Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [82]
The theme-parking of reality has many overseas zealots. Led by Berlin concert manager Frank Georgi (who had fled the German Democratic Republic in 1989), businessmen from the eastern states of Germany are currently discussing an “Ossi Park” theme fair on a five-hundred-acre army base near Wandlitz in Brandenburg that sits astride what was once East German leader Eric Honnecker’s nuclear shelter. According to the planners, visitors to Ossi Park (the attraction is named for the slang term for Easterners during the Cold War) will:
experience a condensed “typical year” in the [Communist era] German Democratic Republic, including state-organized mass celebrations, such as May 1. One-day visitors will be required to leave by midnight, as they were in the GDR; guards will patrol the border; attempts to escape will lead to hour(s)-long imprisonment. All visitors will be required to exchange a minimum of hard currency for eastern marks …. Political commentary will be available through a reconstructed “black channel” as it was in the GDR; there will also be static-ridden transmissions of western German television (and) blackmarketeers and an underground opposition. [The whole park will be surrounded by barbed wire and a wall and will] include badly stocked stores, snooping state secret police (Stasi) and scratchy toilet paper known as “Stalin’s Revenge,” whose texture, according to an old GDR joke, ensured that “every last ass is red.”33
Whether the plan, goofy to be sure but hardly goofier than some of Disney’s projects now under way, will come to fruition is uncertain in Germany’s troubled fiscal condition. That it could even be conceived suggests how far the theme park ideology has come from its inception in London in 1851 or its second coming (with Disney) at Anaheim in 1955.34
Walt Disney World is McWorld’s front parlor. The cartooning of reality with which Walt Disney established his first theme park at Anaheim nearly half a century ago foreshadowed McWorld’s seductive blend of commerce, illusion, manipulated desire, and vicarious satisfaction. According to an early promotional piece:
Disneyland will be based upon and dedicated to the ideals, the dreams, and the hard facts that have created America. And it will be uniquely equipped to dramatize these dreams and facts and send them forth as a source of courage and inspiration to all the world.
Disneyland will be something of a fair, an exhibition, a playground, a community center, a museum of living facts, and a showplace of beauty and magic. It will be filled with the accomplishments, the joys, the hopes of the world we live in. And it will remind us and show us how to make those wonders part of our lives.35
Not really the “hard facts” and not quite a part of our lives, as things turn out. Eileen Orgintz writes in what is presumably intended as high praise (in the Los Angeles Times), “Disney World is an unreal place, and don’t expect reality to intrude. Everyone is happy and well-fed. Everything is clean. Everyone is courteous. Don’t be suspicious. Wait until you get home to feel guilty about all the world’s problems.”36
As once the sun never set on the British empire, so today, Disney can boast, “the fun now follows the sun around the globe.”37 Disneyland in Anaheim, template for all the models that followed, is approaching the half-century mark, Walt Disney World is over twenty years old, Tokyo Disneyland (with its new Splash Mountain), is over ten and in 1992 added another 16 million visitors to its 100 million plus in the nine previous years. Japanese couples are among those that select Disney theme parks for their postmodern nuptials. EuroDisney outside Paris has been the exception to the rule: even if it avoids becoming the first Disney Bankruptcyland,