Reflections on Disney

[boogieshoes]

Disney’s View of History: The Perspective of a Whiter-than-White History Buff
 
Since the race discussions and cultural appropriation discussions seem to have died down for the moment, I thought I’d take some time to share some objections I had to Disney’s portrayal of American history at Epcot Center/ The World park. Most of you know by now that earlier this year, I had a family vacation with my parents; my sister, her husband, and their two daughters; and my brother, his wife and their four – two girls and a pair of twin boys. It went much better than the first time I went to Disney, and a great time was had by all. And if you take Disney at face value for entertainment, the detail in the displays, the variety of rides, it’s all fun and there’s a lot of good stuff in there. Even at Epcot Center, despite what I’m going to say here, it’s easy to see why people love the House of Mouse. 
 
Now, there are a lot of things which *could* be said about The World, the back section of the Epcot Center park in which representations of various countries surround a central lake. I have no doubt that more aware eyes than mine could spout positive books-worth of essays and analyses on cultural appropriation, and denigrating representations of cultures. Although I dislike the latter, I am probably not as stringent about it as the half of my flist that’s actually going to pay attention to this post. Part of that is ingrained cultural blindness. A big chunk is ignorance of the actual culture being portrayed – I can see fairly glaring issues, but I tend to miss the more subtle ones. The ‘denigrating representations’ discussion has surprised me so often in what people object to that I’m just not going to go there – I’d sound pretty much exactly like what I am in this context: an ignorant hick. My primary response to inaccurate, denigrating cultural portrayals is that I prefer accurate history, a history of facts and figures as far as I can get it. Denigrating cultural portrayals stem from the fact that history is written by the victors, and the victors are going to write the story such that they are the sympathetic character. I hate that, although it’s a fact of life. I prefer, much prefer, to make my own judgments on cultures and actions and battles. It does require a bit of digging and questioning of the texts, though, something which I’m not always well-equipped to do, being trained as an engineer.
 
I have a different relationship to the cultural appropriation discussion. One the one hand, I can kind of see where people are coming from, but on the other… As a history buff, I know cultural appropriation happens, and you can’t stop it. Not only that, it’s the primary reason for cultural *evolution* - nothing develops in a vacuum. It also has a fair hand in technological and artistic evolution, too.
 
Further, on a personal note, one has to ask where to draw the line? I recently expanded my garden to my ‘front yard’. If you visit the linked post, you’ll see pictures where-in I painted different pots in different motifs: I have a Moche pottery pot; a pot with a representation of an Egyptian tomb painting; a pot with a (badly done *wince*) Celtic knot; a pot with Native American Plains Indian Life scenes taken from a painting on a buffalo hide I found on the internet. The two potato pots have Coats of Arms on them. This stuff definitely qualifies as ‘cultural appropriation’ – but is it offensive? I’m fairly certain no one would actually think so. I chose these themes to exhibit things I’m interested in and interested in learning about. That can hardly be offensive, right? And yet, I was painting these pots while the cultural appropriation discussion was in full swing, and I found myself hesitating and asking if I really had the right to decorate my garden the way I wanted to. And I found that I resented that; I resented that a discussion could make me question my right to reproduce beautiful things in my own way and on my own terms, and to display those reproductions. 
 
One of the other major issues with the cultural appropriation discussion is the culture of America itself. I think, looking back, it lurked liked the proverbial elephant in the living room during this discussion. American culture is a culture of amalgamation – the very thing people get up in arms about in the cultural appropriation discussion? *That* is the very bedrock of American cultural heritage. Everything we have, currently, is borrowed from somewhere else. When one discusses a distinct ethnic culture, say the Maori in New Zealand, one has strong boundary lines to follow: this is Maori, this isn’t. When one discusses American culture, those lines all but disappear. Our culture is a culture of borrowing, remixing, re-interpreting, and displaying bits and pieces of other cultures as our own. If a person says as a blanket statement, ‘cultural appropriation is wrong’, then they are saying by implication ‘American culture is wrong’. And they aren’t just implicating the white American majority with this statement, but rather everyone who calls themselves American, from the Natives who were here first, to the latest influxes of Cuban, Russian, and Mid-Eastern immigrants. The culture of a place is made of the practices of the people in it – and that means we (America) are the culture of everyone, all trying to live together and respect *everybody else’s* cultures. 
 
