Tuesday, September 08, 2020

I Got the News: Sorry, but Uncle Walt's not going to save you, either.



I'm shocked ... SHOCKED ... to learn that "Disney is not only underreporting its COVID cases but clearing COVID-positive employees to return to work."

Four sources familiar with the matter told The Daily Beast that Disney has kept the total number of positive cases at the district under wraps, alerting unions only to the positive test results of their members—often days after the fact, risking further exposure—and leaving workers to guess for themselves why colleagues disappeared for days at a time, or why 11 people from the 12-person Horticulture Irrigation team didn’t show up to work for a full week.

All sorts of folks in positions of authority here and throughout the country, most often Democrats locally but in truth it's a bi-partisan thing, absolutely worship Disney for keeping its streets clean.

Of course, they're forgetting that a Disney theme park is not the real world. That's an important consideration, isn't it?

In fact, I reiterate: Veneration of Walt Disney is one of the roots of our current intellectual stalemate.

Grow up, folks.

Verily, I wasn't made for a world this stupid: "Visiting Disney World is the modern version of a medieval pilgrimage."

Like the time Disney's for-profit masterminds proposed a history theme park, including "a new vision of a Disneyland for slavery."

"The weirdness of historical Disneyfication" failed miserably, but it accurately presaged the Dickey Error.

As Charles "Strong Towns" Marohn noted in a 2018 article about crony capitalism, Disney's in it for the money just as much, if not more, than any other power-wielding multinational:

When a company like Walt Disney, which had $25 billion in gross profits last year, can demand—and receive—decades of tax amnesty from a city like Anaheim, a city with a $1.7 billion budget that is struggling to pay pensions, maintain streets and provide basic services, something is broken.

Perhaps it isn't possible to prove categorically that Walt Disney himself was "sexist, anti-Semitic and racist, aside from the backlash against the now-banned Song of the South."

But his successors shouldn't be absolved from fleecing generations in pursuit of obscene profits. Shouldn't we be embracing history's verdicts, not fleeing headlong from them?

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