MOUSE INTERRUPTED: RE-ENGINEERING REALITY

The wife of a good friend has a Disney fixation: specifically, she is fascinated by the archetypal Disney cartoon characters Mickey & Minnie Mouse. My friend, who is a retired US Marine Gunnery Sergeant (‘Gunny’, as the Corps refers to it) and a very thoughtful, kind, and moral person, amicably tolerates having his home absolutely crammed from floor to ceiling with images and artifacts of the mousely duo.

Every accessible shelf is burdened to the point of near structural failure with plastic figurines, models, ceramic busts, dioramas, and framed images of Mickey and Minnie. Everything from celluloid film cells showing Mickey in his original and earliest characterisation as ‘Steamboat Willie', through the latest, slickest and most computer-enhanced personification imaginable of what Walt Disney originally intended to be Mortimer Mouse fills each square inch of their walls.

I would estimate (conservatively) that there are perhaps more than a thousand small icons of Mickey and Minnie on display in their home (a relatively small one) and there is such a superfluity of ‘eau de Mickey’ scattered about that you can’t even take a step into the home without coming close to impaling yourself on a two-foot high cast resin figure of the diminutive cartoon rodent that lurks just behind the front door. The overall effect is such that entering their home more closely approximates crossing over into a nightmarish cartoon dream than visiting a friend’s cozy residence.

My friend….we’ll call him ‘Gunny’….is an infinitely patient and gentle soul, despite his having survived a full blown career in the US Marine Corps. To meet him, you’d never guess that under his calm exterior lies a trained professional soldier who has somehow managed to fight his way through several wars with both arms and legs intact: a soldier who has stared death in the face a number of times and who has dispatched his share of the ‘enemy’ in battles, stretching from Vietnam through the present era.

While ‘Gunny’ is no pussycat on the battlefield, neither is he a reflectively astute inquirer after abstract knowledge and arcane philosophies. In other words, my friend is no parlor intellectual (like I am). He is, however, an intelligent, morally strong, and principled individual who thinks the world of his wife and two children. As a devout Christian, his questions about the Universe all appear to be satisfactorily channeled down that institution’s theological avenues of pastoral reference, a state of affairs that appears to be mortally sufficient for both he and his wife.

Gunny’s wife, aside from being a complete Mickey Mouse devotee, is what I would discretely describe as a rather ordinary and thoroughly conventional woman, coming from an ordinary, lower middle class religiously devout family of ordinary means.  She seems to be a good mother and is, I presume, a good wife to Gunny, but for some inexplicable reason I find her somehow not to my tastes. There’s something about her personality and affect that makes it very difficult to appreciate her and even to like her. Don’t ask me to qualify it further than that for I’ve given this much prior thought and have never come up with a satisfactory answer as to exactly why I feel that way, even to myself. What matters here, for the sake of my commentary, is the fact that my dislike of her actually makes it difficult for me to spend much time at Gunny’s house, since Gunny is a family-oriented person who spends much of his time there, with his wife and kids. That’s wonderful, of course, except that it keeps me from enjoying Gunny’s company on the odd occasion.

At any rate, this is all simply contextual foreplay, since what I intend to discuss is not my friend Gunny and his wife, but rather some reflections and thoughts relative to the object of his wife’s obsession with Walt Disney’s cartoon characters.

In the past, I have often commented on the subject of what I called ‘engineered reality’, or the deliberate construction of pseudo-realities by corporate entities for the purpose of marketing commercial, material consumer goods. In a modern nation such as ours, with its free market economy almost totally unconstrained by the inhibitions of good taste, moral ethics, and high standards of decency (ironically contrary to the image of America most have as being a nation strongly possessed of such qualities), perhaps the single most dominant driving force is what we call ‘popular culture’. By that I refer to a vastly superficial culture of the trivial, the mundane, and the puerile, designed, created and perpetuated by commercial interests for the inherently immense profitability potentials. I have, in that context, often commented on how Americans have been socialized to accept artificial ideals, synthetic motivations, and contrived aspirations that are in their entirety intended be milked by corporations for commercial profits. In this hypothetical paradigm of pseudo-reality, our ordinary, everyday concerns are not refined from a matrix of higher cultural or traditional precepts of value, but are rather cobbled together from a synthetic matrix of commercially profitable symbolic values that are designed to make us spend money.

The process behind all this (engineered reality) is perhaps one of the single most influential and massively pervasive processes at work in America today, and one of the chief perpetrators of ‘engineered reality’ is none other than the parent entity of our cartoon hero, Mickey Mouse: the Walt Disney Corporation. While most people don’t stop to give Mickey and his creator many second-thought reflections, a number of very keenly intelligent people have.

