper bar and good food, and on the weekend, one of the best live shows of surprisingly good traditional music I've heard in quite a while (no "Danny Boy" or "Unicorn Song" here!) The food was good, if expensive (and don't even get me started on the booze -- $20 for a shot of MacAllan 18?!), but having full kitchens in our condos meant that we got to go shopping for food and wine in town and do some really good dinners in (as well as breakfasts/brunch). And the very best part of the whole week was being able to spend time with some of the ex-housemates who are dearest to me, a few of whom I don't get to see often at all. Pool, hot tub, sauna, all good.
So why didn't I really enjoy myself? One piece of it was the fact that this was a working vacation for me. I worked from the condo (high-speed internet access, w00t) every morning, which cut a chunk out of my time, and helped keep me from really relaxing. Working for yourself means that there's no such thing as paid vacation (and your boss is a slave-driver ;>) Next vacation I want to really get time *off*.
But it was more than that. The whole Disney environment just constantly set my teeth on edge. It felt like the exact opposite of a sensory deprivation tank, being immersed in pastel-coloured liquid plastic mixed up with saccharine. It was total, constant sensory overload -- crowds and noise and endless lines and garbage food and every single ride and "experience" dumping you out into a themed gift shop filled to the gills with plastic crap to buy buy buy. Like so much of our modern consumer culture, it seems as though via complete and total excess, it's designed above all to sell things, pump up the pace of consumption, and create some kind of memorable experience for people who are nearly totally, utterly numb. And, I note, I am not nearly numb, or not nearly numb enough to not find the experience more annoying and painful than fun.
Ol' Walt may be spinning in his grave -- the Disney experience is all about consumption, and so much of it is just a huge, huge waste. I kept thinking that the energy expended in one day in this park could keep a small-sized energy-efficient village running for a year or more. The quantity of physical waste produced must be immense.
In a way, Disneyworld is an encapsulation of the best and worst of our culture. The sheer cleverness and innovation that goes into many aspects of the park is amazing -- the use of high technology, sound, environmental effects, set design, and psychological knowledge, to create powerful sensory experiences is incredible. The attention to detail is fantastic. Human resources, too -- after having more than 16 million people pass through their gates in 2005, there is not a single piece of garbage in the park when it opens each morning. Not one. Seriously. And there are so many optimistic messages presented, about the power of imagination and following your dreams and cultures co-existing peacefully, and so on. There's even a few weak enviromental messages in there, too.
But none of it is *real*. These happy, easy, optimistic messages are drowned out in an endless sea of relentless marketing and merchandising, overhyped crap, and thoroughly-calculated hyper-efficient mechanisms for maximizing profits by moving the maximum number of people past the maximum number of saleable moments, scientifically optimized to stimulate every accessible consumer instinct and squeeze ever last dollar out of the Valued Guests before packing them into boxes to go back to their cookie-cutter suburban lives, to drudge on in soulless jobs just long enough save up enough money to come back and do it all again. Viva La Disney -- Vegas and Disney, the two absolute pinnacles of scientifically, psychologically and sociologically-maximized consumer culture. Ack.
And now, again, I feel like an old sour curmudgeon for not being captured in the allure of Disney World. I mean, it's a playground, made for pure fun, right? What's wrong with me that I don't see the magic in it, or at least not enough to float me along for a week of carefree fun?
I think it's deeper than just being annoyed by continuous over-stimulation and crass consumerism. I think I've lost my faith in the entire world-view the Disney parks presents. I no longer believe that human cleverness can lead to a consumer-driven paradise, that if we all just trust in the miracles of science and mass-marketing, we can consume our way to utopia. I don't believe in the easy answers, the painless fix, the boundless optimism, a clean, tidy world fueled by capitalistic excess. I strongly suspect that the world as it is isn't going to be able to sustain our current load on it for much longer, much less a world with even more people consuming even more resources, even faster. I think the answers we are likely to find -- the real answers, if they are to be found in time, may be very, very hard indeed, hard in a way most of us in this country are, in one sense blissfully, and in another sense, perhaps unfortunately unaware of.
I suspect that the sparkling clean fantasy-world Disney World presents to the lucky millions who can afford to experience it, is not going to prove sustainable or believable for too much longer. I think that a more persistent, far more real reality is going to set in, and I think part of why Disney World set me on edge is that I want to believe in it, I want to believe the pretty illusions and the easy answers and the technocratic utopian visions. It is, in large part, the world I was raised in, the world we're still tenuously clinging to. And, I really don't believe it's where we're going. The real world doesn't have to be grim and dour -- the world will always be a place where beauty, love, joy, delight, wonder and mystery are all around us. But I think that we've taken the Disneyfied fantasy world as real for too long, taken the spiffy fast thrill ride we've been herded onto without ever really questioning where it ends up, wondering how we get off, and thinking about what's going to happen when it's over.