Conversely, we are also the culture of no one. There is no single other country that we are ‘like’. The country we are *most alike* is Canada, but as I understand the differences – and I may be wrong – Canada is closer in cultural spirit to Australia and New Zealand than us. 
 
But I think it’s an interesting commentary on American – or at least, whiter-than-white, trained as an engineer American – thinking that there’s a major part of me that keeps looking at cultural appropriation and thinking ‘but my culture *is* cultural appropriation – that’s all we do!’ And I think maybe no one wanted to/ wants to verbalize this idea, because it would certainly have led to a serious outcry during the heights of the discussion. No one wants to say – or means to say, really – that American culture is ‘just wrong’, and being an American is bad because the culture pretty much entirely consists of borrowing what works from other cultures. But at the same time, it brings up an important question – what is the definition of an ‘American’ culture? What are the bounds? And not the as-seen-on-TV definition and boundaries – we all know that’s a load of crap. Where’s that real line where our culture crosses another? In a population and social situation designed to spread cultural traditions as far as possible, when does cultural appropriation go from being the result of natural social forces to being a thinly disguised insult to the originating culture?
 
It’s somewhere between my pot paintings and Avatar, but I’m not sure where.
 
I’m going to concentrate mostly on two Disney presentations here: One is a mostly animatronics show at the ‘America’ section in The World. The other is the little ‘Lion King’ presentation on interactions between man and the environment. I went into both of these presentations with no real expectations of what would be shown, and came away from both more than a little irritated.
 
The environmental presentation starts with Timon and Pumba deciding to damn off the river that flows through the Serengeti so they can build a resort. Simba stops them and tells them a ‘story’ about an ‘animal’ that ran into serious trouble when they did too much damage to the environment. The presentation is intended to read like a parable to Timon and Pumba, but it’s really a thinly disguised environmentalist rant about the evils of technology and modern America.
 
All of the imagery except for the cartoon versions of Africa is of various American people, places, and things. Simba’s story opens with scenes of Native American life, and the voiceover says things like ‘once this animal lived in harmony with the land’ and ‘they only took what they needed’. Then, as the scenes turn into a montage of 19^th century history leading, the voice-over says ‘they began to turn more and more to machinery to help them out. Then they got greedy, and began building bigger and bigger and threw away more and more trash.’ At this point, the montage pauses to linger on city skyscrapers, power plants, and a city trash pit – and the pit is probably one of New York’s middens. Finally, though, the people began to redress the balance of nature, and these scenes show some rather classic environmentalist PR scenes. I think the most insulting thing in the entire film was the implication that NYC’s skyscrapers were somehow a sign of greed and horribly awful for the environment. New Yorkers, in general, live in a smaller square footage per person than just about any other place, and skyscrapers and apartment buildings are not wasteful, but rather some of the most efficient uses of limited space there is. 
 
Now, don’t get me wrong – there’s an awful lot we’re doing today that we could correct, that we should correct, in order to lessen our impact on the environment. Trash should be recycled as much as possible; organics gone into a compost heap, and the rest burned for energy. We should certainly retain and maintain areas of wilderness, free from human intervention, if only to be able to study nature’s processes. We really ought to clean the floating trash patch from the ocean, and dumping random chemicals into our water is a no-no. 
 
But I’m a firm proponent of modern technology. It’s given us major improvements in health, empowered our individual and national global relations, made it much easier to visit relatives from afar, taken us to the moon. It will, in a few years, make solar energy not just the best renewable resource in the world, but also *affordable for the average Joe*. Not just affordable, but *economical* - and that’s something that wouldn’t have happened without modern technology. My father probably wouldn’t be alive today without modern technology. Wind and solar power would not have been developed. Or sewage treatment plants. Or TVs, radios, film theaters, the internet (which keeps me from going insane), and recliners. Yes, we have problems with keeping our environmental footprint relatively small, but it’s got a heck of a lot less to do with technology, and a heck of a lot more to do with how we view our relationships to our goods.
 
