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disney tails…….
In 1985, at age 41, I visited Disney World for the first time. I remember the experience for two things: the endless lines so cleverly organized that you never knew how long they truly were and the Hawaiian Luau dinner I attended. Yes, a genuine Hawaiian feast that reminded me of American Chinese food circa 1953 and the unforgettable “entertainment” offered by “native” Hawaiian dancers with spears who smacked their weapons on the ground and rhythmically advanced on the diners glowering fiercely. Whoever those dancers were, they were quite skilled at playing “primitives” from elsewhere, also circa 1953, objects of fear, wonder, and scorn. (Oh yes, and Disney World was the place that first taught me this country had an obesity problem — along with some of the most fattening food on the planet.)
Best of TomDispatch: Ariel Dorfman, A Tale of Two Donalds
POSTED ON JULY 3, 2022
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: A little treat for you on this July 4th weekend, a 2017 TomDispatch piece from a favorite author of mine, Chilean novelist Ariel Dorfman, and my introduction to it of that moment. Of course, in a country where Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is attacking Walt Disney World and the Supreme Court has just loosed a flood of concealed weaponry into our already embattled land, while ensuring that there will be ever fewer abortions, you know that Donald Trump, a target for Dorfman even then, did indeed make his mark on this country. As it happens, he did so all too violently, even if he didn’t manage to steal the last election. (There’s always the next one!) How sad. Remind me, what exactly are we celebrating this July 4th? Tom]
In 1985, at age 41, I visited Disney World for the first time. I remember the experience for two things: the endless lines so cleverly organized that you never knew how long they truly were and the Hawaiian Luau dinner I attended. Yes, a genuine Hawaiian feast that reminded me of American Chinese food circa 1953 and the unforgettable “entertainment” offered by “native” Hawaiian dancers with spears who smacked their weapons on the ground and rhythmically advanced on the diners glowering fiercely. Whoever those dancers were, they were quite skilled at playing “primitives” from elsewhere, also circa 1953, objects of fear, wonder, and scorn. (Oh yes, and Disney World was the place that first taught me this country had an obesity problem — along with some of the most fattening food on the planet.)
I must admit that my grown-up’s eye view of Walt Disney’s fantasy universe left me a little shocked at the time, but I shouldn’t have been. After all, a decade or so earlier I had absorbed How to Read Donald Duck by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, an unforgettable exposé of the true nature of Disney-style American “innocence.” It was a document that had emerged from the democratic Chilean revolution of Salvador Allende, just one of the governing experiments of the twentieth century that the U.S. helped do in. (In fact, I still have my copy of that British-produced book from the mid-1970s, which, in its Spanish version, had quite literally been consigned to the flames and later in English was impounded by U.S. Customs. It was a work that no American publisher would put out at the time and so my well-worn copy has become a remarkably valuable collector’s item, as Dorfman points out in today’s post.)
Keep in mind that I had been a typical Disney kid of the 1950s. I read Walt’s comics and raptly watched Walt Disney’s Disneyland on our black-and-white TV. That weekly extravaganza included such gems as “Our Friend the Atom,” a paean of praise to the all-American power source that, only a decade or so earlier, had obliterated two Japanese cities. Above all, though, the show was a living ad for the wonders of — you guessed it — Disneyland, which was partially constructed with money ABC paid to air it. (“Each week, as you enter this timeless land, one of these many worlds will open to you: Frontierland, tall tales and true from the legendary past! Tomorrowland, promise of things to come! Adventureland, the wonder world of nature’s own realm! Fantasyland, the happiest kingdom of them all!”) I can still remember yearning to visit Disneyland and see the guide on its “African” river at Adventureland shoot his pistol directly into the voracious maw of a hippopotamus. Of course, Uncle Walt’s showcase had been built in distant California at a moment when air travel wasn’t the commonplace of today and the farthest west I had ever been was Albany, New York.
Still, I do have something to thank Walt for. In the spring of 1980, in exile from his native Chile (then in the hands of its military), Ariel Dorfman walked unannounced into my office at Pantheon Books in New York City. Fortunately, thanks to Disney’s favorite duck, I already knew his work well and so was prepped to become the editor of his first two books in English. Now, another set of decades down the line, he completes the circle of our lives as he looks back by torchlight (so to speak) on his own experiences with Walt Disney and what they mean in the age of Donald Trump. Tom
How to Read Donald Trump
On Burning Books But Not Ideas
The organizers of the white supremacist gathering in Charlottesville last month knew just what they were doing when they decided to carry torches on their nocturnal march to protest the dethroning of a statue of Robert E. Lee. That brandishing of fire in the night was meant to evoke memories of terror, of past parades of hate and aggression by the Ku Klux Klan in the United States and Adolf Hitler’s Freikorps in Germany.
