The Awful Truth page 2
Throughout the show, though, you can hear people snickering about Jackson the Pederast, which casts a whole new shadow on his harmless falsetto and rainbow T-shirt and shiny buckles, like he's an ice cream van with mirrored windows playing a toy-xylophone version of the theme from "The Exorcist." All of Jackson's childish posturing now seems like a handful of Kandy Korn offered by a playground creep. Even Disney, the last outpost of whitewashed American denial, is about to abandon EO's ship: the man who sold us our tickets told us that the Anaheim Disneyland is the only Disney institution left that still has any Jackson in it, and they're going to quietly get rid of it, too. Mickey Rat.One can walk through Disneyland and observe how popular culture rubbed off on the artists who created the rides through the decades. The Alice in Wonderland section is clearly LSD-informed psychedelia, with its swirling pink and orange Laugh-In aesthetic and paisley teardrops and luminous two-story mushrooms. In the '70s, space was clearly the place, and everything was stars and white plastic and more robots and control panels. The '80s gave us that nostalgia-for-the-'30s and '40s thing, with all of the Indiana Jones old brass safari-and-Egypt kitsch. And the late '50s-early '60s are there in the Camelot look -- all of the castles and kings. Man's home is his big pink castle. Change your baby at the convenient Mom-port shaped like a big white tube of health. Baby blue robins will quickly dispose of any waste articles, and we've made sure Dad can't drink alcoholic beverages of any kind on the park premises. Safe. Clean. Happy. Hopeful. Kennedy is alive and all marriages last happily ever after.
Disneyland is a "rouster" of family spirit. It just rousts you all up to wanna go home and light a presto log and turn on the TV and watch Tinkerbell dive bomb the castle on a Sunday night at seven like you used to, with Mom and Sis and Dad and Mr. French and Mrs. Beasley. It fills you with that warm-choky sentimental sense that Life Could Actually Deliver on the things it promises but can't actually deliver.
What surprised me the most was how much fun I had. We giggled and skipped around and screamed on the rollercoasters and were impressed by the infinite attention to detail in the ride settings. I was actually having fun for the right reasons, which was shocking. My cynicism was penetrated by the world that Walt Disney succeeded in creating. Disneyland is damn good art, after all, and some of the rides have just the right amount of whippy torque and not-unpleasant G-force to make you feel really excited and spazzy. In the future, if the cloud of prevailing evil ever lifts, I hope the world will be more like Disneyland. It's already just as weird and surreal. It just needs to be happy.
