Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [80]
“[W]e are living at a period of most wonderful transition which tends rapidly to accomplish that great end to which indeed all history points—the realization of the unity of mankind…. The distances which separated the different nations and parts of the globe are rapidly vanishing before the achievements of modern invention, and we can traverse them with incredible ease [T]hought is communicated with the rapidity, and even by the power, of lightning The products of all quarters of the globe are placed at our disposal, and we have only to choose which is the best and cheapest for our purposes, and the powers of production are entrusted to the stimulus of competition and capitalism.”26
If, as Sorkin suggests, “the Prince Consort’s evocation of a world shrunk by technology and the division of labor is the ur-theme of the theme park,” then it is also the leitmotiv of McWorld and Prince Albert is the natural progenitor of Ronald McDonald (Sorkin calls the Prince a “mouseketeer avant la lettre”) as well as of cyberenthusiast Gingrich.
Whatever the genealogy of the theme park, it finds its most common outlet nowadays not in the specialty fairgrounds in Anaheim and Orlando but in shopping malls all across the country. For these malls are entertainment plazas built around the multifaceted pleasures of shopping. Once upon a time, stores found a home in downtown neighborhoods among workshops, churches, restaurants, theaters, schools, and town halls as elements in an architecture of public space that integrated shopping into other public activities and at the same time gave to commerce an appropriately complementary and utilitarian role. The isolation of commercial space from every other kind of public space hinted at by the world’s fairs and certified by mall development has allowed commercial consumption to dominate public space, transmuting every other human activity into a variation on buying and selling. Margaret Crawford, an astute student of mall culture, has noticed that the express aim of the developers is to contain the entire world within the shopping plaza. She cites one of the builders of the world’s largest mall, who at the opening ceremony boasted: “What we have done means you don’t have to go to New York or Paris or Disneyland or Hawaii. WE have it all here for you in one place, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada!”27 Joan Didion has suggested that malls are actually addictive, a space where “one moves for a while in an aqueous suspension, not only of light, but of judgment, not only of judgment, but of personality.”28 The boundaries that separate the mall from the world are intended to remove every boundary between what goes on inside the mall and in the world: very few exits, no clocks. As fast food energizes consumers to shop (“dining” takes time away from shopping) and movie multiplexes provide entertainment incentives to consumption, so the architecture of mall space—the placement of stairways, the grouping of shops by income level, the theming of stores, the funneling of pedestrian traffic—has as its sole object the facilitation of consumption.29
The mall is not so much part of the suburbs as their essence, for suburbs themselves strive to take on the aspect of a theme park. A pamphlet from the California Office of Tourism invites readers to take a fresh look at Orange County (this was before the county went belly-up bankrupt, which gives the following an even more affecting comic poignancy):
It’s a theme park—a seven-hundred-and-eighty-six-square-mile theme park—and the theme is “you can have anything you want.”
It’s the most California-looking of all the Californias: the most like the movies, the most like the stories, the most like the dream.
Orange County is Tomorrowland and Frontierland, merged and inseparable….
Come to Orange County. It’s no place like home.30
Malls are theme