Team Rodent - Carl Hiaasen [2]
Disney’s recent ambitions in Times Square are modest compared to its original mission in Florida: to establish a sovereign state within a state, a private entertainment mecca to which every working family in America would be lured at least once and preferably several times. And that’s exactly what has come to pass. Disney World is the most-visited vacation destination on the planet; kids who went there in the 1970s are bringing their own kids today, perpetuating a brilliantly conceived cycle of acculturation. Every youngster who loves a Disney theme park—and almost all of them do—represents a potential lifetime consumer of all things Disney, from stuffed animals to sitcoms, from Broadway musicals to three-bedroom tract homes. With this strategy Disney will someday tap into the fortunes of every person on the planet, as it now does to every American whether we know it or not.
And though the agents of its takeover are omnipresent and not always identified, it’s still unnerving to enter the non-Disney Virgin Megastore in Times Square and see Kathie Lee on the ultralarge TV screen. This would be Kathie Lee Gifford, the talk-show hostess whose signature line of fashion clothing was revealed to have been manufactured by waifs in squalid overseas sweatshops; the same Kathie Lee whose husband, football legend Frank Gifford, briefly took up with a flight attendant who arranged for a tabloid to publish grainy photographs of the tryst.
Here on the megascreen, though, Kathie Lee appears domestically serene. She’s singing a tender-type love song titled “Forever and Ever,” which (according to the graphic on the video) is available on a Disney record label and featured in a Disney full-length animated film. Glancing around the store, I notice I’m not the only customer frozen in place. The others display no snickering or outright derision, but rather a woozy glassiness of expression that dissolves only when Kathie Lee finishes her tune. Instantly she is replaced on the jumbo tube by Marilyn Manson, a flamboyant metalhead whose plangent ode to masochism puts an inexplicable bounce in my step. According to rock lore, several of Mr. Manson’s ribs were surgically removed so he would be limber enough to perform oral sex upon himself. A future duet with Kathie Lee would seem out of the question, but one can always hope.
A few blocks away, Peep Land hangs on by cum-crusted fingernails. Inside … well, just try to get past the video racks. Sample: volumes one through five of Ready to Drop, an anthology featuring explicit (and occasionally team-style) sex with women in their third trimester of pregnancy. And that’s not the worst of it, not even close. The shop’s library of bodily-function videos is extensive, multilingual, and prominently displayed at eye level. Skin a-crawl, I am quickly out the door.
Revulsion is good. Revulsion is healthy. Each of us has limits, unarticulated boundaries of taste and tolerance, and sometimes we forget where they are. Peep Land is here to remind us; a fixed compass point by which we can govern our private behavior. Because being grossed out is essential to the human experience; without a perceived depravity, we’d have nothing against which to gauge the advance or decline of culture—our art, our music, our cinema, our books. Without sleaze, the yardstick shrinks at both ends. Team Rodent doesn’t believe in sleaze, however, nor in old-fashioned revulsion. Square in the middle is where it wants us all to be, dependable consumers with predictable attitudes. The message, never stated but avuncularly implied, is that America’s values ought to reflect those of the Walt Disney Company and not the other way around.
So there’s a creepy comfort to be found amidst the donkey films and giant rubber dicks, a subversive triumph