The organizers wanted to issue a warning to those watching: that past violence, perpetrated in defense of the “blood and soil” of the white race, would once again be harnessed and deployed in Donald Trump’s America. Indeed, the very next day, that fatal August 12th, those nationalist fanatics unleashed an orgy of brutality that led to the deaths of three people and the injuring of many more.
Millions around America and the world were horrified and revolted by that parade of torches. In my case, however, they also brought to mind deeply personal memories of other fires that had burned darkly so many decades before, far from the United States or Nazi Europe. As I watched footage of that rally, I couldn’t help remembering the bonfires that lit up my own country, Chile, in the aftermath of General Augusto Pinochet’s September 11th coup in 1973 — that “
The Chilean people had voted Allende in as their president three years earlier, launching an exceptional democratic experiment in peaceful social change. It would be an unprecedented attempt to build socialism through the ballot box, based on the promise that a revolution need not kill or silence its enemies in order to succeed. It was thrilling to be alive during the thousand days that Allende governed. In that brief period, a mobilized nation wrested control of its natural resources and telecommunication systems from multinational (primarily U.S.) corporations; large estates were redistributed to the peasants who had long farmed them in near servitude; and workers became the owners of the factories they labored in, while bank employees managed their nationalized institutions previously in the hands of rich conglomerates.
READ MORE:
https://tomdispatch.com/how-to-read-donald-trump/
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- By Gus Leonisky at 5 Jul 2022 - 7:49am
- Gus Leonisky's blog
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it's a drag…..
A video depicting a drag queen clad only in spangled panties and a body harness leading a young girl adorned in a tiara around a bar has elicited outrage and demands for legal action from viewers after the clip went viral over the weekend.
“These people belong in jail,” conservative pundit Lauren Chen tweeted on Saturday in response to the video, adding that the issue was a “hill [she was] willing to die on.”
READ MORE:
https://www.rt.com/news/558371-drag-queen-child-miami-horror/
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too young to know......
THE GENDERISATION AND SEXUALISATION OF YOUNG CHILDREN (EVEN IN KINDERGARTEN) IS A HOT TOPIC. SOME INFORMATION COMING FROM VARIOUS QUARTERS SHOULD SEND SOME ALARM BELLS IN THE "COMMUNITY".... THE LEFT HAS EMBRACED A FULL-ON WOKISH ATTITUDE THAT WOULD BE CONFUSING FOR "BOYS AND GIRLS". PROTECTING THE GAY (LGBTi) COMMUNITY FROM HARRASMENT AND VICTIMISATION (AND MURDER) IS PARAMOUNT, BUT ALLOWING THE GROOMING OF KIDS UNDER THIS "PROTECTION" IS BEYOND THE BRIEF. THIS GENDERISATION IS PUSHING THE RIGHT FURTHER TOWARD HARDENING OF "TRADITIONAL" POSTION AND CAN CONFUSE SOME DECENT PEOPLE AS WELL.
BOYS SHOULD BE BOYS, GIRLS SHOULD BE GIRLS, WITH A FEW EXCEPTIONS.
WHEN THE EXCEPTIONS BECOME THE RULER OF THE ROOST, THINGS CAN BECOME VERY WEIRD AND IFFY....
FROM THE RIGHT-WING BREITBART:
Everyone who knows nothing about how real life works is all excited about former Disney Chief Bob Iger returning to the captain’s chair.
It was from Bob Iger that freshly-booted CEO Bob Chapek inherited the primary reasons Disney’s stock is tanking. Granted, Chapek didn’t reverse Iger’s mistakes and frequently appeared lost and indecisive. But let’s get real about Disney’s problems.
To begin with, parents no longer trust Disney to be alone with their children. What was once a company that focused on protecting and preserving the innocence of children is now a predatory company looking to sexualize children.
And that’s just one reason Disney’s stock is in the toilet.
Another reason is how the woke and social justice cancers have destroyed Disney’s art, specifically its most important product: its film franchises. Toy Story and Star Wars are crippled as film franchises. The early buzz about Indiana Jones V is brutal. Marvel is a shell of its former self. Pirates of the Caribbean looks to be toast. Why? Because Disney gleefully joined the #MeToo witch hunts and made Johnny Depp walk a plank without due process.
After the hapless Bob Chapek stepped in for the retiring Iger, one of Iger’s first public attacks on Chapek involved a Florida law that protects small children from s the public school’s sexual perverts. The left and the fake media called it the “Don’t Say Gay Bill” — which is a lie. The bill stops the sickos who infest our public schools from grooming small children with gay porn and transsexual propaganda. After Chapek was publicly criticized by the left for not opposing the bill and staying silent, Iger piled the criticism on by bragging that Disney would have stood up to defend the child groomers in government-run schools under his leadership.
“When you’re dealing with right and wrong, or when you’re dealing with something that does have a profound impact on your business, I just think you have to do what is right and not worry about the potential backlash to it,” Iger told CNN in March.
