Disney Über Alles

The Happiest Place on Earth [1]

"Children, I wanna warn ya / 'Cos I've been to California

Where Mickey Mouse is such a demon / Where Mickey Mouse is as big as a house!" [2]

 

 

I.

 

Cotino is the first Storyliving community being developed by Disney in Rancho Mirage, California. Work started on the 618-acre site - which will feature residential housing, hotels, resort facilities, and a retail centre, all surrounding a 24-acre grand oasis and an artificially blue lagoon - in April 2022. 

 

Disney are so confident that it will be a successful venture, that, in December 2023, they announced plans for a second such community, Asteria, in Pittsboro, North Carolina, which will include 4,000 homes (the same month that the first houses in Cotino went on sale, although the community will not be opened until 2025).    

 

 

II. 

 

In an article published in The Guardian [3], Oliver Wainwright discusses Disney's plan for curated living, i.e., a life which unfolds in a perfectly stylised and completely controlled environment so as to ensure that residents and guests experience the magical joy that the company has been peddling for a hundred years.    

 

Wainright calls it a fantasy world, but it's really much more (and more sinister) than that; this is a model of zen fascism overseen by Mickey Mouse and other Disney cast members where neighbours will be able to "bond over Disney-themed art lessons, enjoy dinners inspired by Disney stories and join family days with Disney-related activities". 

 

Wainright also informs us that the themed homes curated by Disney imagineers will be priced in excess of $1m, whilst the forthcoming town centre will feature "a street market where local artists will sell Disney-themed arts and crafts" and there will be "'abundant opportunities for laughter'". 

 

Oh, and if you're wondering how to keep a large lake sparkling blue all year round in an area that suffers from extreme drought, well, that's thanks to patented Crystal Lagoons technology.   

 

This expansion by the world's largest mass media and entertainment conglomerate into the real world is surely something that Uncle Walt would have approved of and might have amused Jean Baudrillard were he still alive to witness it ...

 

 

III.

 

Baudrillard wrote an important piece on Disneyland more than forty years ago in his seminal text  Simulacres et Simulation (1981), describing it as "a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulacra" and a "frozen, childlike world [...] conceived and realized by a man who is himself now cryogenized" [4] and awaiting resurrection.  

 

Obviously Disneyland exalts American values in miniature and cartoon form. But it does more than this: its real purpose is to conceal the fact that it is the real America, just as prisons are built in order to disguise the fact that society is itself carceral. 

 

Baudrillard writes: 

 

"Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle."

 

He continues: 

 

"The imaginary of Disneyland is neither true nor false, it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate the fiction of the real in the opposite camp. Whence the debility of this imaginary, its infantile degeneration. This world wants to be childish in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the 'real' world, and to conceal the fact that true childishness is everywhere - that it is that of the adults themselves who come here to act the child in order to foster illusions as to their real childishness." 

 

With the opening of Cotino next year, I'm not sure whether the Disney executives so skilled in playing this game of concealment have finally triumphed and the Happiest Place on Earth will soon expand across the globe, or if, perhaps, they have made a fatal miscalculation and all but the most fanatic of Disney adults will decide they've had enough of staged reality and curated living.    

 

 

Notes 

[1] This was the original slogan for Disneyland, Est. 1955. 

 

[2] Lyrics from 'Do You Wanna Hold Me?' by Bow Wow Wow, from the album When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going (RCA Records, 1983): click here.

 

[3] Oliver Wainwright, 'Let's move to Disney Town! Will life in its 2,000 themed homes be a dream or a nightmare?' The Guardian (08 April 2024): click here.

[4] This text by Baudrillard was translated into English as Simulacra and Simulation by Sheila Faria Glaser (University of Michigan Press, 1994). Material quoted here and following is from a section entitled 'The Hyperreal and the Imaginary' in the first chapter, 'The Precession of Simulacra'. See pp. 12-14. 

 

On Recuperation and Karaoke Culture: Welcome to Glastonbury 2023

Steve Jones, Billy Idol, Tony James, and Paul Cook demonstrating 

the spectacular nature of punk rock at Glastonbury 2023 [1]

 

 

I. 

