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By Root 1432 0

it will have a hard time denting the tough European market. For Europe is where dreams die; the dreamers have all emigrated to America’s warmer climes. Florida, America’s playground, has been a natural Disney venue: even at a moment when to some wary European tourists it has the feel of Murderland, it holds out the promise of Walt Disney World, the Disney-MGM Studios theme park, Disney’s Dixie Landings Resort and Bonnet Creek Gold Club, the Disney Vacation Club Resort, the Epcot Center, and the projected new Disney town of Celebration. The Disney theme parks around the world earn $3.3 billion of Disney’s annual $7.5 billion a year, with films accounting for another $3.1 billion and consumer products (with theme park and film tie-ins) representing another $1.1 billion. All three divisions of Disney derive inspiration from a single set of cartoon images spun out in endless variations by an Imagineering Department responsible for redefining our reality.

In recent years, the Disney Company has set about virtualizing American history and cartooning its politics. Walt Disney World in Florida recently added Bill Clinton to its popular Hall of Presidents. Like Abraham Lincoln before him, President Clinton has been “imagineered” as an Audio-Animatronic robot who can walk and talk—and unburden himself of some surprisingly terse oratory.38 The company also nearly succeeded in building a “Disney’s America” Civil War theme park at Manassas where America’s bloodiest war was to have been reconsecrated as a pay-per-view spectacle rendered (in accord with the dourly correct realism expected of our times) in all its fratricidal mayhem. Political opposition in Virginia and the District of Columbia along with a national publicity campaign by indignant historians scotched the Manassas venture at the eleventh hour, but the Disney people are still seeking an Americana theme park. For the failed Civil War theme park, “with fake Indian villages, a replica farm, mock Civil War battles and a faux fair” all “within hailing distance of real Indian trails, actual farms, a county fairgrounds and a town that was sacked and burned by Union troops,” was certified by reputable historians.39 Scholars debate the preservationist merits of these new theme parks while the Disney company tries to approximate their exacting standards, but the issue is not preservation and there was something comical about securing scholastic certification for a virtual reality being raised up right next to the Civil War actuality it was reproducing.

Disney’s creations, however, aspire not to truth but to verisimilitude: the metatruth of virtuality. The whole point of virtual reality is that it is just like the reality that it assiduously is not and cannot be. You cannot have sex in Pirate’s Cove or get to Germany on a ride through a Disney Bavarian castle or assassinate Lincoln in the Hall of Presidents. All you can do is buy a ticket to watch: watch without consequences, watch without engagement, watch without responsibility. That is perhaps why Dexter King (Martin Luther King’s youngest son) has met such resistance to his plan to turn his father’s Atlanta memorial into a Disney-like theme park to be known as the Martin Luther King, Jr. Time Machine and Interactive Museum.40

The King family is one thing, but Disney is another; one should not ask Disney to bear a greater burden than the responsibilities of an entertainment company warrant. The company’s aim is innocent enough, even endearing: not reality modification but a few hours or days (or ideally, if its hotels are to remain full, weeks) of escapist relaxation for the tired masses. Theme parks are not just shaping but are being shaped by the larger McWorld whose values they manifest. In one sense, McWorld itself is a theme park—a park called Marketland where everything is for sale and someone else is always responsible and there are no common goods or public interests and where everyone is equal as long as they can afford the price of admission and are content to watch and to consume.

McWorld as Marketland is, however,