Tuesday 3.21: Welcome Home
The Disneyland imaginary is neither true or false: it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real. Whence the debility, the infantile degeneration of this imaginary. It's meant to be an infantile world, in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the "real" world, and to conceal the fact that real childishness is everywhere, particularly among those adults who go there to act the child in order to foster illusions of their real childishness.
-Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations
Every day, it seems, we reconfigure the boundary lines of the reasonably expected. If you read the news on the internet or watch it on TV, you’ll no doubt encounter some new absurdity designed to make you cluck your tongue and shake your head and wonder aloud just how we got here. People in hot, humid states no longer cite a vague, problematic understanding of personal freedoms in their refusal to adhere to basic public health practices, but rather a belief that cell towers are transmitting disease (which, if that is the case, shouldn’t you wear the mask and not use Facebook on your cellphone? But I digress). The president remains incapable of displaying any feeling for people who are suffering, the hundreds of thousands who have died, etc. At one point, he lies about throwing out the first pitch at a Yankees game, because he’s jealous of the attention being paid to the country’s top health official, who perhaps for just a moment feels a glimmer of hope and contentment and joy, even, as his own atrocious toss from 60’ 6” at Nationals Park bounces comically wide up the first-base line.
It’s mostly good that we’ve become hardened. That we’ve lost the ability to be shocked. That we just don’t have the energy anymore to read 10K words in the New York Times on just what kind of a father Fred Trump was (bad). Because all of this was written. Our political system has been, for as long as I can remember, an artifice of virtue, a framework for international violence and domestic larceny. We had our chances to say enough was enough. We could have said we wouldn’t allow the foundational elements of colonialism, fascism, and oligarchy to be established with unnecessary, endless war, said “not enough” to meaningless incremental change designed just to placate the have-nots and maintain the power structures that keep the order in place, declared that we needed to take a real, honest look at race in this country from a perspective of love and understanding before we were forced to look at it from one of righteous, divisive fury and slurs, considered that the limits of capitalism simply could not include a healthcare system whose primary concern is the physical well-being of its constituents, &c. &c.
Like a lot of people, I think, I once equated many neoliberal pursuits with goodness and humanity, and have been disappointed to find that upon closer inspection, those elements are superficial. To try to say it succinctly, I wish we could put as much effort into the creative reimagination of social democracy as we do the obscene retrofitting of, for example, a superficially patient-concerned healthcare system that’s palatable for pharmaceutical profiteers.
Why is the first concept more absurd than the second?
In part, because we’ve been conditioned to recognize the virtues of the incremental legislative experimentation as the best possible outcome within the parameters of our democracy. The Covid pandemic and political crisis on the horizon are only further highlighting the incompatability of American democracy with the viability of the society that seems increasingly adjacent to that democracy, rather than the product of it.
“The Disneyland imaginary is neither true or false: it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real.”
Disney World’s reopening is frightening for all the common reasons: the desperate necessity of this specific type of commercial entertainment during a deadly pandemic is a special flavor of nightmare, but when I saw the commercial, I immediately thought of Baudrillard’s point that Disney’s world of imagination is invented and exists to reassure us of a reality that does not exist. Consider the irony that people who live in small towns in America will visit Disney World, park in massive parking lots, wait in long lines in stifling heat—and all at great risk, today, to their personal health—to visit an attraction, “Main St. USA,” designed to reflect the ideal town they theoretically left behind so many miles ago.
It isn’t Main St. USA that is the illusion, it’s America. And deep down, we’ve always known it. The postmodern point was always a grim one, but now, living in the world they envisionsed, I think it’s more positive. We’re seeing clearly, and with a little conviction, we can find ways forward and ultimately begin the process of building the America we were tricked into believing existed. That’s a collective dream that I do believe has a basis in reality, and I’m energized by its visceral pursuit.