 

 

I hate - and have always hated - the Glastonbury Festival. 

 

And so, whilst 'Smash It Up' may not be my favourite track by The Damned, it contains one of my favourite verses of any song and I fully endorse the vitriol aimed at those zen fascists who continue to insist we all wear a happy face and share their vision of unity in diversity: You can keep your Krishna burgers and your Glastonbury hippies [2].  

 

Glastonbury may have started out in 1970 as a counter-cultural event rooted in the free-festival movement, but that's not what it is today, over fifty years on. Now it has become the coldest of all cold monsters, feeding on everything and everyone, and from whose mouth comes the monstrous lie: Art can make you happy and music set you free! 

 

Glastonbury, basically, is a means of establishing the total control and coordination of all aspects of what was once known as pop culture, or youth culture. 

 

The Nazis had a term for such a process: Gleichschaltung. Some translate this as bringing-into-line, but it more accurately means that everything is placed on a single circuit or network, so that it only requires one master switch that can be flicked on or off at the will of a single governing body or individual: Michael Eavis Über alles.   

 

 

II. 

 

For those who think this comparison with Nazi Germany is a bit over the top and who are uncomfortable with the use of the word Gleichschaltung, let's try another term - this time one that is recognisable in English, even though it's French in origin: Récupération ...

 

This term, often associated with the Situationist Guy Debord, refers us to a process by which politically radical ideas and subversive art works are defused, incorporated, and commodified within mainstream culture (usually with the full collaboration of the media) [3].  

 

Glastonbury is a huge recuperative machine making a spectacle out of aged rockers who were once the voice of teen rebellion; gleefully castrating the Sex Pistols, for example, and even managing to strip the songs of the Smiths of all negativity (their dark humour, their melancholy, their pain) by hiring the smiling anti-punk Rick Astley to show that Morrissey really isn't needed any longer. 

 

The audience sing along and wave their arms, or passively stand and watch the reified spectacle. It's an amusing irony that the festival takes place in fields where usually there are a large number of dairy cows grazing, because that is what these audience members essentially constitute - a human herd consuming pop fodder.     

 

Shortly before he died in April 2010, Malcolm McLaren bemoaned the fact that genuine creativity (which is a chaotic phenomenon that often ends in failure) was increasingly becoming impossible within what he described as a karaoke world - i.e., an ersatz society, that only provides us with an opportunity to safely revel in our own stupidity and the achievements of others; a life lived by proxy [4].

 

And, whilst I'm a little uneasy with his use of words like authenticity, he was making an important (though hardly original) point. Britain's got talent: but it's lost its soul.          

 

Notes

 

[1] I am grateful to Roadent for suggesting that Generation Sex are best understood in terms of the Spectacle (i.e. from the theoretical perspective of Situationism).

 

[2] The Damned, 'Smash It Up', single release from the album Machine Gun Etiquette (Chiswick Records, 1979): click here for the official video. 

      Alternatively, you can click here, for a live performance of the song on The Old Grey Whistle Test (6 November 1979), followed by a (curtailed) performance of another track released as a single from the above album, 'I Just Can't Be Happy Today'. 

 

[3] See Debord's seminal text La société du spectacle (1967). It was first published in English in 1970, trans. Fredy Perlman and friends.  

[4] Readers who are interested can click here to watch McLaren deliver his final public talk at the Handheld Learning Conference (2009). Originally entitled 'Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Txt Pistols', the talk is now better known by the title it appears under on ted.com - 'Authentic creativity vs. karaoke culture'.  

 

Torpedo the Ark Versus the Censor-Bots

Screenshot of my post with sensitive content warning 

 

 

I.

 

D. H. Lawrence famously battled the censors throughout his life as a writer - often describing them as morons infected with the grey disease of puritanism and busy extinguishing the gaiety and rich colour of life, which they find both dangerous and obscene [1].

 

He also thinks of censors as dead men; "for no live, sunny man would be a censor" [2].

 

But of course, Lawrence was writing 100 years ago and things have changed since then. Now censorship is often carried out by an autonomous programme or bot relying on instructions supplied in the form of an algorithm.

