When civic reality collides with imagination
The Magic Kingdom offers lessons, some hopeful and others dispiriting
There’s a lot to celebrate in the imaginary world Disney creates. But the contrast with reality is saddening. (Photo by Sandro Gonzalez on Unsplash)
Lots of people flee Upstate’s midwinter woes for a while, but I like winter enough to skip the snowbird cycle that draws others my age. Then a few weeks ago our 20-something daughter and a friend concocted a scheme: It would be amusing, they decided, if their parents would finally make up for a gap in their childhood experiences by joining them at the Magic Kingdom and its neighboring theme parks. It will be fun, they insisted. We were dubious.
Let me say upfront that they were right, but that’s not the point here. No, this isn’t so much an essay on “My Trip To Disney World” as it is a report on a civics lesson surprisingly delivered by Mickey and friends. And here’s the bargain for readers of The Upstate American: You don’t need to buy a $26 burger with your $124 (minimum daily) admission ticket to get the insight, because I’m going to share it and make the case, even at risk of sounding as innocent as an original Mouseketeer. Here’s my takeaway: America would be in better shape if we managed the country a bit more like the good folks at Disney run their theme parks.
Not that we should literally turn over the country to Disney, of course; I don’t expect Bob Iger, now on his second tour as Disney’s CEO, to take on the pay cut and relentless disparagement that a White House residency would require of him. But the Team from Mouse, it seems, has figured out solutions to just about all of America’s pressing issues: border security, transportation, crime, housing, respect for cultural diversity, and even partisan division. Plus, they have great fireworks at night. There’s just one big matter they can’t handle, and we’ll get to that in a moment.
But good news comes first: Anybody who thinks America can’t make things work anymore, and that we can’t get along with each other, ought to check out the make-believe world encompassed by an area of former swampland near Orlando that’s almost twice the size of Manhattan, where an array of entertainment options draws 58 million visitors a year to something that delivers a lot more than rides for kids. You might conclude, as I did, that we have something to learn from a place where imagination runs free and hope has a home.
Of course, it’s facetious to say that the policy issues confronting the nation are solved at Disney World — though you do have to stop and think about it to be sure you’re not missing what’s real. Take, for instance, the secure border: You can’t get into Disney World without a prepaid electronic pass and a finger image, an approach that’s a lot more effective than the border wall that Donald Trump didn’t actually build at Mexico’s expense during his presidency (speaking of imaginary notions).
And consider crime, which isn’t something you need to fear so much inside those secure boundaries. Certainly the demographic of theme park crowds doesn’t match what you see in crime statistics, so the low crime rate — aside from some thefts from the expansive parking zones for strollers — isn’t really surprising. There was some excitement a couple of years back when an analysis uncovered some serious criminal activity in the area behind Cinderella’s Castle, including a homicide. Then the NBC affiliate in Philadelphia found that police in that city had for more than a decade used the GPS coordinates for “Fantasyland” — that area behind the castle — on documents when they were unable to record a precise location for a crime committed in Philadelphia. So even crimes that really were committed weren’t really committed in Disney World.
Mass transit? Yes, Disney is known for its plentiful buses, boats and monorails, which carry folks at no extra charge from one place to another across the campuses. And consider housing, the root of so many policy problems in the real world. It’s available at various price points across the Disney property, from the campgrounds favored by some of my relatives to the Grand Floridian, where suites go for $2,000 a night.
Disney’s imaginary world hasn’t solved climate change, to be sure; we had drenching midwinter rains during our visit. And the display of global cultures celebrated in the “Small World” presentation doesn’t take into account the way the real world divides itself, both politically and economically. Nor has Disney’s openness to gender and sexual diversity done much to quell pushback to reality from the political right.
But all that’s because the real world doesn’t operate the way a theme park does, right? Theme parks generate a lot of money, which enables them to spend a lot so they’ll be great places, and thus able to lure more people to spend a lot more money. Disney’s revenues topped $89 billion last year – roughly equal to the GDP of Bulgaria, the 70th largest of the world’s 200 economies. The theme parks — in America, Asia and Europe — pull in about $60 million a day in profits.
