My high school history teacher, and one of my top three favorite teachers of all time, Mr Lavin, once said that he thought the two most evil entities in the world are shopping malls and Disney. He certainly wasnt wrong about Disney. This place was insane like the Matrix where they placate the masses with this grand delusion while they strip away every your every resource only letting you go when there is nothing more they can wring from your oblivious crippled shell. I mean they have such a sweet racket worked out that it isnt enough for people to go there and spend huge sums to get in the theme parks and huge sums for their hotel rooms and buy ridiculous, useless overpriced souviners in great quantities and insanely overpriced food, no no, they have so brainwashed people that visitors are so impatient to give Disney their money that they dont bother with intermediaries like actually buying something but instead just toss money into any body of water they can find.
I am serious. In my two days in Disneyworld there was not one body of water, be it the river that flowed through Its a Small World, or a fountain in Animal Kingdom or a fake well in frontierland that didnt have a tremendous number of coins at the bottom. I mean why would anyone do that? You have paid thousands for this vacation on all the things listed above so why throw away additional money? Why not just stay home, watch Aladdin on DVD and just light one hundred dollar bills on fire? I have long been fascinated by cults and people like Charles Manson and Reverend Jim Jones who somehow managed to exert such control over people that they would kill for them. I have long wanted to know their secret to such control but now I think I have been looking the wrong way, Id much rather know how to convince people to throw vast sums of money at me than kill for me.
To learn those secrets though would probably entail working for them and based on how my brother is treated I dont think I would make it. Max lives in an interment camp, one of several for Disney interns. They have guards and electronic gates at the entrance and a high barred wall surrounding the compound. Only registered cars can park in the compound, visitors are not allowed after 1am and are not allowed to spend the night. This isnt just for complete outsiders but also applies to Disney interns from other compounds. The guard at the gate can search the car at his discretion to see if you are smuggling anyone in or smuggling any booze. If you get caught you can instantly be kicked out of the program. Goofy’s Gestapo comes around to all the apartments periodically to do a thorough check. Not just to ensure there is no alcohol or illicit activity going on but to ensure that the rooms are clean enough according to the Disney standard. All employees or “castmembers” have to be smiling at all times while “onstage” which means in the presence of tourists and they even have a strict business casual dress code for the college courses they offer the interns. If you violate any of the rules even the minor ones, the enviroment is such that other brainwashed Hitler Youth castmembers will chastise you even if they arent your manager or have no authority over you. Each intern has to go through an 8 hour class when they first begin on the magic of Disney and the Disney way to do things, I think they did some similar behavioral programming in a Clockwork Orange.
It really wouldnt surprise me if there is a “Work will set you free” sign hidden in the stylized cartography that decorates Cindarella’s castle of if the Seven Dwarfs in jackboots werent herding undesirables onto train boxcars out back of Pirates of the Carribbean. Dumbo’s mother tried to resist and she was chained in a train car faster than you can say “Mein Lehman”. I mean from my understanding ol’ Walt wouldve fit right into Germany in the late 30’s. You may think I am being ridiculous but I challenge all of you to really look around you the next time you are in Disneyworld or go to a Disney store. Bambi’s mom? Mufasa? Housecleaning, just like the Night of Long Knives. Sure who doesnt love having our picture taken with Pluto but no amount of chrismas-card-cute pictures of kids and cartoon characters can hide the fact that our children our being subverted into facist brownshirts one mickey mouse eared hat at a time.
Dont believe me? Think I am going into my usual hyperbole? I point you to this review of the book An American Icon Walt Disney: Hollywood’s Dark Prince which includes the following quotes:
“Wages were docked for minor breaks from work, all employees having to punch a Bundy time machine every time they left their drawing board for whatever reason — getting a drink, going to the toilet or sharpening a pencil. There was arbitrary dismissal for “immorality” whenever Disney’s puritanical “house rules” were breached. Disney took all public credit for the creative process, the lack of screen credits for his animators resulting in non-recognition and poor career prospects in the industry.”