Professor Henry A. Giroux is but the most recent of many academics who have examined the engineered reality of the Walt Disney Corporation, in his 1999 book titled The Mouse That Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence. As Waterbury Chair Professor of Education at Pennsylvania State University, Dr. Giroux and his colleague Dr. Joe L. Kincheloe are the editors of a series of books on culture and education that examine the formative cultural forces at work in America today. Like the two authors, I share their grave concerns over the philistine direction in which our nation’s economy is headed, as almost every single aspect of what little genuine culture we have is remorselessly transformed into a corporate profitability dynamic with little or no regard for any higher purpose than to simply gnerate profits for shareholders by selling consumer goods and services.

Sadly, as the American public’s relatively mindless existence (as a pool of thoughtless consumers) continues to be brutally strip-mined by the corporations, few Americans take time out to look deeper into the infinitely subtle, but devastatingly effective dynamics that are destroying American intellectual reflectivity and enslaving us all to an endless existence as subservient economic slaves. To put this in a more relative frame of definition, think of the nation (America) not as a population of ‘free’ citizens blessed with infinite choice in a democratic society, but as the occupants of a virtual gulag of the mind, a cultural encampment of inmates who are all being coerced into a life of dependence upon consumer substance: abusers of a substance that some would cleverly have us view as unending material abundance.

Others have well documented the transmogrification of the Disney phenomenon. What originally started out as an uncomplicated entertainment medium (Walt Disney cartoon characters in animated film media) has, over the past decades, transformed into one of the most effective and irresistibly pervasive vehicles for effecting socio-economic change the world has known, since the time of Josef Goebbels Ministry of Propaganda under Hitler’s Third Reich. The difference is that instead of using concentration camps, Gestapo terror, and threats of violent physical harm to render individual will inert, the Disney Corporation uses clever little simulacrums of cuteness and inferred ‘wholesomeness’ (i.e. cartoon characters and their related entertainment venues) to achieve its (equally nefarious) ends.

As an amateur historian, I am well aware of the fact that history is a notoriously imperfect discipline, for the history that ends up in our books, songs, legends, and memories is not the factual reality of what actually occurred on some day now remotely buried by the daily avalanche of continually unfolding contemporary events; it is instead an interpretation that is highly colored by the interpreter’s own biases, partisan affinities, and political, social, cultural, and ethnic biases. Just as in ancient Hawaii’s oral culture (there was no written Hawaiian language until the missionaries devised one, back in 1820) where events were transmitted from generation to generation via oral interpretation in chants, our own culture, with its impressive arsenal of enhance communicative tools has enabled the process of selective interpretation of reality to a degree never even remotely conceived by Guttenberg and his medieval  contemporaries.

Today, the process of interpretative reality has gone far beyond the simple ‘interpretation’ of historical events that previously obtained to the point where history is now being completely re-engineered to suit the perceptions of powerful masters of commercial media (e.g. The Walt Disney Corporation). The principal threat posed by the ‘imagineers’ that Disney employs is that this re-interpretative process is no longer powered as much by humane and ethically pure socio-political influences as by hard, cold, soulless business marketing ethics. However difficult that fact may be to swallow for a simple and unreflective collector of Mickey and Minnie Mouse cartoon figurines like Gunny’s wife, the fact remains that social and political biases are now being insidiously harnessed not out of a desire to turn people to or away from certain cultural tenets (say, for instance, to fundamentalist Christian religious belief that demands salvation by Jesus), but for the purpose of selling a superfluity of material consumer goods.

Thus the Disney Corporation re-engineers and re-interprets history in the form of its massive entertainment media venues (films and animated cartoon features) not just because its founder was a conservative, right-wing Republican Christian with strong attitudes about social order and dominant cultural hegemony, but because it was found that history may be conveniently turned into a vehicle for marketing consumer goods, the revenue from which now exceeds billions of dollars each year.

Walt Disney, the originator of the present Disney Corporation empire, has been very closely examined in a number of worthy studies in past years and his life, his values, motivations, and outlooks have been as carefully evaluated as have those of any major mover and shaker of American society in the 20^th Century. We know from these studies that Walt was, among other things, a racist, a strong advocate of the White Anglo Saxon Christian status quo, a rabid anti-Communist (and personal friend of J. Edgar Hoover), and a closet misogynist who believed women should be kept pregnant and at home with the children.  Walt’s staunchly conservative belief in the traditional values of the White Anglo Saxon American were equally matched by his distrust of Federal regulatory government and his feeling that ‘social problems’ were best handled by American corporate industrialism. It is no secret, in this context, that Walt Disney maintained a close personal relationship with J. Edgar Hoover, who conferred upon Walt a special status as a ‘consultant agent’ to the FBI’s Los Angeles Division and that Disney actively helped the FBI keep track of suspected Hollywood communists during the hay days of Senator Joe McCarthy’s House Un-American Affairs Committee.