And this is not a new issue, either, despite implications. To say that only modern man is so wasteful of his resources ignores mass kill sites on all continents where-in many more animals were killed than used(1). It ignores the saga of the City of Ur, a town which ended up salinizing its own farming soil so badly that the place is still sterilized today. It ignores the City of Venice during the Middle Ages, when the stench of the canals was so bad nobody wanted to visit. It also ignores the fact that modern suburbia supplies everyone who lives there an opportunity to have a productive garden plot to supply at least some of their food needs. Or that the more creative we’ve gotten with our food farming, the more people we’ve been able to feed, and in a more stable manner. 
 
In short, technology is not bad, and it certainly isn’t the source of all evil. I dislike it when environmentalists – or any other movement – rewrites history just to set forth its own agenda, especially when that agenda tends to spread serious misinformation and imply that we should be ashamed of our own achievements. Technology is a tool, and just like any other tool, it should be used responsibly. So, too, is our collective attitude towards the environment and how we use it, and what we view as a ‘resource’. Yes, we need to make some changes, but we shouldn’t be ashamed of our own accomplishments and creativity in meeting our needs as a society. We could probably stand to add ‘re-use and recycle everything’ to our immediate needs list, though.
 
Second, I’d like to address the ‘History of America’, as presented in the ‘America’ section of The World. The America section has a really nice architectural reproduction of the Senate Building in Washington, DC, complete with rotunda, historical paintings, and appropriate furnishings. It houses a theater which has a line of life-size statues in alcoves above head-height on each side. In itself, every architectural and ornamental piece of the building is really just awesome. And this is where it gets interesting.
 
See, the statues in the theater are named things like ‘The Spirit of Freedom’, and ‘The Spirit of Innovation’. Basically, they’re representations of the kinds of values Americans, as a whole, hold the highest. If I had a camera and lot more time, I’m sure I could come up with some serious essays on both what Disney is saying with these statues, and what they *think* they’re saying. 
 
I don’t, and I don’t have an eidetic memory, either, so you’re stuck with my impressions. Which are these: before the show, one is willing to give Disney the benefit of the doubt, although they have some choices that are both clichéd and not the best. For example, the ‘Spirit of Freedom’ is Frederick Douglas – I would have chosen Harriet Tubman. But hey, they’re not just representing whites, right? They had a statue of Sacajawea there – ‘Spirit of Loyalty’, I think, Boone was ‘Exploration’. You see where I’m going here. In any event, because it’s obvious this building hasn’t been renovated in a while, you’re willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, because our social consciousness has expanded greatly in the last 20 years or so, and this building was old in the 1980s.
 
And then you see the show. And from an engineering perspective, the animatronics are pretty awesome. In a pure technical, hardware sense, I applaud the engineers and technicians who made this show possible. And I’d like to fold, spindle, and mutilate the scriptwriters.   The show opens with Benjamin Franklin and Mark Twain discussing American history. Since those two are generally recognized by the most people as being the best of us, I was ok with that. And then comes the single line which screws everything up for everybody, everywhere.
 
Benjamin Franklin states, ‘American history began 200 years ago with our Founding Fathers.’ And after that, I was just in a simmering state of fury, looking for other issues. Because the real American History began 14,000 years ago or so, when people crossed the Bering Land Bridge into North America, following game. Those people colonized the Americas all the way to the southern-most tip of Chile, to the Baffin Islands and Greenland in the east. Those people developed civilizations and technologies that rose and fell, just like the Europeans and Mid-Easterners and the peoples of the Orient. They significantly changed their ecological landscape to suit their purposes. Their interactions and political standings among each other had a huge influence on what came later, whether that fact comes through in white-written history or not. Off the top of my head, I can think of three major events that the Native Americans were responsible for that profoundly influenced later American history:
 
