FRANK RICH The Audio-Animatronic Candidate
I don't care what anyone says. It's always depressing when the circus folds its tent and leaves town.
So forgive me for mourning the passing of the recall election in California. Maybe it wasn't the greatest show on earth, but in its lasting impact it may prove one of the more transformative cultural events of our young century. Eastern snobs who airily condescended to the spectacle as merely another example of left-coast madness just didn't get it. As goes California, so goes the nation. It's Disneyland, not Colonial Williamsburg, that prefigures our future, and the action-packed recall ride was nothing if not the apotheosis of the Magic Kingdom. It was fun, it was instructive, it was expensive, it was hawked relentlessly on television, it starred an Audio-Animatronic action figure. It even had product placement for its leading man's vehicle of choice, the Hummer. And it will set off a chain of unanticipated consequences whose full meaning will become apparent only with time.
To see the recall as Disneyland, you have to remember the platonic idea of Disneyland at its inception. From its opening day in Anaheim in July 1955, 48 Julys before Darrell Issa's recall petitions hit paydirt it was never meant to be just another tourist destination. It was virtual reality before virtual reality was cool a visionary's idea of how American life might be conducted. Walt Disney had long despised the rowdiness that up until then had defined amusement parks, "dirty, phony places run by rough-looking people," as he characterized them. He wanted to build instead a beautiful, phony place run by nice-looking people: an alternative America that he could script and control down to the tiniest detail of its idyllic Main Street U.S.A. and whose sovereignty no citizen would or could challenge.
In 2003, as Pixar drives hand-crafted animation out of the movies, it's that vision of a hermetically sealed simulation of democracy that is proving to be Walt's most lasting legacy. The original notion of Disneyland lives today not only in the first park, its satellites and its many imitators; its influence can be found in planned and gated communities, in Rouse-developed downtowns, in the carefully scripted "reality" programs of network television, in the faux-urban ambiance of a shopping mall near you. It lives in Celebration, Fla., the model suburban town that Disney built in 1994 and has tried to manage with theme park-like control. But up until Arnold Schwarzenegger, no one had succeeded (though many have tried) in creating a powerful political movement according to the Disney park aesthetic: a content-free campaign, as hollow inside as a movie set's facade, that enjoyed an unimpeded romp to victory until scandal cast a shadow at the finish line.
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