Does that sound like a guy who will turn Disney away from endangering children and enabling their abusers into something family-friendly?
No, it doesn’t
Iger also elevated Kathleen Kennedy to oversee LucasFilm, and Kennedy is the brittle, feminist woketard who woke-raped Star Wars until it was no longer a viable film franchise.
The “queering” of children’s entertainment, the grooming assaults on our children’s innocence, and the push to mutilate children as holy sacrifices to the trans lobby, all started at Disney under Iger.
Disney’s woke assault on art started under Iger.
Iger’s shellac might be might more polished than Chapek’s but Disney’s demonic turn to sexualize and prey on children is still the same threat it was yesterday.
READ MORE:
https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2022/11/21/nolte-woke-pro-grooming-bob-iger-is-disneys-problem-not-the-solution/
HERE ONE COULD EXPLORE THE SEXUALITY OF SAY A RIMBAUD AND VERLAINE....
The two began a stormy love affair when Rimbaud was 17. Verlaine left his wife and child for Rimbaud, whom he called “the man with soles of wind”. Their relationship ended in 1873, when a row broke out between them and Verlaine fired a gun at Rimbaud, for which he would spend two years in a Belgian prison.
RIMBAUD WROTE POETRY FOR ONLY FOUR YEARS, FROM AROUND 16 YEARS OF AGE. HE THEN BECAME A CANNON MERCHANT FOR THE ANTI-COLONIALISTS IN AFRICA.... BUT HERE ONE COUD EXPLORE HIS DESCRIPTION OF HIS SENSUOUS ARSEHOLE....:
not for kiddies to read.....
The Idol... Asshole SonnetDark and frilly like a purple carnation
It breathes, humbly crouching among the moss.
Wet again with love that follows the gentle flight
From the white buttocks to the heart of its hem.
Filaments like tears of milk
Wept, under the cruel wind that pushes them back,
Through little clots of russet marl
To lose themselves where the slope was calling them.
My Dream often abutted on its suction cup;
My soul, jealous material coitus,
Made it his tawny teardrop and his nest of sobs.
It is the swooning olive, and the coaxing flute;
This is the tube where the celestial praline descends:
Feminine Chanaan in its damp enclosures!
Albert Merat.
PUBLISHED IN C. 1870
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annus horribilis....
FROM BREITBART:
For Hollywood, 2022 was truly an annus horribilis.
Major studios, streamers, cable providers, and other media giants lost a combined $542 billion in market value in 2022, with left-wing studios the Walt Disney Co., Netflix, and Comcast accounting for the bulk of the bloodshed.
The Dow Jones Media Titans index, which tracks the performance of 30 of the world’s biggest media companies, shed 40 percent this year, with its total market value declining from $1.35 trillion to $808 billion, according to a Financial Times report.
The losses outpaced indices for other sectors, including banking, which saw a 14.5 percent drop for the year, and telecommunications, which fell by 11.2 percent.
Hollywood’s horrible year was the result of a one-two punch of a downturn in the streaming market coupled with consumers continuing to cut the cord by the millions. In addition, the advertising market has cratered as households cut spending as the costs of essentials like food and energy continue to skyrocket due to President Joe Biden’s (D) disastrous economic policies.
Leftists are having a very hard time accepting the smashing success of non-woke, pro-America, masculine "Top Gun: Maverick."
Disney — once an invincible brand and iconic American company– saw its stock plummet more than 40 percent this year as the company faces weak profitability for the foreseeable future, prompting the firing of CEO Bob Chapek and the return of old CEO Bob Iger.
Disney, whose stock is on course for its worst year since 1974, spent 2022 embracing radical LGBTQ activism and waging a calamitous political war with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) over the state’s anti-grooming Parental Rights in Education Law.
Netflix experienced an unprecedented two consecutive quarters of subscriber losses this year, which resulted in layoffs and cost-cutting across the board. For the year, the stock is down more than 50 percent.
Other big losers include Paramount Global, whose stock has dropped more than 40 percent, and Warner Bros. Discovery — the parent company of CNN — whose stock has tumbled more than 60 percent.
READ MORE:
https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2022/12/25/hollywood-lost-more-than-500-billion-in-market-value-in-2022/
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TOP GUN MAVERICK? WHAT A DRIP OF A MOVIE.... PREDICTIBLE FROM THE START, FULL OF SILLY CHICHES, SAID AND UNSAID — A MOVIE WHERE THE GOOD GUYS ARE UNINTELLIGENT DICKEHEADS (IDIOTS) AND MENTALLY CHALLENGED (IMBECILES) WITH AN ERECT JOYSTICK BETWEEN THEIR LEGS..... AS A NAZI LOVER, I CAN'T WAIT FOR THE SEQUEL...
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charlie mouse.....