 

Take, for example, the following case ...

 

 

II.

 

In ten years of publishing on Blogger - a site owned by Google since 2003 - I have never had any issue concerning content of the 2000 posts. 

 

But the first part of my post on Young Kim's erotic memoir - A Year on Earth With Mr. Hell (2020) - that I published recently (24 Feb), was immediately issued with a sensitive content notice, which warns that I have, apparently, infringed community guidelines (a document which describe the boundaries of what is - and is not - allowed on Blogger).

 

Admittedly, readers can still access the post, but it takes a bit more effort and this will, inevitably, result in a loss of views.      

 

I am unable to appeal this decision: and nor have I been told the exact nature of my offence; i.e., what word, phrase, or idea is so distressing to the censor-bot. 

 

Thus, although I have been invited by Google to update content so as to conform to their guidelines - and then instructed to republish the post so that it's status can be officially reviewed - I really don't know how or where to begin any revision. 

 

Not that I feel inclined to make changes to my text - to effectively self-censor. Did we have done with the judgement of God, merely to accept the judgement of Google ...? I think not. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] In a letter written in November 1928 to Morris Ernst - an American lawyer and prominent member of the American Civil Liberties Union who would later play a significant role in challenging the ban placed on works of literature including James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) and Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness (1928) - Lawrence makes his disdain for the censor-moron clear:

 

"Myself, I believe censorship helps nobody; and hurts many. [...] Our civilisation cannot afford to let the censor-moron loose. The censor-moron does not really hate anything but the living and growing human consciousness. It is our developing and extending consciousness that he threatens - and our consciousness in its newest, most sensitive activity, its vital growth. To arrest or circumscribe the vital consciousness is to produce morons, and nothing but a moron would wish to do it." 

 

See: The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI, ed. James T. Boulton and Margaret H. Boulton, with Gerald M. Lacy, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 613.

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Censors', in The Poems, Vol. I, ed. by Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 459.   

Global Goals

SDG logo

 

I. 

 

You may have noticed that all kinds of powerful people have been adopting the phrase build back better as a kind of zen fascist mantra over the last few years. The same people - let's call them the global elite - have also started to wear a circular multicoloured little badge and I thought readers might like to know why that is ...    

 

 

II. 

 

In September 2015, the leaders of all 193 member states of the UN adopted a universal programme known as Agenda 2030. 

 

At the heart of this programme are a number of Sustainable Development Goals (known more simply as SDGs or the Global Goals), which promote the utopian fantasy of a better world for everyone by the end of this decade; provided that is, we all work together and accept that far-reaching social, economic, and environmental change is necessary. 

 

If we all mobilise successfully, argue those who are seriously pushing this agenda, then we will meet the 169 targets contained within the 17 Global Goals [1] and transform society from top to bottom; ending all forms of poverty, achieving social justice, and tackling climate change, for example. 

 

Whilst the private sector, the media, civil society, and the general public will all have a role to play in this Great Reset, obviously governments will be expected to take a lead and establish the necessary frameworks via which the Global Goals can be implemented and achieved. The UN will monitor and report on their progress "towards building an inclusive, sustainable and resilient future for people and planet" [2].        

  

Of course, although unanimously agreed, the Goals are not legally binding and the UN doesn't have the power to enforce them - it can merely encourage everyone to get on board. Those who wish to show their support for the New World Order can even buy their very own SDG pin on Amazon: click here. 

 

And once you have the badge or brooch, you might want also to follow these suggestions about how to contribute to Agenda 2030:

 

"Spread the word about the Global Goals, so that more people can take action and contribute to meeting the Goals. Join an organization that actively contributes to meeting the Goals. Reduce your general waste and your enviromental footprint. Avoid plastics, take the train instead of the airplane, the bike instead of the car. Make conscious choices in your consumption. Buy local and try to make sure what you buy is produced in fair and sustainable ways. Show compassion and stand up against racism, exclusion, discrimination and injustice. Use your imagination. The future depends on our ability to imagine it." [3]

 

That last line is, of course, an expression of the purest idealism. In fact, it's almost a form of magical thinking; i.e., the belief that one's thoughts and fantasies can have real effects in the actual world providing one really, really wants something to happen or to change. The young and religiously-minded are particularly susceptible to such thinking. And the insane ...     

