When I was small, my father took up latch-hooking as a hobby, to keep himself at home and responsible for his family. I remember one of his largest projects, a three-by-five-foot wall rug with an image of Donald Duck. He made it when I still slept in a cradle, and I kept it on my wall, through multiple moves and homes, until I was eighteen. It was a talisman, not only of the innocence Donald represented, but also of the knowledge that my dad loved me.
Last week, Nevada writer Jonathan VanBoskerck published an op-ed in the Orlando Sentinel whining that “I love Disney World, but wokeness is ruining the experience.” (The Sentinel moved it behind a paywall after its viral flare-up passed, but it’s available on other websites.) I wasn't inclined to write about VonBoskerck’s entirely predictable, formulaic whimper, because frankly, we’ve heard it before.
Then I remembered my Donald Duck rug.
To his credit, VanBoskerck doesn’t assume Disney used to be apolitical. He contends the massive media conglomerate bearing Walt Disney’s name is drifting from it’s founder’s vision. A vision which, coincidentally, ratifies his own as “a Christian and a conservative Republican.” Uncle Walt, an ardent capitalist and flag-waving patriot, apparently made GOP voters feel good about themselves; today’s company makes them feel bad and picked on.
This claim stumbles when studying anything about media history. Princeton historian Kevin M. Kruse writes that Uncle Walt founded his company as a New Deal Democrat, and gave FDR unpaid advertising in his early featurettes. Only during World War II, and the subsequent Cold War, did Disney’s personal and business philosophy drift right. By 1955, Disney was, with Billy Graham and Ronald Reagan, part of America’s triumvirate of mass-media Christian Conservatism.
Therefore, VanBoskerck isn’t championing Uncle Walt’s vision as it existed, pure and unchanging. He wants to trap Disney, to veritably cryogenically freeze him, at the moment which gives VanBoskerck most comfort. Judging by VanBoskerck’s photo, he was probably born after Disney, the man, passed on; so he’s free to select any moment from the abundant buffet of political positions Disney expressed throughout his career.
The illusion of an apolitical past presumes that what you grew up with is simply normal, a neutral and stationary baseline immune to change. VanBoskerck’s vision of Disney, the man, drips with unspoken prior assumptions. Somehow, the decision to stop circulating Song of the South, for instance, was a sort of act of God. Now he has to see the desire for change as motivated by humans, which he identifies as political.
VanBoskerck fundamentally wants to retreat into childhood innocence, to resume never having to know about injustice and suffering. Like me, hanging my dad’s Donald Duck rug long after I’d outgrown its literal significance, he requires a place of moral neutrality where he needn’t take positions, or feel shame for failing to do so. That’s why he inveighs against Disneyworld specifically, over the Disney Corporation: he wants a physical destination without moral weight.
But this assumes the beatified past was simply natural, that his view matched that of children everywhere. That young kids of all eras were driven by the same motivators that he was, that things simply existed. It’s a definition of “political” that makes certain groups, like women and children, innately apolitical, even when they’re demonstrably not. That isn't a base for making good, meaningful decisions. It’s a reliance on ignorance.
I sympathize with VanBoskerck’s views. I’d love to revisit a time when music and TV and movies and books simply existed, with no need to be aware of the conditions from which they arose. We White people have this idea that everyone widely shared our innocence, and everyone wants to return to that. But we can’t go back, neither as individuals nor as a nation, because that time never really existed.
We all come from a background based on our parents’ economic standing and the choices our forebears made. White people didn’t have to see that when we were kids: we simply saw our families, schools, and neighborhoods, and considered them normal. The mere fact that we, as adults, have material evidence they weren’t, doesn’t change some people’s belief that the past was a morally blank slate.
This desire to flee the present makes perfect sense, of course. But once you can witness the world through another person’s eyes, you can never again fail to see that, for instance, Song of the South was pretty offensive, that Dumbo’s crows were aggressively racist, that Donald Duck was never neutral. My father’s love shielded me for years. But I’m an adult now, with all the burdens that entails.
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