Florida's Republican Governor Ron DeSantis - a long-time critic of Disney as a "purveyor of woke ideology" - signed a bill in February 2023 to end the self-governing status of the entertainment giant, saying that the "corporate kingdom finally comes to an end. There's a new sheriff in town, and accountability will be the order of the day".
The Walt Disney Company has seized upon a legal loophole invoking England's King Charles III to thwart an attempt by Florida's Governor Ron DeSantis to strip the entertainment giant of its self-governing status in the state, US media reported.
In what has been described as a checkmate move, Disney will purportedly fall back on a Royal Lives Clause to retain control of its Walt Disney World resort area. All of the latter is located within the special taxing district of Reedy Creek.
A contract clause, inserted into Reedy Creek's tax district agreement, provides that a specific right must be exercised within the lifetime - plus 21 years - of the last living descendant of a British Monarch who happens to be alive during the time that the contract is made, in this case - King Charles III. Such clauses are believed to date as far back as to the 17th century.
Reedy Creek's tax district was set up by Florida Legislature in 1967 to "support and administer certain aspects of the economic development and tourism", according to its website. Disney is the largest single landowner of the district. However, in February this year, Florida's Republican-led legislature voted to scrap the self-governing arrangement that enabled Disney World to have its own police and fire departments, power distribution, and a spate of other public functions. Under the auspices of a bill signed by Ron DeSantis, a new board was appointed, consisting of five members that would oversee the government services provided on Disney district’s properties in the state.
"Today the corporate kingdom finally comes to an end... There's a new sheriff in town, and accountability will be the order of the day," DeSantis has stated at a bill-signing ceremony.
But purportedly days before the Florida House passed the legislation, the still Disney-appointed board rushed to transfer a batch of duties of the Reedy Creek Improvement District under the media giant's control. What this means is that Disney would not need to seek board approval in cases such as construction of various projects or buildings, or selling and/or assigning development rights.
As the above-cited clause appears to stymie efforts by the DeSantis-appointed board of the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District to govern the municipal services provided on Disney's properties in Florida, the members vowed to fight the contract in court.
"The agreement unlawfully delegates the district's legislative authority to a private corporation, subverts the provisions of the new act, and binds the hands of the new board," lawyers representing the board were cited as saying in a statement.
Walt Disney Corporation disputed this, underscoring that "All agreements signed between Disney and the District were appropriate, and were discussed and approved in the open, noticed public forums in compliance with Florida’s Government in the Sunshine law".
READ MORE:
https://sputniknews.com/20230402/disney-plies-legal-loophole-linked-to-king-charles-iii-to-dodge-desantis-self-governance-crackdown-1109042504.html
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where's bambi?....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kvMdWcluwI
MEANWHILE./../.
DISNEY'S WOKE/PC "LITTLE MERMAID" MOVIE SHOULD CUT THE MUSTARD WITH THE PUBLIC (1/2 OF IT AT LEAST)....
I’m sorry to say the new Little Mermaid is extremely mediocreJake WilsonThe Little Mermaid ★★
(PG) 120 minutes
Disney adaptations have never been known for sticking to their source material, but this hasn’t stopped a subset of online fans from getting outraged over Disney’s new live-action retelling of The Little Mermaid – specifically over the casting of an African-American lead, Halle Bailey, in the title role.
It all sounds a little fishy, considering firstly that mermaids don’t exist, secondly that if they did, they wouldn’t belong to any human ethnic group, and finally that in Hans Christian Andersen’s original fairy tale the character wasn’t named “Ariel” and ultimately met with a very different fate. But these are mere details, apparently, for those who feel obliged to defend the cultural heritage of the West. Poor unfortunate souls, indeed.
Racist weirdos aside, this new The Little Mermaid is even less imaginative than you’d expect from one of the live-action remakes Disney now grinds out relentlessly, with the same laborious, murky quality that director Rob Marshall brought to his 2014 film of Into the Woods.
Though stretched to two hours, this remains in essence a short story. Ariel is among the beauteous daughters of the undersea King Triton (Javier Bardem, in a get-up that would suit Will Ferrell). After rescuing the handsome Prince Eric (Jonah Hauer-King) from drowning, she yearns to pursue him onto dry land.
READ MORE:
https://www.smh.com.au/culture/movies/i-m-sorry-to-say-the-new-little-mermaid-is-extremely-mediocre-20230520-p5d9vj.html
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snow white-ish....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dq0kERqavX0
Disney's Latest Controversy - Snow White's Seven "Dwarfs" Won't Be "Dwarfs," with Christopher RufoMegyn Kelly is joined by Christopher Rufo, author of “America's Cultural Revolution,” to discuss Disney’s recent photo of “diverse” dwarfs from the new Snow White film, how adding politics to films make storylines hard to follow, how Disney will take hits from these decisions, and more.
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