Carl Hiaasen by Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World Page B

customer frozen in place. The others display no snickering or outright derision, but rather a woozy glassiness of expression that dissolves only when Kathie Lee finishes her tune. Instantly she is replaced on the jumbotube by Marilyn Manson, a flamboyant metalhead whose plangent ode to masochism puts an inexplicable bounce in my step. According to rock lore, several of Mr. Manson’s ribs were surgically removed so he would be limber enough to perform oral sex upon himself. A future duet with Kathie Lee would seem out of the question, but one can always hope.
    A few blocks away, Peep Land hangs on by cum-crusted fingernails. Inside … well, just try to get past the video racks. Sample: volumes one through five of
Ready to Drop
, an anthology featuring explicit (and occasionally team-style) sex with women in their third trimester of pregnancy. And that’s not the worst of it, not even close. The shop’s library of bodily-function videos is extensive, multilingual, and prominently displayed at eye level. Skin a-crawl, I am quickly out the door.
    Revulsion is good. Revulsion is healthy. Each of us has limits, unarticulated boundaries of taste and tolerance, and sometimes we forget where they are. Peep Land is here to remind us; a fixed compass point by which we can govern our private behavior. Because being grossed out is essential to the human experience; without a perceived depravity, we’d have nothing against which to gauge the advance or decline of culture—our art,our music, our cinema, our books. Without sleaze, the yardstick shrinks at both ends. Team Rodent doesn’t believe in sleaze, however, nor in old-fashioned revulsion. Square in the middle is where it wants us all to be, dependable consumers with predictable attitudes. The message, never stated but avuncularly implied, is that America’s values ought to reflect those of the Walt Disney Company and not the other way around.
    So there’s a creepy comfort to be found amidst the donkey films and giant rubber dicks, a subversive triumph at unearthing such slag so near to Disney’s golden portals. (Hey, Mickey, whistle on
this
!) Peep Land is important precisely because it’s so irredeemable and because it cannot be transformed into anything but what it is. Slapping Disney’s name on a joint like this would not elevate or enrich it even microscopically, or cause it to be taken for a shrine. Standing in Disney’s path, Peep Land remains a gummy little cell of resistance.
    And resistance is called for.

Insane Clown Michael

    I N 1996 THE WALT DISNEY COMPANY reported $18.7 billion in revenues, a thunderous 54 percent jump from the previous fiscal year. Its operating income was $3.3 billion (up 35 percent) and its net income was $1.5 billion (up 11 percent). In 1997 its revenues surpassed $20 billion.
    Disney touches virtually every human being in America for a profit. That is rapidly becoming true as well in France, Spain, Germany, Japan, Great Britain, Australia, China, Mexico, Brazil, and Canada. Disney will devour the world the same way it devoured this country, starting first with the youth. Disney theme parks have drawn more than one billion visitors, mostly kids. Snag the children and everybody else follows—parents,politicians, even the press.
Especially
the press. We’re all suckers for a good cartoon.
    The money comes in a torrent, from Walt Disney Pictures, Touchstone, Caravan, Miramax, and Hollywood Pictures; from ABC, ESPN, the Disney Channel, Arts and Entertainment, the History Channel, and Lifetime; from Siskel and Ebert, Regis and Kathie Lee, and Monday Night Football; from nine TV stations, eleven AM radio stations, and ten FM radio stations; from home videos, stage plays, music publishing, book publishing, and seven daily newspapers; from the theme parks in Orlando, Anaheim, Tokyo, and Paris; from computer software, toys, and merchandise; from baseball and hockey franchises; from hotels, real-estate holdings, retail stores, shopping