Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [191]
30. Cited and brilliantly analyzed in Edward W. Soja’s “Inside Exopolis: Scenes from Orange County,” in Sorkin, Variations, p. 94.
31. Linda Killian of the Renaissance Capital Corporation, quoted in Ann Imse, “Hang on for the Ride of Your Life,” The New York Times, December 12, 1993, p. F 6.
32. William Booth, “Wayne’s World,” The Washington Post, National Weekly Edition, August 29-September 4, 1994.
33. From an article in Der Spiegel, summarized in The Week in Germany, German Information Center, November 5, 1993.
34. Coldwarland has already come to pass, according to a peculiar and droll story that came out of Russia at the end of 1993. Russian aerospace entrepreneurs, working with American counterparts, leapt out ahead of the Germans by putting into practice an idea even the inventors of Ossi Park might have found far-fetched. MIGS Etc., Inc. of Sarasota, Florida, ran ads in major print media with the offer: “Fly a MIG-29 at Mach 2.5 in Moscow … You Need Not Be a Pilot”! The company promotes what it might profitably advertise as Evil Empire nostalgia rides in MIG-29 fighter planes and T-80 tanks for prices approaching $100,000 (for a two-MIG dogfight). The New York Times not only ran the ads but published a tourism piece by someone who took a ride and editorialized on the concept, musing about whether Lenin, Stalin, John le Carré, and Tom Clancy must not be somewhere “shaking their heads in collective amazement.” “Your Very Own Cold War,” The New York Times, October 25, 1993, p. A 18.
35. Cited by Michael Sorkin, “See You in Disneyland,” in his Variations, p. 206.
36. The Disney Annual Report, 1992, p. 14.
37. Ibid., p. 8.
38. In Florida, President Clinton delivers stirring words written by lyricist Tim Rice, the librettist for Jesus Christ Superstar and the Disney films Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast, the latter now a musical playing at Disney’s Broadway theater in New York. Rice’s script has Clinton propose that national happiness “still evolves from liberty, from property.” See Jon Wiener’s understandably cynical account in “Disneyworld Imagineers a President,” The Nation, November 22, 1993, p. 620.
39. The description is Michael Wines’s in “Yes, Virginia, the Past Can Be Plasticized,” The New York Times, November 28, 1993, p. E 4. Wines’s piece is less skeptical than his title, however; he cites James McPherson (Princeton University’s civil war historian and Pulitzer Prize winner and avowed preservationist) as having “mixed feelings” and notes that places like Williamsburg (which in 1994 ran a highly controversial mock slave auction) have already established the precedent for Disney at Manassas.
CEO Eisner is certainly anxious not to be seen as ransacking history. In Florida, he hired Eric Foner, the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University and a prize-winning Civil War historian, as a packaging consultant. According to Jon Wiener’s account in The Nation, Foner had complained about the editing and context of the speech delivered by the Lincoln robot at Disney’s Anaheim Hall of Presidents, a speech that omitted any reference to slavery. Disney hired the critic. When Foner was finished, even a radical journalist had to acknowledge an “impressive” achievement: “In this park full of attractions that are calculatedly sentimental, sickeningly cute or crudely commercial, visitors to the redesigned Hall of Presidents will find a strikingly intelligent and remarkably progressive program.” Jon Wiener, “Disneyworld Imagineers.”
40. For an account of the sad struggle of Dexter King to build a $60 million hi-tech King amusement center in time for the Atlanta Summer Olympics in 1996,