When Disney’s plan expanded beyond his first entertainment project (the original Los Angeles Disneyland) to take form as the Disney World/Epcott Center in Orlando, Florida, the undercurrents of his thematic projections strongly reflected and endlessly echoed white Anglo Saxon, middle-class, post-war America. Giroux describes them as being a mix of “…Taylorised fun, patriotic populism, and consumerism dressed up as consumer fantasy” (the reference to Taylor is of Frederick Winslow Taylor, whose 1880s studies of work flow analysis aimed to enhance labor productivity and which ultimately resulted in a radical dehumanizing of the ‘means of production’; if it is convenient, you may think of the term ‘patriotic populism’ in its most recent form, the series of so-called ‘Tea Party Patriot’ protests against repressive government regulation).

Walt’s idea was to remove all perceived ‘undesirable’ social and cultural taints from his Disneyised ‘models’ of American society (Disneyland and Disney World), providing an environment that reflected a strongly white Anglo Saxon Christian perception of social reality (mirroring his own unique take on so-called mainstream ‘family values’). Substantial documentation exists that points to the fact that Disney felt that the post-war culture of American consumer comfort was a highly desirable model to emulate, thus resulting in his incorporating a basic functional structure at his entertainment complexes that encouraged consumption of material things and promoted what one might call a life of ‘Christian hedonism’.  It would be almost ludicrous to feel compelled to suggest that Walt Disney viewed such things as marital discord/divorce, homosexuality, and cultural diversity as being chief among those ‘undesirable’ social and cultural taints referenced above, given his severely conservative outlook on society. In his own way, Disney and an equally utopian Henry Ford shared many congruent concerns, despite many other differences that separated them. One of them was strong social control.

The American public, cultivated from the immediate post-war period to the present to embrace a cultural ideal of unlimited materialistic excess and luxury, quickly bought into the Disney concept of a fantasized all white, middle class America, and uncritically embraced the beguiling (if highly sanitised)  interpretation of reality that Disney engineered. In contrast to this, the progressive diversification of American society and ethnicity concurrently continued almost completely unacknowledged by the Disney Corporation, until sheer legal necessity forced a change in corporate attitude. Thus, a carefully homogenized and blandly sanitized form of political correctness began to subtly make itself felt in Disney entertainment products, despite the cultural ‘baggage’ Walt had brought with him to the corporation. With the threat of costly discrimination lawsuits always hovering on the horizon, the Disney Corporation had little real choice but to pay homage to the new existing socio-legal realities and made necessary changes to at least met the basic requisites of the emerging socio-ethnic sentiment. In this they succeeded all too perfectly, from a superficial assessment. However, as with the iceberg that contains 80% of its bulk hidden from view, there was far more to the Disney corporate philosophy than first met the eye.

As the Disney Corporation expanded beyond simple cartooning in the 30s and grew well beyond its carefully structured entertainment complexes (by this time including ‘Disneyland clone’ operations in France, China, Japan, and elsewhere) by the 1980s, strong interventions began to take place in general film and video media under the Disney Corporation aegis as it acquired and purchased film properties. A number of animated films soon appeared, many dealing with various historical characters. Most of these kept to the always popular themes of the animated cartoon model, with feature-length films such as ‘Pochahantas’, ‘Mulan’, ‘The Little Mermaid’, ‘Aladdin’, and many others too numerous to mention here, although an increasing number were dramatic ‘set-pieces’ involving human character dramas.  The Disney Corporation had, of course, long since realized that people love to be entertained and that perhaps the best way to do that was to do as had been done since the earliest dawn of recorded history: tell them a story.

Story telling has always had a special place in the hearts and imagination of all peoples, since it was the original model wherein all information and knowledge, morals, ethics, outlooks, and customs were transmitted prior to the development of books and later wizardry of the electronic media. Story telling began as an important aspect of early childhood in almost all cultures, but continued to be a strong dynamic in many ‘primitive’ cultures well past childhood (Hawaii serves as an excellent example of this). In producing its animated (and dramatic) story-films, the characteristic Disney slant on culture was strongly evident. The heroes and heroines were invariably modeled with strongly Caucasian personality characteristics, affects, features and voices, despite being from such geographically diverse locales as China, Japan, or perhaps the Middle East (e.g. the character Aladdin, whom the Disney studios modeled after Tom Cruise, despite Aladdin’s erstwhile Arab origin). Even in movies such as ‘Mulan’, while the female protagonist exhibits desirable politically correct traits such as self-determination, physical strength, emotional constraint, and reflective intelligence, at the end of the film one finds the warrior-like Mulan turned back into a comely maiden who wants nothing more than bagging a square-jawed, handsome ‘Mr. Right’, to the approval of her family and friends. Thus, all of the politically correct ‘give-away’ traits conspicuously included in the films are at last nullified in the denouement by a return to the white Christian ethic of conventional marriage in the time-honored ‘happily, ever after’ manner.