 

 

Notes 

 

[1] The 17 Global Goals are: 

 

1. No poverty 

2. Zero hunger 

3. Good health and well-being 

4. Quality education 

5. Gender equality 

6. Clean water and sanitation

7. Affordable and clean energy

8. Decent work and economic growth

9. Industry, innovation and infrastructure

10. Reduced inequalities

11. Sustainable cities and communites

12. Responsible consumption and production

13. Climate action

14. Life below water

15. Life on land

16. Peace, justice and strong institutions

17. Partnerships for the Goals

 

The order of the Goals does not signify priority; "all are critical and interdependent". 

 

[2] All information in this post is taken from globalgoals.org. Lines quoted are from the Q&A section.

[3] For more hints and tips of good things you can do, read the UNs Lazy Person’s Guide to Saving the World, click here. 

 

 

To understand Agenda 2030 etc. within a philosophical context, see Jean Baudrillard's essay 'The Violence of the Global', trans. François Debrix: click here.

Healthy Body, Healthy Mind: Notes on NHS Values

A touching expression of ontological gratitude ... 

or a sinister form of zen fascism?

 

 

I. 

 

Anyone who has recently visited a UK hospital will doubtless be as astonished as I was by the amount of time, effort, and money that is put into the promotion of so-called NHS values, which, essentially, reduce to three key terms: respect, equality, and compassion. 

All fair enough, you might think. But at Queen's Hospital, in Romford, Essex [1] - which happens to be my local hospital - they have really gone to town and decided to expand upon the NHS vision, wildly proliferating values in what might almost be described as a metastatic manner. 

 

This is illustrated by the above poster, designed by a team determined to list as many moral adjectives as they can think of, in order to thank patients, visitors, and staff for being (amongst other things) human, obliging one to wonder who or what they feared they might encounter stalking the wards. 

 

Personally - and for the record - I've no objection to being treated by a robot, an alien, or a highly trained chimp, provided they are competent and go about their business with the minimum of fuss. 

 

And not only do I not care if they lack the (all too) human touch, but I don't expect them to be fun either; there are far too many idiots in far too many professional roles - doctors, teachers, trendy vicars and tubby office managers - posing as chilled out entertainers.    

 

 

II. 

 

But who is responsible for this zen fascist propaganda - or The Pride Way [2] - in our hospitals?

 

Well, in my region - Barking, Havering and Redbridge - the team responsible for teaching, coaching and empowering staff in The Pride Way is called the Kaizen Promotion Office. Based at Queen's Hospital, but working across all Trust sites, the KPO are dedicated to excellence and have adopted their methodology from the Virginia Mason Institute (part of the Virginia Mason Medical Centre in Seattle):

 

"Our KPO Team of specialists have been trained and mentored in The Pride Way tools and methodologies, and these tools have in turn been taught to others in the Trust through the many training and support opportunities provided by the Team, through both formal and informal training, coaching, Rapid Process Improvements Workshops (RPIW) and Kaizen events." [3]     

 

This way of speaking, thinking, and working could, of course, only have roots in the United States. And so now everything begins to make sense ...

 

The irony is that the British people pride themselves on the (supposedly) unique nature of their health care system and fear it being sold off to the Americans. But the latter - over-paid, over-earnest, and over-keen on woke corporate bullshit - are already over here ...    

 

 

Notes 

[1] Along with King George Hospital, in Goodmayes, Queen's Hospital is part the of Barking, Havering and Redbridge NHS University Hospitals Trust which also operates a number of clinics at sites in the surrounding areas. 

[2] PRIDE is an acronym for the values and behaviours which staff at BHR hospitals are expected to embody: Passion, Responsibility, Innovation, Drive, and Empowerment. To learn more about how these terms are being used, visit https://www.bhrhospitals.nhs.uk/our-vision-and-values/ 

 

[3] I'm quoting from https://www.bhrhospitals.nhs.uk/the-pride-way/