I'm glad my son went to Disney World, and we got to ride the Pirates of the Carribbean ride and go through the Haunted Mansion, and ride Space Mountain and see incredible fireworks shows and marvel at displays and experiences and the sheer wonder of moving hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people efficiently in and out of a complete artificial world, giving each person the opportunity to see things they can tell their children about. And some day, I may have to explain to my son why the world of Disney isn't around any more -- that it wasn't a world we could or can actually live in, and help him to understand why it shouldn't even be our goal to aim for. The real world, the actual, natural world, a world of sustainability, with careful attention to the impacts of our choices and actions on the balance of life on this planet, is very different, but no less wonderful. And, in the end, it is so very, very much more magical than anything Mickey can sell us.
A few weeks back, I and a clump of eight of my tribe spent a week down in Orlando at Mooby..., er, Disney World. My partner really wanted to take our son -- we'd canceled a similar trip last year after she broke her wrist doing some snow sports, so we took the trip over her birthday week this year. Two of our peeps have a time-share condo deal good at any of the Disney properties, and they generously offered to put us all up, so, after a bit of griping on my part, we nine miscreants converged for a week at Mooby World. I'd never been to Florida, other than for disaster relief when I used to work for the Red Cross -- I tended to be out there semi-regularly, though at times when there wasn't much left to see. It was odd yet familiar being in a warm place around the holidays, reminded me a bit of being back in Hawaii -- someone crooning "White Christmas" as you sit by a pool in 78-degree weather with palm trees waving overhead. Definitely a big change from New England!
I feel like a real curmudgeonly Grinch for saying so, but speaking personally, as a vacation, this one pretty much wasn't. A week filled with huge crowds of people, screaming spoiled kids and their obnoxious parents, overwhelming noise, constantly bombarded with chirpy Christmas music and plastic holiday decorations, flashing blinking lights, total sensory overload everywhere, standing in enormous queues, immersed in endless acres of pure ceaseless consumerism, spending huge gobs of money on overpriced, well, everything, ugh! Too much noise, too much plastic, too many lights and crowds and people and money spent and...just too much. Even our nice quiet condo was all pastels and plastic and 30 Disney Merchandizing Channels on TV, backing up onto an artificial pond with a fertilizer-pumped golf course on the other side, where sitting on the back patio I could sip coffee or wine and heckle an endless parade of fat old white men waddling around in bermuda shorts, riding on golf carts and playing golf very badly (my Lovely Housemate Kelly actually made up scorecards so she could properly express her opinion of particularly poor play, or players)
I think the last couple of years of peace and quiet out here in the woods have greatly reduced my tolerance for the things of man, and especially of concentrated masses of humanity and technocrap. I'd much rather have spent the week at home on my land with my friends, or out backpacking on Cape Breton in Nova Scotia, or camping up in the White Mountains, or hiking along the Appalachian Trail, which runs not too far from my house. Or seeing good live local music or a play or driving or flying out to visit far-away friends, or just about anything else that doesn't involve concentrated masses of teeming humanity trying desperately to consume everything in sight even faster than normal.
I mean, there were certainly high points. I really enjoyed watching my son have a hoot -- he's the perfect age to go to Disney, he's big enough to do all of the rides he wants to, and still young enough to be excited about getting his picture taken with a giant mouse. It really is magic for him, and I spent much effort helping him and others have a good time, while making sure my lack of enthusiasm wasn't apparent and I didn't bring anyone else down. And my boi pushed his own boundaries -- the first day, he wasn't 100% sure about going on some of the rides, and by the middle of the week, you couldn't keep him off of the Tower of Terror (easily the most intense/scary-fun ride in any of the parks), and for that matter, every single other thrill ride in the park. Pretty brave 6-year-old. Strong stomach, too ;> I predict he will soon be skiing/snowboarding off the cliffs that daddy won't dare.
Anyway, there was certainly fun to be had. I enjoyed watching my partner and friends have a good time, and I got to take C out for a really incredible meal for her birthday, at a very, very good restaurant up on the glass-surrounded top floor of one of the resorts, from which while we sat, we could see the enormous fireworks show in the park, which was synchronized in precise time to the piped-in music in the restaurant. The wine list was huge and one of the best for California wines I've seen anywhere, if almost criminally jacked up to 3-4 times retail prices... I do adore roller coasters, and while none of the Disney parks have any really huge ones, there are some very cleverly-designed small coasters and coaster-type rides, some of them fairly intense in places. Pleasure Island (the "adult area" of the park), plus travelling with a whole flock of trusted companions willing to babysit meant that I and my partner and Lovely Housemates got to go out late-night dancing about as often as we wanted to, with a wide variety of music (and rotating dance floors, banks of smoke machines and killer light/sound systems were a blast). The new "Irish pub" was very well-done (built in Ireland, natch), with a proper bar and good food, and on the weekend, one of the best live shows of surprisingly good traditional music I've heard in quite a while (no "Danny Boy" or "Unicorn Song" here!) The food was good, if expensive (and don't even get me started on the booze -- $20 for a shot of MacAllan 18?!), but having full kitchens in our condos meant that we got to go shopping for food and wine in town and do some really good dinners in (as well as breakfasts/brunch). And the very best part of the whole week was being able to spend time with some of the ex-housemates who are dearest to me, a few of whom I don't get to see often at all. Pool, hot tub, sauna, all good.
