09/02/2013
Is Jiminy Cricket a Marxist?
Stay with me here…I just got back from the AFP conferences in Orlando…After just one day there, my mental peripheral vision kept telling me something was definitely amiss…I hate these ‘mental tropical storms’, and by Saturday; day two; I had it nailed down…Orlando IS Disney’s “Magic Kingdom” in practice…
As a kid, the Disney program was a required staple on the ‘must watch’ menu of TV programming at our house…I have long since viewed television as the “Greatest Generations” electronic ‘babysitter’, and it remains so today; along with Xbox, Gameboys, Nintendo, etc…and now SmartPhones…Walt Disney was a genius, taking an entire generation into his vision of fantasy/reality futuristic view of how life; and the world; could be if we could just all “get along”…He did this through the children, and took their parents with them…
We dutifully watched the movies as youngsters…The Saturday Disney matinees at the local movie house were required viewing in our home and a break for Mom and Dad; dropping three, and then four kids off at the marquee with five bucks and instructions on how much candy, pop and popcorn we could have during the afternoon’s movie fest…Snow White, Cinderella, Fantasia, Mickey, Goofy and the rest were all programmed into our young minds…Jiminy was, of course, that ‘little voice’ in the back of your mind that issued words of occasional caution when faced with a moral dilemma…He was there on my shoulder all weekend…
I remember as a boy hearing on the radio the announcement of Disney’s plans for Disneyworld…Building a huge commercial entertainment ‘city’ in the middle of a swamp had everyone in the ‘real world’ thinking Walt was not right in the head…That kind of capital investment was a financial risk even the boldest of Wall Street types could not comprehend undertaking…Mr. Disney had other ideas though; here, using mostly his own money, he could plan, build, and operate nearly unrestricted by any government interference…After all, the amount of money he was spending was enough to silence any and all critics of the undertaking…So he did…
Not that Disney did anything blatantly wrong in building his dream park, in the contrary; this was his chance to demonstrate to the world his ‘vision’ of the future; and make money while doing so…Monorails, Tomorrowland, 360 theater, and his own on site hotel encapsulated the perfect family style entertainment vacation…All he needed next was infrastructure access…Orlando provided the perfect base of operations for the required necessary infrastructure to ensure a steady stream of visitors to his park…The airport and highway systems were built to accommodate Disneyworld…This is exactly what Jiminy was trying to tell me, from the moment we got off the plane, the atmosphere was “Welcome to Disneyworld”…I was already in “The Magic Kingdom”…
That brings us to Universal Studios, and the rest of this story…We were booked into the Portofino Bay hotel, a Loews Hotel chain operation with an Italian Villa motif…Universal took the Disneyworld model and duplicated it using the same ‘self contained’ vision of the guests vacation experience…AFP used the Loews hotels as their base of operations, with the Right Online group in the Portofino, and the Defending The Dream group in the Royal Pacific…Mind you, I’m not going to complain about an all expense paid weekend in a five star hotel, but it was discomforting the longer I was there and looked around…The feeling was the same one I had at the airport, “Welcome to Universal Studios”…We were staying in an artificial reality, and it kept nagging at me…Jiminy was now dancing on my shoulder, but I hadn’t yet made the ultimate connection…
The conferences held my attention for most of Friday and Saturday, conservative speakers and panelists from all over the country were difficult to sort out and choose from; so much important information presented at two locations simultaneously presented us with a problem that could only be resolved with a game plan of our own…We split up the programs to ensure we didn’t duplicate our efforts to absorb as much as possible…Our room became simply a place to sleep and check e-mail, and plan our next events…During any breaks we had, I began exploring the hotel and grounds, observing everything I could about not only the hotel, but the complex that it was ‘contained’ in…You could get anywhere you wished, free of charge, within the complex…Like Disneyworld, we were in another artificial reality…Jiminy was beating on the ear with his umbrella…
Friday evening was the “Party in the Park”…The Marvel Island theme park was closed down to accommodate the AFP convention folks for a night of awards, speeches, and partying on the park grounds; with free rides and a DJ blasting out dance tunes in front of the Spiderman exhibit hall…Michelle Malkin was the featured speaker of the evening, 2,500 people packed the arena, and were then turned loose in the park…Jiminy had finally made his point; we were all living in a comic book…I took this feeling back to the hotel with me, and looked around again with this thought in mind…
Saturday morning I had breakfast (a fruit plate and coffee) in the perfectly manicured courtyard outside the meeting rooms…The hotel staff was never far away, the plants and shrubbery all meticulously manicured and properly place and spaced for seclusion and quiet…Everything about the hotel and grounds ‘encapsulated’ one in that particular moment…It was unnerving…I took it to the next level and revisited the hotel and grounds completely, each floor and courtyard gave me the same surreal feeling, it was ‘manufactured’ reality…
I had mentioned my apprehension on several occasions to Jason (my roommate for the conference) and once the conference had concluded Saturday afternoon, we took our rental car out of the hotel lot for the first time all weekend to have dinner outside the ‘bubble’ of the hotel and Universal complex…What we found was more of the ‘planned’ city of Orlando…We started actually looking for the Agenda 21 markers that constituted ‘planned communities’ and ‘form based zoning’; they were everywhere…Jiminy Cricket had ‘morphed’ into the “New World Order”, and THAT was what had been nagging at me all weekend…Disneyworld had engulfed the city of Orlando; and, being virtually built from the swamp up, was the perfect place to begin the ex*****on of the planned cities of the United Nations vision of the future of humanity…Welcome to Orlando, the new “Magic Kingdom”…
