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Everybody knows that there are places all over the world called Disneyland, from Anaheim, California, over Tokyo in Japan, to Paris in France, fun parks, just perfect “to spend a fun-filled day the entire family will enjoy,” the Disney Company is advertising:

“Welcome to the Magic!”

But not everybody knows that these artificial worlds are perfect representations “of the makeup of contemporary American ideology “, too, without any magic, “where ideology is put into play and where its critical function comes to operate is really not a stage” – it’s “a place of projection where we can view and test out the ideology of the dominant groups in American society”, as the French philosopher and art historian Louis Marin noted in his 1984 essay “Utopic Degeneration: Disneyland”.

“Disneyland is the representation realized in a geographical space of the imaginary relationship that the dominant groups of American society maintain with their real conditions of existence, with the real history of the United States, and with the space outside of its borders. Disneyland is a fantasmatic projection of the history of the American nation, of the way in which this history was conceived with regard to other peoples and to the natural world. Disneyland is an immense and displaced metaphor of the system of representations and values unique to American society.

This function has an obvious ideological function. It alienates the visitor by a distorted and fantasmatic representation of daily life, by a fascinating image of the past and the future, of what is estranged and what is familiar: comfort, welfare, consumption, scientific and technological progress, superpower, and morality. These are values obtained by violence and exploitation; here they are projected under the auspices of law and order.”

But Disneyland is not only a simple minded mirror of contemporary US of A, although Marin calls it a “deep-frozen infantile world”, no, it’s something different delivering a function and message. Following Marin, it’s

“a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real.”

“Nothing is true, however. All that is living is an artefact – the machine is the truth, the actuality of the living. . .”

So you won’t meet the reality of contemporary US life but its hallucinatory return, “as a real imaginary: a fixed, stereotyped, powerful fantasy”. Thus the mirrored image becomes another dimension of reality itself: the fiction of the real substitutes the real. Hence the temporary visitor to a stereotyped system of representations containing a utopia based upon myths which are wrapped in fantasy and an imaginary history, called Disneyland, becomes the inhabitant of a fictive country emerging from this moment – the formerly temporary visitor, leaving Disneyland, enters this new country called US Disneyland, a country of the unreal, the untruth, the fictions, the myths.

“History is neutralized; the scenes only change in relation to the increasing quantity of electric implements, the increasing sophistication of the utensil-dominated human environment. The individual is shown to be progressively mastered, dominated by utensility. The scenic symbols of wealth are constructed by the number and variety of the means and tools of consumption that is, by the quantity and variation of the technical and scientific mediations of consumption. The circular motion of the stage expresses this endless technological progress as well as its necessity, its fate. And the specific organization of the space of representation symbolizes the passive satisfaction of endlessly increasing needs. There is absolutely no reference made to money and even less to its deathlike accumulation. …

It demonstrates, actually, the utensil’s mastery of mankind. Men and women adapt perfectly to this environment and act mechanically.”

As the US of A is not equal to US Disneyland and therefore, these terms are no synonymic labelling. US Disneyland exclusively emerges from myths within a territory residing in the head of its inhabitants. But being the fiction of the real it’s not less powerful than the real itself – the blueprint dominates the model instead:

“Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation.”

US Disneyland is the Land of “the Absolute Fake”, which has become “the real thing”, presenting “its reconstructions as masterpieces of falsification” – described by Umberto Eco in his novel collection Travels in Hyper Reality (1991): “the levels of illusion are numerous, and this increases the hallucination.”

But when the Disneyland module once has been implanted, reality begins to become the infantile degeneration of its own imaginary fiction. And Disneyland is everywhere.

Disneylanders are disposed by an outstanding feature psychologists call ’selective perception’, meaning that people tend to perceive things according to their beliefs more than as they really are. Now black is white and white is black:

“War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength.”

So lies become truth, torture is defending human rights – oh no: first there was no torture at all, and second, if there was, now certainly there is no torture any more, but let it be an event or non-event, no one basically is accountable, anyway.