The same scripting pattern has been used over and over in almost all of the Disney films, animated or not, with the same personality dynamics and cultural biases being reflected. In this context, the characters could literally assume an entirely new cultural or gender identity and still be seen to behave in exactly the same manner in each new appearance.  Regrettably, the average American movie viewer is so captivated and so completely mesmerized by the entertainment value of the scenic wonders of computer-enhanced special effects that there is little (if any) room left for reflective analysis of what exactly is being viewed, or perhaps what the deeper, unspoken message is that is coming across subliminally.

Thus, the traditional white Anglo Saxon Christian values of earlier times in America are being strongly perpetuated, despite the external appearance of compliance with present, demands for politically correct socio-cultural status quo takes on reality. It is, as I hope may be seen, an incredibly subtle process and one wherein the communicative impacts of images and affect far supplant any underlying currents that run counter to logic, reason, and/or reality. Given the grossly unreflective nature of a  public that craves instant visual and emotional gratification, as opposed to perhaps harder to grasp and far more complex nuances of human nature (such as might be found in, for example, Ibsen’s classic ‘The Doll House’), there is considerable reason to wonder why smoothly re-engineered reality of this highly contrived sort quite readily captures so many in its web of unreflective and highly emotional simplistic fantasies.

Sadly, however truly sinister and horrifically damaging are the assaults of these pseudo-reality ‘re-interpretations’ of life on our reasoning ability, or how successfully they render our ability to perceive factual truth and separate logical reality from the smoke and mirrors of highly contrived media euphemisms, the motives of the Disney Corporation are not as evil as one given to reflection on the process might at first conclude, for neither the Disney Corporation, nor its principals are out to distort the reflective intelligence and/or thought processes of individuals as much as they wish to create a highly successful corporate paradigm within which high profits and gross economic gains are realized. The fact that this paradigm incorporates heavy elements of traditional white WASP Christian values simply legitimizes their activity, since (by reference to their outlook on the ‘whiteness = rightness’ principle of things) who could justly question such ‘high-minded’, archetypal ethics? Christian white supremacy as a higher moral influence was a given in Walt’s day and strong elements of that ultra-conservative philosophy carry over into today’s corporate Disney entity, since once the Frankensteinian monster of re-engineered reality has been created and turned loose, it develops and perpetuates an agenda of its own that has long since cut the figurative umbilicus that originally linked it to its creator. Consequently, it assumes a life of its own and remains largely autonomous, with a substantial inertia of its own (money).

Another disingenuous characteristic of the Disney ‘re-engineering’ process that selectively subverts reality for the sake of both moral and economic corporate gain may be seem in the very processes Disney (et al) use in their media productions to placate the forces of the ‘Diversity Gestapo’ and the legions of the politically correct. One example is the attempt by Disney ‘imagineers’ to draw-in ethnic sub-cultural group viewers (I won’t call them ‘minorities’ since at least in the case of the Hispanics that ‘minority status appears to be heading closer to the other extreme, as unchecked illegal immigrations increase) through the use of culturally illogical or contextually inappropriate devices to induce diversity into feature films.  Perhaps one of the most flagrant (and vastly amusing) examples to be seen is in the animated cartoon ‘Mulan’, wherein the small dragon character named ‘Mu-Shu’ is given the jive-talking voice of Eddy Murphy, a black man who has about as much to do with Chinese legend as J. Edgar Hoover had to do with the American Communist party.

While the ‘vehicular’ device of Murphy’s jive patter as ‘Mu-Shu’ in that film is certainly amusing and engaging, any momentary reflection by a thoughtful person on the ethnicity of either the actor or his voiced dialogue in regards to the contextual logic implied results in extraordinary confusion.  Fortunately (or perhaps most regrettably), the average movie viewer has little time or capacity for such comparative reflections in all likelihood, so the sheer incongruity of a jive-talking Chinese dragon (who is supposed to be Mulan’s ancestral intercedent) is totally lost. Blacks, on the other hand, are offered (by virtue of this device) a palpable tie-in to the story, so that they can more comfortably relate to something as highly un-black as ancestor worship; pragmatically, speaking, while the device lacks any real associative reality, it does serve to draw in the black members of the audience. From the standpoint of someone who views such painfully forced techniques as gimmicky at best, and utterly dishonest at worst, the only possibly worse animated cinematic device could be a Chinese horse with a Chicano accent (I won’t even go beyond mere mention of the ‘Shreck’ character ‘Donkey’, who has also been given a jivey black voice).