1)      The fact that they came over the Bering Land Bridge at all. If they’d stayed in Russia and Mongolia, never explored, there’s a high chance of much of mega fauna – bison, horses, smilodon, saber-toothed wolves, American lions – still being extant when European whites came across America in 1492. Never mind the political hot potatoes set off by the question of how to treat Native Americans who had never even heard of Jesus Christ and Christianity, much less converted. The forays in search of gold, fuelled by rumors, probably would never have happened.
2)      There are indications that Incan civilization was maybe 50 years away from learning to forge steel. If Cortez was even 75 years later, the destruction of the Incan empire would have been a different story, and might well have given other tribes the chance to figure out how to organize and fight the whites off.
3)      The destruction of Cahokia and the mound culture. Indications are that the Cahokians brought about their own destruction by becoming so dependent on corn for food that their diet became somewhat inimical to their own health. But make no mistake, Cahokia was *the* major trading center of a vast empire of mound-building Indians, for much the same reason that St Louis is a central hub of such activities today. It wasn’t, of course, an ‘empire’ in the classic western European sense, but nonetheless, if the Cahokians had survived, they would have been an empire of sorts that would have had to been dealt with as a separate sovereign country, and it might well have been enough to stop the westward expansion of American whites.
 
And that’s not even counting the nearly 300 years of western colonization between the discovery of the Americas (1492), and the Revolutionary War (1776, beginning). It’s not counting the tons of political issues and trade relationships that informed the characters of the colonies.
 
The rest of the presentation was similarly offensive. They completely skipped over the question of slavery, except for a five-second spot by Frederick Douglass. Native Americans weren’t mentioned at all, except for a five-second spot by Chief Joseph talking about coming in and not fighting anymore. Women’s suffrage was given a slightly longer spot, but not much. It was really ridiculous how much they skimmed over. The level of white pride, white accomplishment, and over-all white-*wash* was just amazing. I felt like I was watching Hitlerian levels of feel-good propaganda (3), and it was kind of sickening.
 
Again, don’t get me wrong. As someone who is whiter than white, whose upbringing was very stereotypically mid-west farming mid-America, I have no problems taking pride in European cultural influences and white heroes. When it comes down to it, I have pride in my country, and think America’s rather the best of the best when it comes to a choice of what country you can live in. Or with, as the case may be.
 
BUT – and this is a mighty big but – our country didn’t evolve in a vacuum. Even if you take the line that the formal, political inception of our country began in 1776, when we declared independence from England, it’s just bad history to state that ‘America’ started then. It didn’t. It started with the Natives. It was heavily influenced by slavery, piracy, European expansionism, colonialism, and royal greed. It was also heavily influenced by Chinese and Japanese and Russian immigrants on the other side, wishing to make a better life for themselves as early as the 1500s. It was heavily influenced by racism, and sexism, and in our written version of events, continues to be so. 
 
I think it is far more important to highlight factual history than ‘proper’ or ‘patriotic’ history, both to our youth, and to ourselves. It’s much more foundational for discussing our in-house social issues, which often have roots reaching back hundreds of years. It also highlights things I think we should take pride in, but are often very *under-rated*, or dismissed. 
 
One is that we can acknowledge our mistakes. We don’t like to dwell on them, because our current society is built on ‘going forward’, but we can acknowledge them. And we try, sometimes in a very back-asswards way, but we do try to correct them, or at least apologize for them, to the extent that we are able. 
 
Another, frankly, is our melting-pot culture. I like to think the sum of American culture is that immigrants can keep their home cultures’ best features, and dump the worst. I prefer that. I prefer that variety and diversity to celebrate, even if I, myself, tend towards preferring European styles of art and architecture. 
 
Third, as a whole, as a political country, we trend towards more freedom for all, more parity, rather than less. This isn’t as common as one might think in history, but it is our heritage, our legacy from having a myriad of ancestry and cultures all fighting to survive and live with each other. And that’s something to be pretty proud of.
 
In short, I seriously hate propagandized history, especially when it doesn’t have to be. 
 
(1) And although there are many reasons for the extinctions in North America at the end of the last Ice Age, two animals I’m sure would have survived if they weren’t hunted to extremes are the Greater American Bison (about half again as large as his extant cousin, the American Buffalo), and the American Horse. (Mastodons and woolly mammoths were probably just doomed, unfortunately.) 
 
