Asshole of the Century

Friday, April 17, 2009

Bread and Circuses

I opened up my box of Frosted Mini-Wheats this morning to find a small Donald Duck in a sealed plastic package on top of the cereal. While I like Donald Duck more than most Disney characters, finding him in my cereal box before I’d had a chance to drink my first sip of tea was like taking an ice pick to the face. I looked at the front of the box, and there was a drawing of Mickey Mouse, advertising a free stuffed Disney character in every box.

A few days before my Mini-Wheat surprise, my parents-in-law threw out a trial balloon: Now that each of their three kids had recently delivered a grandchild on which they could lavish attention, what they really wanted for their 50th wedding anniversary, which is still a few years down the road, was to take their entire family, the whole kit and caboodle, including in-laws like myself, down to Disney World.

I know this makes me a walking cliché, one of those goofy urban dorks that most of the country likes to laugh at because they think we are trying to act culturally superior, but I mean it from the bottom of my blackened heart: Disney is Satan. I have really done my best to ignore them, but growing up 20 miles from Disneyland made it hard. I know all about the secret tunnels running underneath the facility. I know about the Disney jail under Tom Sawyer’s Island, which a couple of college buddies got thrown into while dosing because they tarried too long in the Disney parking lot, making the security crew manning the cameras that blanket the park suspicious. I remember when punk rockers were banned from the park, and I remember the day when the Disney Corporation, in all its wisdom, changed this policy, commemorating it sometime around 1983 by having “Punk Rock Day” at the Magic Kingdom.

I can already see myself breaking down in a few years, succumbing to the dual cajoling of my in-laws and my kid. I may very well be dragged to Disney World, spending large sums of hard earned money (whether mine or Melissa’s dad’s) for something that I morally oppose. I may lose this one. But that doesn’t mean that I have to feel good about it.

Along with Microsoft, Home Depot, Fox News, et al, Disney is part of the Capital Imperium out to destroy the fabric of our country, paving the way for quick bucks and the New World Order. In the last couple of weeks, it seems like these forces have collectively conspired to tighten their circle around my life.

About two weeks ago, I broke down and bought a PC, which I needed for trading my commodity accounts, as most trading platforms were not designed for Macs. Now, I’m not really a gadget guy, which is why, four years ago, I sprung for an iBook in the first place, because with the purchase of a Mac comes unlimited use of the support staff at their stores. While I had a PC at most of my old jobs, I never realized how nosy Microsoft is about getting into your personal shit, cross marketing and periodically taking over your computer for their automatic updates. Add to that all the information that Google is steadily gathering on my life and interests. I halfway expect my Google search to one day read something along the lines of, “You are a misanthrope who craves excitement and has a fascination with fetishes and other mild perversions. You might like… Boyd Rice.”

Soon, these corporations will know pretty much everything about you, from where you live and how you spend your money to what you do all day. While this information will be coded in packets based around an anonymous user name, it is only a matter of time until it all gets merged into a Federal database near you, just like the security cameras at Disneyland eventually morphed into the electronic Cyclops now casting their eyes across the streets of Chicago.

Not that I am against every corporation. As a whole, the act of incorporation serves us well. This was demonstrated in a couple of recent news headlines. In the first, salmonella was found in a Georgia facility that made peanut butter. Interestingly, several brands of organic peanut butter had been shipped through this facility, but all the peanut butter made by established American brands, like Skippy and Jif, were untouched by the outbreak. A couple of weeks later, salmonella was discovered in a California pistachio warehouse thanks to the testing Kraft Foods made on these nuts as a standard protocol before taking ownership of them, thus nipping another potential outbreak of food poisoning in the bud.

The fact is that it is generally safer to buy food from a major conglomerate, which is concerned about a possible class action lawsuit and thus looking to cover its backside, than it is to buy from a small company that can’t always afford to take the same precautions. As the father of a nine-month old, I’ve been bombarded with a steady barrage of information designed to make me paranoid of the world around us in order to sell me some overpriced product, and the organic food scam is among the least rational of these appeals. So I’m all for cheap, reliable, corporate food. But that is all the more reason why finding Donald Duck in my Mini-Wheats made me want to spit up my tea, and just because most corporations provide a useful service doesn’t mean we should turn a blind eye to the creeping evil that some of them represent.

The Bible is persistent in its evocation of an evil thread woven into some of the institutions of Western Civilization, beginning with Babylon in the Old Testament and shifting to the Roman Empire during the time of Christ. These were ruthless civilizations, materially focused, the literal Antichrist of Revelations. You can see where this evil found a home in the hierarchies of the past two thousand years, in institutions ranging from the Church to some of the more decadent European aristocracies and then in the fulcrums of European Empire (Spanish, British, French).

Opposed to the institutionalization of Evil is the revelatory nature of Western Civ, the strand that informs our demand for independence and freedom, our questioning, questing selves, embodied in the lone odd-balls who have spurred most of the great achievements in the short history of our species, folks like Newton, Copernicus, Beethoven, Kierkegaard, Einstein, et al.

America harbors both instincts in large measure, sometimes acting like the successor to Rome, and sometimes seeking to create a New Jerusalem, to be a shining city on a hill. I worry when I see the corrosive effects of folks like Gates and Disney on our culture. I worry that soon the corporations will pretty much know everything about us, at least everything that can be codified, enumerated, and defined, that cameras will document our every mistake, that the media will have done such a complete job of replacing insight with entertainment that we won’t even notice anymore, and that they will have bought us all off with a raft of government-sponsored entitlements. In short, I worry that we will become a nation where the powers-that-be have placated the public with Bread and Circuses, just like the plebeians were placated in Imperial Rome, oblivious to the fact that the only thing their country stood for was the facilitation of evil.

But I also have at least a modicum of faith in the human spirit, that we can transcend this collection of billionaires out to skew our minds, that almost all of us, in our better moments, are susceptible to the call of our divine imperative.

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