Whoopi Goldberg, another black Hollywood actress whose voice has been used for an animated animal character before, falls into the same category. While one could argue “What’s wrong with using a black person’s voice for an animal character?”, the answer would have to obviously be “Nothing. As long as the story is contextually a black folk story or legend derived from black cultural antecedents.” If it were not (as in the ‘Mulan’ instance), it would be completely duplicitous unless the maker of the film had absolutely NO regard for the resulting interpretative liberties being taken that could precariously skew perceptional social or cultural realities (QED: The Disney Corporation).

At the far end of the process, the re-structuring and altering of social and cultural realities to achieve commercial objectives results in product-associated consumer goods (spin-off products, such as action figure toys derived from a popular film that captures public imagination, a good example of which would have to be the Star Wars phenomenon), but that is simply another part of the primary reality re-engineering process at work: converting apples into oranges and selling lemonade made from it.

In the end, all of the foregoing contention boils down to a matter of the legitimacy of (contrived and purpose driven) the social engineering that the Disney Corporation routinely incorporates into the products of its vast entertainment media empire. To say that the Disney corporate philosophy is doctrinally loaded, philosophically skewed, contextually ambiguous, and culturally disingenuous is understating things considerably; the reality (at least from my perspective as a historian of inconsequential prominence) is far more disturbing, for this is nothing less than an attempt by a corporate entity of vast influence and power to harness and control the elemental forces of natural social change that have traditionally influenced and molded American society. Far worse, it constitutes a deliberate co-option of extant reality for the specific purpose of exploiting American sensibility (what little there is left of it, that is) for grossly disproportionate corporate material gain.

What’s next? Tom Cruise in the film role of Martin Luther King? Sharon Stone as Mahalia Jackson? Morgan Freeman as George Washington in retirement? American Nazi party chief George Lincoln Rockwell (now demised) reincarnate as the voice of the Taco Bell chihuahua? In the spin-reality game that is the studio re-engineering of historical fact to suit commercial purposes, nothing is beyond the realm of the possible and everything is, as journalists used to say privately amongst themselves, grist for the remorseless corporate mill.

The Disney Corporation have taken that precept and refined it to the point where far too Americans today are totally unable to determine where factual reality ends and commercial spin-mongering begins (or even grasp why it is important to know the difference between the two).  Whether you think Disney (and others like them) are simply innocent agents of commercial entertainment innovation, or something far more sinister and threatening to American society, is a judgment call each person has to make for him or her self. Hopefully, that decision will be made in a reflective and intelligent manner, but regardless of your opinion on the subject, the insidious slide that American credibility is meanwhile making down the slippery slopes of factual reality will in all likelihood merely continue.

The actual danger of all this lies not in Disney’s specific example of conveniently rearranging reality to suit corporate commercial gain, but the long-term effect such ‘standard’ revisionary practices will have on all the other important aspects of American society (such as government truthfulness and the moral balance of religious ethics and belief).

As for myself, I have to date managed to control my urge to grab a small plastic figure of Mickey Mouse off the shelf at my friend Gunny’s home and jump up and down on it when I visit, but probably only due to my strong sense of understanding that in the end, it really doesn’t matter whether we all march to the drums of an Adolph Hitler or a Mickey Mouse. Human beings are notoriously imperfect (it’s after all what makes us ‘human’, isn’t it?) and despite our best aspirations and fondest hopes we will continue to live in an imperfect world, but at least there are still a few of us out here who really do care enough about the difference between fantasy and reality to dare coming across as insane old codgers who are totally out of step with modern times…

Hopefully we won’t ever meet in that ‘happiest place on Earth’ (and I’m not talking about ‘heaven’, either), since that would mean that I, as one of the last hold-outs against pseudo-reality fascism, have finally crossed over.

Back in the late 50s and early 60s, when I puerilely oogled Mousekateers Annette and Darlene, little did I supect that no less than Mickey himself was predicting the ominous future of American society when he approached the Mickey Mouse Club's 'cartoon vault' and uttered those prophetic words: Meeska, Mouseka, Moosekateer, mouse cartoon time now is here…