MAGAZINE REVIEW
An ominous Disney Celebration
by Seth Rogovoy(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., Oct. 12, 1996) -- Let me come clean and declare my bias right up front. I despise all things Disney. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that I believe that Disney is the symbol, if not the actual root, of all that is evil in our culture.
Harper's Magazine
There. Feeling better having said that, let me say that Russ Rymer's piece, "Back To the Future," in the October Harper's, is one of the scariest things I have read since I picked up Stephen King's "The Dead Zone" about 10 or 15 years ago.Rymer's piece is about a town called Celebration in Florida, a made-up, fake place being built by the Walt Disney Company near the Disney World theme park. Celebration is a Disney creation with a twist: if it is successful, and all bets are that it will succeed, it will be populated by regular people who want to live in a world designed by Disney.
Rymer's article paints a portrait of the Florida development that gives new meaning to the term "company town." The idea of Disney designing and building small American towns from scratch is bad enough, but Rymer's descriptions of the place make my nightmares all the more vivid and horrifying.
"No previous project has enjoyed...Disney's unique aptitude for mixing high-minded ideals with mass-market sentimentality to clothe a commercial project with a sense of mission," writes Rymer.
On closer inspection, Rymer finds that behind the traditional facades of Disney's pre-designed houses lies "the celestial gimcrackery of a time-share condo....That dissonance of surface and depth...haunted more in Celebration than just houses."
But even worse than the cheap, imitation wood paneling and the "cathedral-ceilinged dining pits" inside the homes are Disney's attempts to create out of whole cloth a history, or "backstory" in Disney-speak, for the town of Celebration. "The entire awkward struggle to manufacture a tradition for the town revealed, to my mind, a hollowness at its core, the absence of a bona fide purpose such as inspired the creation of most towns," writes Rymer.
Have our lives and culture become so utterly bland and homogeneous that we need to rely on the imagemakers of the Disney Company to reinvent our polities from top to bottom? Rymer notes that Celebration will have a Philip Johnson-designed town hall. What it will not have is a town government to occupy the building, however. Even the decisions of Celebration's "community association" of homeowners will be subject to veto by the Disney company.
Maybe I'm wrong -- call me crazy -- but I always thought that an alliance between business and government exercising political and cultural power in all aspects of a community's life was fascism. To me, that is hardly something to celebrate.
The New Yorker
A "Letter from San Francisco" by Nicholson Baker in the Oct. 14 issue of the New Yorker is ostensibly another in a series he has written about library card catalogs, but as he points out, "the real story is a case study of what can happen...when telecommunications enthusiasts take over big old research libraries and attempt to remake them, with corporate help, as high-traffic showplaces for information technology.'Baker's particular concern is with the new main branch of the San Francisco Public Library. The hundred-million-dollar-plus building was needed to house the growing collection that the Old Main, as it is called, could no longer hold. Yet when the glorious New Main was completed, it turned out that it actually had less space than the Old Main. The solution? Discard thousands of books from the collection. Literally, trash them.
The New Main, writes Baker, "has built into it a contempt for, or at least an indifference to, literary culture and its requirements." The book-return chute, a motorized conveyor, frequently jams and eats up books trapped in its clutches. The sorting room has no shelves; books are piled up in mounds for weeks at a time, waiting to be reshelved. As one anonymous staffer put it, "It's an absolute disaster."
Men's Journal
A fun diversion in the October issue of Men's Journal offers "50 New Facts of Life," offering the latest in revisionist, state-of- the-art health and medical thinking.Remember the recommendation that two glasses of red wine per day helps prevent heart attacks? Martini drinkers, rejoice. The latest studies claim it's not the grapes, it's the alcohol, stupid. Wine, however, does protect against the scourges of bacterial food poisoning, so be sure to wash down your salmonella-contaminated poultry with plenty of vino.
Other findings say that taking an Advil each day can fend off Alzheimer's, cockroaches trigger asthma episodes, high-fat diets lead to back pain, red meat causes cancer, up to three eggs a day won't raise your cholesterol levels, eating meat causes baldness, drinking tea lowers your risk for strokes, eating fish prevents depression, tomatoes prevent prostate cancer and sex cures headaches.
"Honey, how about mixing up one of those fish, egg and tomato dishes, pouring us some wine, and then after our nightly tea and Advil concoction, curing our headaches?"
[This review originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on Oct. 12, 1996. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1996. All rights reserved.]
Seth Rogovoy
rogovoy@berkshire.net
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