(2) I don’t say this lightly – Hitler and his team were positively *superb* at propaganda, and really highlighted how the tactical use of information given to the masses could help – or harm – your cause. 
 
-bs

Comments

[chocolate-frapp.livejournal.com]

nicely thought out. I haven't the slightest idea why you would label yourself an "ignorant hick". you are clearly neither.
one small mistake: Maori aren't from Africa, they're the indigenous people of New Zealand.
also, Disney has some nerve putting on a "technology is bad for the planet" show. Hypocritical much? anyway most ecological problems are caused by overpopulation and the last thing Disney would ever do is encourage people not to have kids.
Alex Haley once said something to the effect that America was not a "melting pot", it was more like a salad because each culture didn't assimilate so much as keep its individual flavor while blending into a whole. I like that a lot. I do believe diversity is part of what makes America a great country.

[boogieshoes.livejournal.com]

*hurries to edit* thank you. :)

i say i'm an 'ignorant hick' on a lot of the racism type issues because i was brought up in a near-monoculture situation. that means half of me makes the insensitive dumb mistakes of 'oh my god, you look so different' that come from not actually knowing a lot of POC, even while the other half of me is just flabbergasted that people would be afraid of differences or treat others badly *because* they're different. and there's a lot of gut-deep experiences that i never had, and therefor just don't 'get' that have been going round in the last few rounds of the culture discussions.

so... give me a hard science question, and i'm your chick... give me a questioned about layered cultural responses, and i'm floundering like a fish on dry land.

i like the salad analogy. i think i've always mentally substituted 'stew pot' for melting pot - put fairly disparate items in, add a few spices, heat for 8 hours, and if you're lucky, you have a hearty meal with complex flavors. mmmm... now i'm hungry. :-D

-bs

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

"Disney Corporation Considered Harmful." (To adapt a well-known software industry meme.)

[riteturn.livejournal.com]

The current acceptable view is that you must consider all other cultures and beliefs as at least equal to your own. Any hint other-wise is career death here and a jailable offense in much of Europe.
It is in conflict with reality.
Some religions such as cargo cults are so ridiculous I won't waste bandwidth defending them. Others such as Rastafarians and Native American religions - in fact just about any animists - are publicly discriminated against by our supposed equal opportunity government. Education discriminates against most religions by demanding that you not only understand current theories of cosmology and evolution but profess that belief in public and on paper. It is an abuse of power as total and reprehensible as demanding the Hitler salute.
Some cultures are demonstrably inferior because they do not deal with the problems which are common to all humans. Tribal cultures can only deal well with a village size group. Beyond that they must be run by a totalitarian overlord of some sort such as a monarchy. If you want to see what a tribal culture does when it is run under a nominally democratic form of government look at Detroit.
Any culture that doesn't protect women and children is throwing away at least half of the intellectual capital of the group. Read Muslims and Quite a few Asians.
If the Native Americans had a unifying government when the Europeans appeared they would have stood a decent chance of driving them away despite gunpowder and disease. They only had to deal with a boatload at a time. They looked at the Europeans as just another tribe. Fail.
Cultures that will accept communism progress straight to wretched poverty.
Cultures that lock all wealth in a few hands and corrupt democracy until there is not real choice in voting lock down with no advancement. Change of any significant kind is destabilizing and will push money away from the acceptable overlords. Any change will be legislated away as much as possible. Patents and copyright become tools to protect the industry instead of the innovator. - Read America and Japan.
I refuse to make appeasing noises praising beliefs and cultures and religions (sometimes they are indistinguishable) inferior to mine. Don't like that? How dare you denigrate my culture!

[wyrdling.livejournal.com]

i thinking learning real history is an essential tool to developing a skill for applied critical analysis. or perhaps vice versa.
well thought out. you've helped me clarify some ideas i've been chewing on for awhile. thanks.

[spartanwerewolf.livejournal.com]

Hear hear! The whitewashing that Disney (and Hollywood "family" culture as a whole) is something that's incredibly disturbing and that isn't thought about enough. Because thinking about it might make white people feel guilty.

You're right about us and Australia; my Aussie friend and I have much more culturally in common than I do w/ any of my American friends