Sixteen Volts

Anyone can write what I write, but few people speak Finnish, which gives me a chance to be useful by translating the wisdom of Finnish bloggers for a worldwide audience. I can see that Tommi has recently written about Disney. In Finland we don't have Disneyland or anything similar, but there is a weekly Donald Duck magazine (with a distribution that used to be something like 500,000 copies a week, in a nation of five million people, and it was especially popular in the post-war Finland) and a monthly series of Donald Duck pocketbooks of about 250 pages each that every Finn under fifty basically grew up with and should recognize instantly certain classic stories and one-liners from them.

The stories and artwork in these pocketbooks is mostly made in Italy and Germany, and even though these books are 100% official Disney products, their overall feel and their general worldview at least used to be rather different than what you see in the American Disney products. Damn, I wish I could one day read the official Disney guidelines for their comic book artists of what is not acceptable. I bet that it would be an even bigger hoot than "How to draw comics the Marvel way", which explicitly instructs the reader that when you are drawing women, you should shrink their heads and enlarge their bosoms. In any case, if you are sneaky enough, you can put a lot of stuff between the lines that the "censors" won't necessarily see, and I am sure that I missed a lot of 70's and 80's social commentary in these stories. There are also a bunch of characters that don't exist in American Ducksburg, such as Brigitta McBridge who is in love with Scrooge and tries to have him marry her, leading to many kinds of mayhem and conflict.

But that's enough of my nostalgic rambling. Let's instead hear what Tommi has to say!

The happiest place on Earth

I happened to read a book about Disney. Like everyone should know, we Europeans have a slightly different point of view to it than Americans. Around here the most important Disney product are comics. In America the theme parks are number one, number two are their movies and after those comes everything else. I guess that this is also changing, since the young kids are accustomed to videos and movies, and the Aku Ankka magazine no longer holds the position that it once used to.

I'll stop here because otherwise I would start to ramble too much about inessentialities. Such as the fact that Disney comics are most popular in the geographical slice reaching from the Nordic countries down to Italy, and for some reason in this same slice also asketic mechanical romanticism and scruffy heavy metal guys seem to flourish.

Now to the point. Americans have this idea that Disneyland is the happiest place on Earth. Anyone who has ponied up the entrance fee can be a king for a moment, regardless of his age, social position or race. Employees have detailed rules that try to make each guest feel comfortable and admired. Especially the comfort of disabled people and minorities is paid quite a lot of attention to. Leftists naturally mock their careful attempts not to offend anybody, but it is not hard to understand why this place annoys them so much and why they regularly try to depict it in such a harsh light of sneering contempt.

I was reminded of this not only by what I read, but also by something that happened this morning. I had stayed up late, trying to take care of certain repulsive or at most weakly rewarding duties. I woke up around nine A.M. and not in a greatest of my moods. I turned on the radio so that I wouldn't fall asleep again. The morning show was "Kultaa ja Hopeaa", and soon they started to play some kind of waltz. I understood that now this is what they call entertainment. Amusingly melancholic sounds of humppa that you can emote with, no matter who or what happens to be oppressing or burdening you.

The same asketic moralism seems to apply to both entertainment and Disneyland. On the other hand, the 18th century moral philosophers often thought that an act is ethical when it is freely and consciously chosen. The consciousness or soul is something that is always inevitably beyond the reach of all definitions. Every time you say or believe that you are this or that, you are alienated from the real you. An ethical act is one in which you cut loose from the external definitions and limitations, make a choice and then go back to the physical-social world to act it out.

Entertainment seems to serve such transcendence. The tolerance that humans have grows if they can, even for a moment, get away from the pressure, preferably even a bit above it so that they get to chuckle at their situation. There are certain meme complexes that say that this particular escape is bad. A person only exists within the socially shared world, and you are not allowed to leave gaps in this world. Believing in such gaps is self-deception, an illusion to cover the fact that everything that is is societally determined.

The reader can probably now think of groups that fit such thinking, but I will not start listing them here. Otherwise the focus would slip from the actual point to the groups that represent it and the irrelevant questions of liking or not liking these groups. Besides, I would say that the same pattern can be seen also in the level of small groups and individuals. In fact, the idea is even more interesting when applied to them.

I realized that just like entertainment and the Friday night beverages, also the Church is some kind of a gap in society. In principle everybody is equally a sinner while sitting in the pews, and the rituals say that everybody will have their sins forgiven and eternal life if you just agree to take it. By vanishing the societal definitions and limitations, even if only for a moment, and by offering abundance, Disneyland is naturally a kind of a Church. Of course, in the real world churches with their seating orders and political participation have often been anything but outside society, but at least according to certain interpretation, they may have offered people a momentary respite from their social stamps.

I would like to claim that doctrines can be divided in two groups: those that tolerate the fact that their members occasionally step outside the norms to breathe and maybe even chuckle, and those who can't tolerate this. If you want to look for such doctrines, I would recommend that you concentrate on the ones that you can actually see in the movements of the meatsacks that are close to you, and the atmospheric vibrations, instead of the ones that you only read about in some printed source.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Thursday, August 31, 2006 at 4:13 PM