Of course, bombing other countries is spreading democracy, and committing war crimes is promoting freedom just like the white LA policeman’s legal bashing a brownie is the rule of the law – violence is peaceful.

And shooting an abortion doctor of course is defending human life just as abortion is murder – as well as more guns mean more peace.

That’s the world Disneylanders live in: a “prostitution of the imaginary”, the French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard noted in “Disneyworld Company” (1996).

As war is peace now, there can’t be war crimes any more, but peace crimes only, meaning crimes for peace which of course are no crimes at all – and in Afghanistan/Pakistan there is no war of choice and aggression but a fight against evil Jihadists to defend peace and the US’ national interests at the Hindu Kush.

The US World Order is in a Disney mode, timelessly museumified, disneyfied, and so is its history: 9/11 started with the Barbary Wars two centuries ago, if not earlier. A Disneyland without history is inventing its own, prototyped:

“After the prostitution of the imaginary, here is now the hallucination of the real in its ideal and simplified version.”

Nationwide periodic surveys show that constantly more than 70 per cent of all US Americans are “absolutely certain” in their believe in God and wonders, so not surprisingly they elected a president for the maximum possible number of terms who believed to act as a born again Christian on behalf of the Lord – however, without wearing black sun glasses, and no, his name was not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But on the other hand, not surprisingly again, this extraordinary man not only thought that Austria and Australia were the same, but spoke of Africa as the “Continent of Nigeria”, too, just like one of his follower candidates thought Africa was a country.

So backed by the US’ specific conglomerate of a low general education level and, in order to compensate this deficit, a smorgasbord of quasi religious and ridiculous convictions, all popularised by an Orwellian media industry, US Disneyland is culminating in the creationist world view and the intelligent design of Sarah Palin, “inexorably mixing all the sequences as they would or will appear to a different civilization.”

A recent Gallup poll displays that Sarah Palin is still going strong in the Republican base: 71 per cent want her to become the next US president, an ample proof for the ongoing promulgation of foolishness as a growth business just like prisons, which are ‘a stable and growing part of US business’ while other parts of the US economy are going down the abyss.

The specific US Disneyland state of mind, explained by Charles Pierce in his latest book ‘Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free’, in fact constitutes the only genuine part of what right-wing Disneylanders like Robert Kagan call ‘US exceptionalism and uniqueness’, because it is mainstream in the US society, but on the globe it’s in the minority, fortunately.

Following Pierce, this state of mind he calls ‘Idiot America’ is based on three ‘Great Premises’:

• “Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings or otherwise moves units.”

• “Anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough.”

• “Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is determined by how fervently they believe it.”

And Pierce argues with some illustrative examples: these premises

“are at work in absurdities such as the very loud, very public and very idiotic controversies over ‘intelligent design’ (the story of Genesis dressed up as science), the fate of Terri Schiavo (a brain-dead woman who spent years being kept breathing in a Florida hospice thanks to the intervention of talkshow hosts and cynical politicians) and global warming (Pierce spends some time in Shishmaref, Alaska, a once-frozen village now literally melting into the Pacific Ocean).

What’s common to all of these examples is that they are built around debates that aren’t really debates at all: the folks on one side are so flagrantly wrong that one is tempted to assume they are lying or insane. And as Pierce shows, we are not talking about harmless antics. Rather, such idiocy leads to death threats and warps the scientific consensus needed to stop the planet from heating up into an uninhabitable hell.” (Dan Kennedy in The Guardian, July 29, 2009.)

Welcome to US Disneyland !

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You can download the cited texts

LOUIS MARIN, “UTOPIC DEGENERATION: DISNEYLAND” (1984)

UMBERTO ECO: “THE CITY OF ROBOTS” (1991)

JEAN BAUDRILLARD, “DISNEYWORLD COMPANY” (1996)

in one PDF combined: Discover US Disneyland