Hi. I’m flea. My usual lair is One Good Thing, but I’ll be over here this week, since Jill has foolishly given me the keys to the Malibu Dreamhouse while she’s gone. I may not give it back, so get used to fluff.
I also own an online sex toy store, so you may have to settle in for some posts about figging, too.
But it’s all going to be just fine. Most of my posts are going to go up late at night anyway, because my days are filled with kids and work and putting out fires. It’s 1:30pm in Australia, though, so I’ll just talk to them while the rest of you sleep.
A big chunk of today was spent teaching my four year old to tie a reef knot – more exciting posts about that later! – and watching a TiVo’d Daily Show about McCain shopping in Baghdad’s Green Zone.
What a carefully constructed reality that is, isn’t it? This little walled city, heavily armored and guarded, created to keep Americans as safe as possible while the rest of Iraq shudders in pain and loss and grief. As long as McCain can buy five rugs for five bucks, though, he can come back and tell us that things in Iraq are swell and we’re making progress, or winning, or spreading democracy, or whatever it is the pro-war politicians think they can safely get away with saying this week.
Which is when it popped into my head that somehow the Green Zone has turned into Celebration, Florida. Do you know what Celebration is? It’s the town created by Disneyworld, a community that, as Sarah Vowell says, “might be described as Life: The Ride.”
It is a town created for people who like to tell themselves that the excruciatingly-managed happiness at Disneyworld is genuine, and could be theirs year-round for the price of an American-style home (you get your choice of six classic styles).
**Tangent: True story, my best friend in college got a summer job at Disneyworld, and she told me the pressure to conform to all the specific rules required to show sufficient happiness was so stressful that the employees drank heavily. There was one local bar that had a ten dollar cover, and sold draft beer for a nickel. However, there were no bathrooms in the bar, and if you left, you weren’t allowed to come back inside, so the happy Disney employees, boys and girls both, just peed where they stood and kept drinking. I should probably tell you this was back in 1987, so if you’re a Disney employee and don’t know what I’m talking about, I promise I’m not lying; I’m just old.**
Celebration is a town for people who do not want to deal with American Reality, so instead they’ve created “American” “Reality” and have come to an agreement to believe that what they want life to be, is what life actually is.
We’ve taken the concept of Celebration and moved it to the middle of a war. Global Security calls it the “ultimate gated community.”
Being in the Green Zone in Baghdad provides a limited possibility to meet regular Iraqi people. Americans are walling themselves in, mentally and emotionally, as well as physically.
And then our politicians visit it and call it Iraq. It seems so hopeless – how can the administrators of this war deal with it if they won’t even look at it?
This is one of the weirdest, most uniquely American things I can think of. I sometimes waffle between horror and admiration. Imagine the willpower it takes to create such a airy little bubble to live in, while people are pissing in their pants all around you as you tell the world you’re in the happiest place on earth.
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My old roommate was a Disney employee. She is amazed that she didn’t die of alcohol poisoning after a year of binge drinking 6 days/week. This coming from a twenty five year old.
Apparently preserving the magic is hilarious once you realize that both Prince Charmings are gay and Snow White is screwing one of the mice back at your apartment.
Welcome Flea
Thanks for the great post!
I hadn’t thought of this connection before, but I think it’s eerily accurate. Managed reality? check! Question is, how long until the walls start to crumble? My sense is that, at least in terms of the Green Zone, they provide a false sense of security (perhaps the same could be said of Celebration).
Have a look at Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s recent book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City (also plugged on The Daily Show). It’s a thoroughly shocking inside story of life in the Green Zone, and frankly Disneyworld is both a lot closer to reality and a lot less scary.
Great post, by the way.
bean – yes, I think that false sense of security is part of the deal. I guess it should be that surprising, even though I can’t recall something like the Green Zone ever flourishing to this extent in any previous wars. Conservatives love to wax nostalgic about the glorious ’50s, even though it’s clear, if you’ve read The Way We Never Were, that what they’re longing for never really existed. They’re yearning to bring back something completely fictitious.
De-lurking to say:
This (both Celebration & the Green Zone) reminds me of an awesome book called England, England by Julian Barnes. It’s hilarious and really topical – the basic premise is as follows:
OT: Also, if you’re not reading any Julian Barnes, please please start. He’s fantastic.
And in this way, it’s not really so different from the midwest. I mean, I’ve only been in suburban Ohio for a year, but the notion that folks “have come to an agreement to believe that what they want life to be, is what life actually is” just about sums it up ’round here.
Similarly, not so different from the midwest!
Apologies for the tangent, but Chumbawumba did a great song about Celebration, FL.
Not going to be able to get that one out of my head today, but that’s ok, because it’s beautiful AND subversive.
I always knew there was a reason our little rural Iowa town had a) a tremendous number of churchs, and b) roughly twice that number of bars. They loved to think of themselves as a lovely, simple little town with old-fashioned values, merrily ignoring the teenagers drinking themselves into oblivion trying to avoid the stultifying lack of anything to do, and the meth labs in various houses scattered throughout town.
And they thought I was weird.
I just picked that book up (and by “picked up,” I mean literally — it was set out on someone’s stoop for the taking). I’ve been meaning to read it for a while.
Great post, and welcome aboard!
I’d say that sums up much of suburban America, regardless of location.
The Green Zone is certainly a strange little slice of America that is being exported into Iraq. Similarly, try looking for information on what some of our other bases in Japan, etc. are like–very similar. We export our way of life for our soldiers and build bases with shopping malls and golf courses.
I don’t know what it’s like now, but I’ve heard that the Panama Canal Zone that the US owned and operated until ~1999 used to be run like a high-class resort community for the workers and soldiers there.
You might be old :D but from what I heard in the late 1990s (when at college, with actor-buddies who did the Disney thing over the summer) nothing much has changed. Maybe that bar is gone, but drinking yourself blotto enough to be able to coast half-conscious through the next day still goes on.
Sorry, just gotta second this. His A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters is one of the most insightful political (and everything else) commentaries I’ve ever read.
Yay! Fun! I’m glad you’re here.
Hi SJ! I’ve been a fan of your blog for a long time. There really is no better title for a blog’s archives than “Old Asshole.” I saw that years ago and fell in love for life.