But the United States generates a lot of revenue, too. And it could draw in more if the tax code over the past four decades hadn’t left fair taxation aside, fueling increasing inequity that has elevated far more Americans into the realm of Cruella De Vils, the villain of Disney’s 1961 animated movie 101 Dalmatians. As if to underscore that point, Walt Disney’s great-niece, Abigail Disney, was one of 205 multimillionaires and billionaires who signed a letter to world leaders two years ago urging them to “tax us, the ultra rich, now” to help people struggling to make ends meet. They might have noted that just as Disney World uses its relatively vast revenues to make itself better, so, too, could the world’s strong economies use their wealth to build a better world. If only life would better imitate art, in this case.
But if policy ideas aren’t what you take away from a visit to Disney, maybe there are other lessons. The first difference you might notice at Disney World from other places where a lot of people gather is the absence of the partisanship that seems omnipresent in today’s United States. Over three days, we saw not a single red MAGA cap, nor one T-shirt depicting an orange-skinned man with bleached bouffant. People don’t visit Disney to make a point, it seems, unless it’s that the wonder of childlike imagination deserves celebration. Is it unrealistic to think that we can suspend partisan division more broadly, or in other shared spaces? A willingness to avoid hostility in a setting where we know it is unwelcome might encourage us to similarly step away from it in places where we’ve let it take hold.
Of course things seem right, you may say, in a mythical world that is based on giving everyone a good time. The whole point of an amusement park is to provide a temporary break from reality; government, on the other hand, is all about facing reality and coping with its challenges. True enough: It’s easy to be happy in a place where conflict imposes no actual pain — the Pirates of the Caribbean draw no real blood, you know — and where we can’t see the actual suffering of fellow humans. Epcot’s tour of “worlds of wonder around the globe” presents no scenes of the misery in Ukraine or Gaza, and the experience of Africa in the Animal Kingdom theme park is one of giraffes grazing and hippos lolling, not of the 140 million humans facing starvation in sub-Saharan Africa.
But just as a gym workout prepares muscles for the rigor of a physical task, or a daily crossword puzzle makes the brain more agile, what we experience in places where stress is intentionally reduced can make us more durable in the face of real challenges. Vacation time increases mindfulness, scientists tell us, and it’s hard to argue that the world wouldn’t be better if humans were more thoughtful.
And in a society that is increasingly turning away from the teachings of faith — almost 30 percent of Americans told pollsters last year that they had no religion — there are crucial messages of morality conveyed by the made-up characters in Disney’s universe. Consider Beauty and the Beast, in which a mean prince is turned into the ugly beast that his soul reflects, a reality he can escape only if he learns to truly love and to receive love in return. True beauty lies within, the story teaches — along with such other lessons as the value of not losing oneself for the approval of others, and not settling for less than you deserve.
Such lessons from days at Disney are surely more useful, then, than my fantastical notion of copying on a large scale the Magic Kingdom’s approach to borders, transportation and such. America’s founders imagined a government that would, as the Constitution said, “create a more perfect union,” but the gap between their imagination and our reality is one that even the great imagineers of Disney cannot bridge. Visiting the neighborhood in the Magic Kingdom known as Liberty Square, we had to laugh at an apologetic announcement, “The Hall of Presidents is currently experiencing technical difficulties.” No kidding. So are the halls of Congress.
We live in a time, in fact, when Congress can’t pass a budget resolution, and won’t act on an aid package — favored by both a majority of senators and representatives, and by a majority of citizens — that could help protect our allies and aid those suffering in war zones. That’s a reality that we confronted when we emerged from our days of diversion at Disney.
At Liberty Square, though, the animatronic display of American history was rather quickly fixed, and a stirring account of the nation’s history had commenced. Then the curtains parted as a voice announced, “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Presidents of the United States.” So realistic were the 45 figures on stage that I felt a lump in my throat, and I noticed the man next to me wiping away a tear. All those presidents weren’t heroic; actual history got brushed up a bit for us, just as the Magic Kingdom’s Jungle Tour skipped the messy and brutal reality of wildlife.
Yet at that moment, we were moved by the inspiration, making the gap between reality and fantasy less entertaining than tragic. Soon enough, we would be cheering as a parade brought Mickey and so many other Disney characters down Main Street, U.S.A., to stirring music; later, fireworks would explode in the night air, accompanied by musical lyrics stressing how hope and courage are key to achieving dreams. But at Liberty Square, the experience of today’s civic life made the contrast between reality’s failures and the hope of the imaginary all too sad to bear. We had to turn away as the Disney curtain fell, as we were reminded of what lies outside the boundaries of the imaginary kingdom.
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-REX SMITH