Mouseworld, part 3

James Lileks covers the third day of their Disneyworld experience:

It's like that all over. The Disney Experience is one of the most psychologically all-inclusive and seductive thing I've experienced in years. After a while you stop thinking outside the possibilities of Disney; it absolutely drives out everything else from your imagination. It hits you from every angle. It works your soft spots and worms in through the cracks; it finds your fascinations and feeds them. [. . .]

[. . .] It's as if Mickey exists both outside time and inside its specific examples. The effect is Total Mickey, Mouse without End.

The old tired Sinclair Lewis quote gets dragged out by the professional hysterics: when fascism comes, it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a bible and etc. Well, friends, this is the Corporate State, right here, a world unto itself, bigger than two US states put together. They control the horizontal and the vertical, and the utility grid. The roads are private. The lakes are private. The control is hardly total — let Disney cease to pay taxes, and watch what happens. But the enormity of the area and the totality of the control is almost unprecedented. Surely it cannot be benign. Right?

James wrote something completely appropriate to finish this thought a few years ago, which I must recycle here: "Imagine, Winston, that the future consists of a boot pressing on a face. Here's the worst part, Winston — inside the boot is" MICKEY'S FOOT!!!