“When Disney died in 1966, Walt Disney Productions had become one of the wealthiest studios in the world and it continues to rake in the profits. Disney’s anti-worker and anti-union spirit lives on — strict dress and grooming codes (from fingernails to ‘fancy underwear’) — are enforced at Disney’s theme parks around the globe and when Disneyland staff in California threatened a strike in 1991 over a facial hair ban, their strike leader was sacked.
Walt Disney’s carefully cultivated image is that of a creative, and highly moral, genius. He did have a genius of a sort — a genius for making profits, for breaking unions, for exploiting workers, for glory-hogging, for spying and informing, and for red-baiting and ruining the lives of anyone who threatened to interrupt the flow of wealth to Disney.”
But lets give him some credit: the though “an anti-Semite who had attended American Nazi Party rallies and was entertained by Mussolini at his private villa, (he) stopped short of supporting Hitler’s Jewish and socialist victims”.
So remember you heard it here first. Walt Disney was a facist and George Washington was a crook. WhereDaveIs.com is blowing the lid on more dirt that Drudge.
Don’t get me started on Lion King……..sexism, totalitarianism, animalism, violence…
No, I’ll stop before I use up all the …..s on my computer.
I’ll get started Dave. No one made those workers stay. They could have went and got different jobs. People that complain about the way they are treated at there jobs are pathetic if you don’t like it its not slavery go somewhere else. So, what they have to wear uniforms and conform to the corporate way of Disney its called good business decisions if the company doesn’t want facial hair then so be it. To bad so sad go cry to someone else cause you can’t grow your stupid goatee or chinstrap beard. Plus their rules sound a lot like where you went to high school uniform no facial hair? Don’t be upset about a man for employing thousands of people and making himself rich. So what if they had to endure some crap at least they got a paycheck.
i am well aware that crying about the inability to grow facial hair gets you no where. i have been doing it for years. and ill concede the point that currently there is no one forcing them to work there though i dont know if that argument would have held as much weight in the 40s and 50s when there was really very few options for jobs like cartoonists and walt was quick to threaten the blacklist which would have destroyed any career opportunities in entertainment.
all that said the intense facist parallels have more in my mind to the strict and overly big brotheresqe rules they implement backstage or out of site like regulating if a workers apartment is sufficiently clean.
and you just reminded me. thanks for the text telling me it was national coming out day. i got that while in Celebration and I half expected someone there to sense what the message said and kick me out immediately.
ps. i could see you doing real well for yourself in a facist society. like an albert speer or something. you have always had a touch of social darwinism about you
Good point on the 40s and 50s and don’t feel bad I can’t grow facial hair yet either. The point about the apartment may be true if the employee owned it or perhaps paid rent which I’m not sure if they do or not, but if they do not more power to the disney corp. for protecting what is theirs.
Easy with the Albert Speer comments, haha, an organizational genius that keeps a machine going maybe but a follower of hitler your better then that. Even if he did later show remorse.
P.S. I prefer to call it social spencerism since Herbert Spencer pioneered the applicaton of biological ideas about evolution to social phenomena, but I can see your point survival of the fittest is alright by me, but evolution as a result of struggle between individuals not so great of an idea.
Also I didn’t know you were a damn the man type of guy. I thought you were the Ric Flair type to be the man you have to beat the man.
Trevor- Max does pay the rent at his Disney apartment -but i am staying out of this phylosophical discussion and am going to bake cookies. Have at it!
Nice use of social spencerism, and normally I would consider myself a Ric Flair type of guy WHOOO but me against Disney is like a midget wrestling Andre the Giant, I could never beat the man and even if I could the man outweighs me by approx 450 pounds so I still couldnt BE the man
bi polar dis orders…
bi polar, bi polar disorder, bi polar dis orders, manic depression…