Capitals of Unreality

Eli Valley, Jewcy contributor and cartoonist writes:

Here's the Iranian Tom and Jerry thing I was referring to -- much more fascinating in its absurdity than the Hamas Mouse: Click View Clip here. It's wrong for a number of reasons, including Tom and Jerry being Hanna-Barbera, not Walt Disney, and Disney being an anti-Semite himself. I love how their entire frame of reference is Hollywood films, e.g. Schindler's List. They're so jealous of Jews it's amazing! And for another Muslim goodie [via Jewschool], check this Iranian exegesis of Woody Allen as part of Jewish image conspiracy.

See, Jerry the mouse was cute and supposed to make Europeans sympathetic to the Jews who are, after all, dirty mice. I'm surprised he didn't play up a duel between Feivel Mousekewitz and Persian cats.

Now's a good time to mention I'm going to Disney World and won't be back until Thursday. I've never been, it's a family thing and they're treating me so I couldn't say no. I imagine it will involve minor "day care" duties but I'm more concerned with how I'm going to deprogram my nephew when he gets old enough to understand the YM Way of Life™. Here's what James Howard Kunstler wrote in his 1993 book, Geography of Nowhere (an awesome read if you like funny-cranky yet highly intellectual urbanization, community planning and architecture rants), when describing Disney as a "Capital of Unreality":

After paying $32.50 for admission, you are efficiently herded onto a ferryboat for a short ride across an artificial lake to the entrance of the Kingdom. This will be the first of many crowd-control experiences—and resulting lines—that add to Disney World's air of fascism. The boat ride is also a psychological device. Making you enter the place by stages, the Disney "imagineers" emphasize the illusion of one's taking a journey to a strange land-as if driving over 1500 miles from another corner of the nation was not sufficient (and it may not be, for long-distance car travel on an interstate highway is literally like going nowhere fast). Anyway, this short ferry trip is fraught with archetypal death imagery so obvious that I am a little embarrassed to point it out.

What Walt Disney's personal hangup concerning death was we may never know. Company officials staunchly deny the persistent rumor that Walt arranged to have himself cryogenically frozen, hopeful of bodily resurrection in a more medically advanced future. But the fact that the rumor started in the first place is by itself rather interesting - someone was onto him. In any case, Walt's preoccupation was in tune with American provincial Protestantism's obsession with eschatology. Disney World is as death-haunted as any TV studio full of weeping evangelicals. Particulars shortly.

He sounds a bit like 99, right? P.S. Don't crap all over this blog while I'm away, you dirty mice.

Post Value: Handful of crunchy snack mix from the Magician.