Wallowing lasted shorter than I’d expected it to. So I can now return to the wildly incoherent politics/culture/art/FRT blogging that you’ve all come to know and love.
Anyway, as you all know (or should), I recently spent a week at Walt Disney World, perhaps the most American place on Earth. And the display there chilled me to the core, altogether shattering my desire that this be the last vacation of my childhood. Make no mistake, what I saw spoke to me as a student of life and society, and what it told me made me sad.
First things first: the trip there. Largely due to my mother’s fear of flying, I hadn’t been on a plane since I was 7, so the concept of waking up in Evanston and spending the day in Florida was exceedingly awesome to me. Not as easy as all that, though, for as I suggested in my “Going to Florida” post, I didn’t actually sleep Friday night. No, I was awake for the sum total of about 40 hours, less a 15-minute powernap at O’Hare.
I should also add that I watched The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek on the flight over, and while it might not be my all-time favorite Sturges, it’s pretty fucking intense.
After landing ahead of time (!), we sought out the Disney Vacation Person, and so my week began.
See, we stayed on the park. And there’s this thing, where you can have all of your luggage picked up and brought to your room and all that for free, plus a free shuttle to the resort from the airport. It’s all very convenient & nice &c. And clearly designed to make the act of travelling as unreal as possible. There’s none of the romance of the airport…and while the phrase “romance of the airport” can only be uttered by one who spends little to no time in airports, there is still the accepted Act of Travelling. And to have that swept under the rug and have all of the unsavory parts handled by unnamed servants while I was driven, luggage-free in a plush, clean bus, felt kind of like The Time Machine or those other sci-fi stories where a society lives in opulence at the expense of vast armies of slave-workers.
Many, many words have been said on Disney’s creation of a willful unreality, but I can’t really make any point if I don’t say at least a few of them again, so bear with me. What the Disney theme park experience is, is the viewing of a world which has been completely fabricated to give the illusion of reality. I’m not talking about going to “the frontier” to ride on “a mine train,” because that’s really just the ur-Theme Park. You go because it’s goofy and fun. EPCOT’s World Showcase comes a bit closer to the mark: they present vignettes as a representation of the spirit of a country, but come a lot closer to a frozen, centuries-out-of-date idealization. But I don’t think anybody doubts that. (I might also add that only one of the many meals I had at EPCOT wasn’t obviously Americanized, but I forgive…it is a tourist trap). The fabrication of reality becomes truly insidious around the theme parks: the hotels, the roads, the forests, the rivers.
Walt Disney World, as many of you know, was built over the reimans of a drained swamp. Nearly everything you see was put there by people who wanted to remove that truth (okay, not the big trees, but everything else). This was driven home to me because I was staying at the Port Orleans Riverside resort, which seeks to recreate the Louisiana Bayou as a hotel. (In my defense, the reservations were made long before Katrina was born). So in essence, I got to look, every day, at a swamp that had been drained and converted into a fake swamp. Which just gets more and more surreal the more you think about it.
So Disney World, the self-proclaimed “happiest place on Earth” is a giant construct. Big surprise. I think we all got that when we were about 12. You go because the construct is so much fun, right? Well…
I hate to be all Blue State Elitist, but something really scared me about the people I saw in the parks. They were not a happy people, by and large. Now, despite what I may have said above and below, I really had a great time. I enjoyed myself. But most of the tourists just didn’t have that vibe. It seemed more like they had the job of “doing” Disney World. Like it was an obligation laid across them to go and experience what Disney wanted them to experience.
That’s the least of it, though. What really shook me, and sometimes even enraged me, were the…
Um…
There’s no nice way to say this…if you’re offended by political incorrectness, skip ahead.
What really pissed me off were the people who were too damn fat and lazy to fucking walk. There were a lot of those little electric carts and wheelchairs whizzing around the park while I was there, and while a lot of the riders were very obviously sick, or simply incapable of walking great distances without pain, a lot more were – just as obviously – in chairs because it was too much of an imposition to haul their 300-lb asses from ride to ride. Maybe I should give them the benefit of the doubt, and suppose their families didn’t want to deal with them. But either way, it was pretty disheartening. There are, after all, reasons that people get fat.
And the kids…school was less than a month started in most places, so there weren’t a lot of people between 5 and 18 there. But the little ones were perhaps a bit unruly. For which I blame the parents. Most whom really sucked. Happily, kids were reasonably, though not completely, absent.
The trip? Like I said, I had a good time. Thanks to staying on the park, I got to stay three hours late at one park per day, which cut down a lot on the crowds – hence I got to go on such big ticket rides as Tower of Terror, Splash Mountain, Space Mountain and Haunted Mansion 4-5 times each. And I want to say, ain’t nothing as cool as the empty Tower of Terror queue at night, and ain’t nothing as pretty as the view from Splash Mountain at night.
Pirates of the Caribbean stalled with me on it twice in four rides, and the second time (the last ride of the whole vacation), they actually had to turn on the lights in the ride to restart the computer, which was pretty fucking cool, actually. Fun fact: the water at Pirates is about 3 feet deep, and when they turn off the power, you start to drift backwards.
They’ve ruined – Ruined! – the animation studios tour, but given that they’ve ruined the animation studio, that is to be expected.
I got to thinking, 6 times in 18 years is really too often. And I decided that I probably won’t come back for a while. Certainly not before 30. Actually, I went and got really morbid, and began to wonder if the next time I came back, it would be with my own kids.
And so I came home, and broke up with my girlfriend, and life resumed its normal course.