Cynicism

I just finished Sarah Vowell's Take the Cannoli, sent by the parentals in my last care package. For those of you unfamiliar with Sarah Vowell – hie thee hence to Amazon.com. I will not go so far with the adulatory ass-kissery as some of her reviewers (the publisher's blurb on the back of her latest is almost masturbatory in its exaltation of this "madonna of Americana"), but the woman IS a brilliant writer, if occasionally a little smarmy and self-important. (She lives in New York, so that's to be expected.) Trivia Time: she was also the voice of Violet Barr in Disney's The Incredibles.

Sarah Vowell writes the sort of quirky, educational pop-lit that liberal university professors love to assign to their introductory level classes. Entertaining enough to be brain-candy, with enough substance to let you feel like part of the Intellectual In-crowd – especially if you get the pop-culture references – reading her books you feel as though you're having a chat with a close friend…a close friend with numerous phobias, an obsession with death, and a nasty case of verbal incontinence. I chuckled my way through her latest trip along the seedy underbelly of our nation…until she got to Disney World. Sarah darling, here we are going to have to agree to disagree.

I am a product of my generation – cynical, self-congratulatory, and viciously devoted to pulling back the Wizard's curtain to reveal the ersatz underpinnings of Oz. People my age have no sacred cows. How could we? How can we believe in anything? We've grown up in a world where the best selling video game is a first person shooter, where sports stars are more likely to appear on America's Most Wanted than a Wheaties Box, where politicians kiss interns instead of babies, where you can't sit on Santa's lap at the mall anymore because he might cop a feel while asking for your wish list. This is a world of rainbow parties, Columbines, three separate instances of government-sanctioned genocide in just the last decade alone, the Jackson trial and September 11^th. It's been said so many times that it's lost a lot of its meaning and become just one more thing to bitch about – but kids today really do grow up too fast. In 1897 a little girl wrote the New York Sun asking if Santa exists. She was 8. The Sun's response is one of the most reprinted editorials of all time, and one of the greatest examples of the innocence of children. In 1993 Robert Thompson and Jon Venables kidnapped 2 year old James Bulger and beat him to death before dumping his body on near-by train tracks. They were 10.

Disney's a huge, multinational corporation dedicated to making money, with several television channels, a thriving film industry, ready-made consumer tie-ins to all movies and TV shows, a satellite radio channel, and bi-coastal theme parks. Does its status as a media conglomerate automatically render all things Disney soulless and evil? Let's consider this a moment.

People criticize Disney for a multitude of sins, but primarily for sanitizing the fairy tales from which its most popular movies have been derived, drawn from the collections of The Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson. People, have you ever stopped to READ the original Grimm's Fairy Tales? In the original Cinderella, the stepsisters slice off bits of their feet so they can fit into the proffered glass slipper. Blood dripping off the hems of their gowns give them away. At Cinderella's wedding, they get their eyes pecked out by doves for their wickedness. Not convinced? Let's consider The Robber Bridegroom, in which a young bride-to-be visits her lover's hideaway deep in the woods and watches him rape and murder a young girl, then conducts an elaborate j'accuse with the girl's finger at a dinner party the next night. Or Sleeping Beauty, in which it isn't a kiss from the Prince that awakens our heroine, but giving birth to twins gotten on her while she slept. Don't even get me started on Hans Christian Anderson. In his two most celebrated stories, a little girl freezes to death in an alley on Christmas Eve, and a pretty mermaid drowns herself rather than murder her lover's new wife. And we get uppity with Disney for taking some liberties with the source material? Kids don't need to read fairy tales for exposure to this sort of bloodshed – open up the Washington Post any day of the week for things ten times worse. The Giant in Jack and the Beanstalk wanting to grind a boy's bones to make his bread can't hold a candle to the real life horror of the DC snipers, or the monsters with normal faces who turn babies into broken dolls.

I love Disney World. I love the pure Stepford escapism of it, the fake castle with Communications majors dressed up as cartoon characters, the aggressive good cheer, the syrupy black-and-white moral lessons and the rampant commercialism. I love the themed hotels, fake beaches, the fact you can't buy alcohol in the Magic Kingdom, the long lines, and the absolute perfect shining wonder on the faces of the kids. I love the stupid Country Bears, the monorail, the suspiciously warm pools, the gigantic turkey legs sold in lieu of pretzels in Frontier Land, and the creepy animatronic things in the stupendously boring Epcot Center. I love the light parade.

I think Disney World is a symbol of all that is right and wrong with America – it's a crass celebration of all things commercial, true…but it's also a sincere effort to provide kids with a haven, a place where all things are sanitized for their protection, where the scary bits are clearly labeled and the entire atmosphere is geared towards the small, the wide-eyed, and the innocent. Even in our cynical age, how can we sneer at a place where dreams really do come true?