STEVE-O ECO

Echo...echo........echo....

Can you hear it?

The reverberation of Postmodernism which is Disney-World/Land...take your pick.

Actually the west coast example can't come close to the quality of the reproduction of fakeness, as does its east coast sister. I remember as a kid, riding the matterhorn (Disney California) and still having the idea that I hadn't left Los Angeles, You could see the building on either side of the park. But Disney World was a WORLD OF ITS OWN! You really felt like you were in another planet. The mind of those Imagineers...I always wondered why Disney never drug tests its employees. Horkheimer and Adorno’s (H & A) ideas come to life in Eco’s Essay, as if they were Disney’s animatronics. The first quote by H & A I want to echo onto this text is, “The advance of stupidity must not lag behind the simultaneous advance of intelligence” (M 57). What a great quote! But now think about this, “Disneyland tells us that technology can give us more reality than nature can” (Eco 203). So the advancement in knowledge can exploit our reality and make us believe that we are in fantasy even though we have proof that we are in reality…(the good ol’ pinch test)..OUCH this is real. Eco writes, “hallucinatory is the confusion between copy and original” (202). Under Eco’s theory, when we know we are in the imaginary, I mean fully immersed in it, there is a tendency to believe the fakeness is reality… “and where it is credible, the reduction serves to make it attractive to the imagination” (204). We allow our own undermining, H & A write, “Their lack of resistance certifies them as reliable customers” (M 63). So, we pay admission in order to be taken advantage of…err…I mean Amused. Thus we “insist unwaveringly on the ideology by which they [we] are enslaved” (H&A 50). “Their [Disney’s] ideology is business” (H&A 52). And, “The quantity of organized amusement is converted into the quality of organized cruelty”(H&A 53). Furthermore, “Amusement itself becomes an ideal, taking the place of the higher values it eradicates from the masses by repeating them in an even more stereotyped form than the advertising slogans…” (H&A 56). This realized Ideology is the “degenerate utopia” described in Eco’s essay. Just as Vegas has been “faked it, till you maked it” into a quasi-city, Disney has blended “the reality of trade with the play of fiction” (201). This happens to such an extreme where the consumer is “distracted” into the mindset that play is reality and trade is fiction…. The only thing authentic is the consumer,

The Main street facades are presented to us as toy houses and invite us to enter the, but their interior is always a disguised supermarket, where you buy obsessively, believing that you are still playing

Your on a this ride, following a character named Figment, with an addictive jingle playing that repeats “Imagination” to the point that imaginary is real and real is imaginary…and you want to believe it…your kids do for sure...and you wouldn’t want to spoil it for them...right? Because in life we are always looking for that next object of unattainability…Whether that be material or emotional…and Disney gives it to us, on a silver platter…and even though it looks like shit and tastes like shit and smells like shit…it feels good…and we want more.


“It's like that, you know it's like that
I got at him, now you never get the mic back
When I attack, there ain't an army that could strike back” Nas


ONE