So why didn't I really enjoy myself? One piece of it was the fact that this was a working vacation for me. I worked from the condo (high-speed internet access, w00t) every morning, which cut a chunk out of my time, and helped keep me from really relaxing. Working for yourself means that there's no such thing as paid vacation (and your boss is a slave-driver ;>) Next vacation I want to really get time *off*.
But it was more than that. The whole Disney environment just constantly set my teeth on edge. It felt like the exact opposite of a sensory deprivation tank, being immersed in pastel-coloured liquid plastic mixed up with saccharine. It was total, constant sensory overload -- crowds and noise and endless lines and garbage food and every single ride and "experience" dumping you out into a themed gift shop filled to the gills with plastic crap to buy buy buy. Like so much of our modern consumer culture, it seems as though via complete and total excess, it's designed above all to sell things, pump up the pace of consumption, and create some kind of memorable experience for people who are nearly totally, utterly numb. And, I note, I am not nearly numb, or not nearly numb enough to not find the experience more annoying and painful than fun.
Ol' Walt may be spinning in his grave -- the Disney experience is all about consumption, and so much of it is just a huge, huge waste. I kept thinking that the energy expended in one day in this park could keep a small-sized energy-efficient village running for a year or more. The quantity of physical waste produced must be immense.
In a way, Disneyworld is an encapsulation of the best and worst of our culture. The sheer cleverness and innovation that goes into many aspects of the park is amazing -- the use of high technology, sound, environmental effects, set design, and psychological knowledge, to create powerful sensory experiences is incredible. The attention to detail is fantastic. Human resources, too -- after having more than 16 million people pass through their gates in 2005, there is not a single piece of garbage in the park when it opens each morning. Not one. Seriously. And there are so many optimistic messages presented, about the power of imagination and following your dreams and cultures co-existing peacefully, and so on. There's even a few weak enviromental messages in there, too.
But none of it is *real*. These happy, easy, optimistic messages are drowned out in an endless sea of relentless marketing and merchandising, overhyped crap, and thoroughly-calculated hyper-efficient mechanisms for maximizing profits by moving the maximum number of people past the maximum number of saleable moments, scientifically optimized to stimulate every accessible consumer instinct and squeeze ever last dollar out of the Valued Guests before packing them into boxes to go back to their cookie-cutter suburban lives, to drudge on in soulless jobs just long enough save up enough money to come back and do it all again. Viva La Disney -- Vegas and Disney, the two absolute pinnacles of scientifically, psychologically and sociologically-maximized consumer culture. Ack.
And now, again, I feel like an old sour curmudgeon for not being captured in the allure of Disney World. I mean, it's a playground, made for pure fun, right? What's wrong with me that I don't see the magic in it, or at least not enough to float me along for a week of carefree fun?
I think it's deeper than just being annoyed by continuous over-stimulation and crass consumerism. I think I've lost my faith in the entire world-view the Disney parks presents. I no longer believe that human cleverness can lead to a consumer-driven paradise, that if we all just trust in the miracles of science and mass-marketing, we can consume our way to utopia. I don't believe in the easy answers, the painless fix, the boundless optimism, a clean, tidy world fueled by capitalistic excess. I strongly suspect that the world as it is isn't going to be able to sustain our current load on it for much longer, much less a world with even more people consuming even more resources, even faster. I think the answers we are likely to find -- the real answers, if they are to be found in time, may be very, very hard indeed, hard in a way most of us in this country are, in one sense blissfully, and in another sense, perhaps unfortunately unaware of.
I suspect that the sparkling clean fantasy-world Disney World presents to the lucky millions who can afford to experience it, is not going to prove sustainable or believable for too much longer. I think that a more persistent, far more real reality is going to set in, and I think part of why Disney World set me on edge is that I want to believe in it, I want to believe the pretty illusions and the easy answers and the technocratic utopian visions. It is, in large part, the world I was raised in, the world we're still tenuously clinging to. And, I really don't believe it's where we're going. The real world doesn't have to be grim and dour -- the world will always be a place where beauty, love, joy, delight, wonder and mystery are all around us. But I think that we've taken the Disneyfied fantasy world as real for too long, taken the spiffy fast thrill ride we've been herded onto without ever really questioning where it ends up, wondering how we get off, and thinking about what's going to happen when it's over.
I'm glad my son went to Disney World, and we got to ride the Pirates of the Carribbean ride and go through the Haunted Mansion, and ride Space Mountain and see incredible fireworks shows and marvel at displays and experiences and the sheer wonder of moving hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people efficiently in and out of a complete artificial world, giving each person the opportunity to see things they can tell their children about. And some day, I may have to explain to my son why the world of Disney isn't around any more -- that it wasn't a world we could or can actually live in, and help him to understand why it shouldn't even be our goal to aim for. The real world, the actual, natural world, a world of sustainability, with careful attention to the impacts of our choices and actions on the balance of life on this planet, is very different, but no less wonderful. And, in the end, it is so very, very much more magical than anything Mickey can sell us.
