Garaphernalia 7.5

I’ve been following the World Baseball Classic the last few weeks. I think its a really great idea, given the international nature of baseball now.

If you haven’t been following along, and you probably haven’t, the US didn’t win. In fact, we didn’t make the finals. In fact, we didn’t make the semi-finals. In fact, we barely made it out of the first round after we lost to Canada (Canada!!! In baseball!! and they didn’t have Eric Gagne pitching!!!) We also lost to Mexico, Korea, and only through the grace of a horrible ump, beat Japan.

Japan beat Cuba in the finals, which was suprising only in that they beat a really good Dominican team to get there. There was only 1 Major League player starting in the final game.

What the WBC showed is that the US doesn’t own baseball anymore. Hopefully, it will spur more players to come out of countries like Korea and Panama who can field good, but not great teams.

As for the US, someone should punch George Steinbrenner in the face.

Next time some complains about Disney World being too commerical or corporate, point them to this photo:

This was a T-shirt sold in the China pavilion at Epcot.

If you have trouble reading it, this is what it says:

Mao Zedong

Poet, revolutionary, genius, and bumbler, the founder of the Peoples Republic was an icon to tens of millions and to a close few, a very human figure.

Of the thousands of people who walked past this display, I doubt if more than a few batted an eye. They should have. Mao was probably responsible for the deaths of more people than any single person in human history.

Consider your reactionion to the following t-shirt:

Adolph Hitler

Artist, revolutionary, genius, and bumbler, the founder of the Third Reich was an icon to tens of millions and to a close few, a very human figure.

I judged a college debate round the year after I graduated at Heart of America. One team ran a Maoism case. Everyone thought it was cute. I wrote the longest ballot of my life, and thankfully the affirmative bungled Topicality. What pissed me off, is that for all the high and might moralism you find with people running critiques, something like this can pass without comment.

I have a random quote on the side of my webiste from George Orwell that summarizes my thoughts very succinctly:

All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.

70m people dead is guess is a “unwelcome fact”.

To a certain extent I can understand why we put Hitler in a special category that we don’t put Mao, Pol Pot, or Stalin in. We fought a war with Hitler, and we didn’t with Stalin or Mao. Moreover, Hitler lost.

Nonetheless, there is a difference between holding someone a particular level of disgust and out right celebration.

So much political discourse today is determined not by what people advocate, but rather by the side they are on. People loathe George Bush, not so much for what he does, but because he’s on the other team. The same was true with Clinton. Some policies advocated by the current administration (warrantless wiretaps) rightfully deserve scorn, but passed without comment in the previous administration. Likewise, those up in arms about lies and scandal in the Clinton adminstration and willing to lie down and let the current overlords do as they please.

Too many people suffer from such an intellectual gridlock, that they cannot bear to admit that there is fault in their side least it be used to advance the cause of the other side. It not so much about advancing an idea, as destroying the other guy.

Take it far enough (and it has gotten this far) and one result is you get Chairman Mao t-shirts at Disney World. There are lots of other examples on both sides, but I don’t think anything else quite makes the point like this t-shirt does.

The Economist: March 16, 2006

Me: October 13, 2005

Day 6

I spent all of today at Epcot. I arrived at the park at 8:45 to take the World Showcase tour. Me and two other people spent 3.5 hours walking around the world showcase, going behind the scenes, and getting the story behind the story.

I had fun.

We had dinner at Artisan Point, which is the upscale restaurant here at the Wilderness Lodge. We’re flying out early tomorrow. I hope to have a wrap up of the week and other thoughts when I return.

Day 5

Morning at Magic Kingdom. Afternoon at MGM Studios.

Crowds were down significantly today, which was a huge relief. We went on Splash Mountain which is a very interesting ride for one overwhelming reason.

The theme of the ride is the 1946 Disney movie, “The Song of the South”.

That is not the interesting fact. The interesting fact is that “The Song of the South” has NEVER been issued on VHS or DVD in the United States. Its the flim that Disney is now embarssed to have ever made. The only remaining thing in the Disney corporation, that I know of, that acknowledges the existance of this movie is Splash Mountain, which was created back in 1971.

Wikipedia gives this brief summary of the movie:

Song of the South is a feature film by Walt Disney, first released on November 12, 1946 and based on the Uncle Remus cycle of stories by Joel Chandler Harris. It was one of Disney’s earliest feature films to combine live action footage with animation and was the first Disney feature film in which live actors were hired for lead roles. The live actors provide a sentimental frame-story, in which Uncle Remus relates the folk tales of the adventures of Brer Rabbit and his friends; these anthropomorphic animal characters appear in animation.

Splash mountain only deals with the animated characters and totally ignores Uncle Remus and the live characters. In the ultimate admission of how embarssed Disney is, the souviner store at the end of the ride has only a very very small number of items which show the animated characters from SOTS. The rest of the items are all generic Disney/Mickey Mouse items.

The controversy surrounding the movie is how blacks are portrayed with with respect to whites in the movie. The movie takes place in the reconstruction south, and the blacks have a very subserviant role to the whites in the film. Those relationships are not the focus of the flim, but nonetheless, its a pretty big scar on the movie.

There has been lots of rumor and debate surrounding Disney releasing it on DVD. The new Disney CEO Bob Iger stated last week at the Disney shareholder meeting:

I screened it fairly recently because I hadn’t seen it since I was a child, and I have to tell you after I watched it, even considering the context that it was made, I had some concerns about it because of what it depicted. And thought it’s quite possible that people wouldn’t consider it in the context that it was made, and there were some… [long pause] depictions that I mentioned earlier in the film that I think would be bothersome to a lot of people. And so, owing to the sensitivity that exists in our culture, balancing it with the desire to, uh, maybe increase our earnings a bit, but never putting that in front of what we thought were our ethics and our integrity, we made the decision not to re-release it. Not a decision that is made forever, I imagine this is gonna continue to come up, but for now we simply don’t have plans to bring it back because of the sensitivities that I mentioned. Sorry.

I think its a matter of time until they find some way to redo Splash Mountain to eliminate all references to SOTS.

….also, all the robot Brer Bear figures on the ride are really homoerotic. Really.

Tomorrow morning I’m finally taking the World Showcase Tour.