- I did meet Mickey and Minnie. They showed up at the conference reception Friday night and asked if they could take this picture with me. Of course, I obliged, even though I knew for a fact they were people dressed up in Mickey and Minnie costumes. I even loaned them my iPhone to take the picture so I could email it to them.
- But what are the overall impressions of four days surrounded by the surreal opulence of excess? (or maybe excess-on-steroids?) Singularly, I was more struck by the corporate kingdom than the Magic Kingdom.
- In fact, I left the place with some ambivalence that I found well-considered in a placard on the side of a waste-disposal unit (a garbage can in most places, but nothing at Disney is that mundane). The placard read, “Waste Please.” As an English teacher, I yearned for a magic marker to draw in a comma after “Waste.” But the missing comma notwithstanding, one can read that placard at Corporate Kingdom two ways:
1. “Waste Please” by disposing your trash and litter here so as not to despoil these impeccable, glittering grounds. Don’t you realize that one of the reasons everything costs so much at Corporate Kingdom is that we go to exorbitant extremes to keep the appearance of this place so squeaky clean? After all, what matters more than appearance?
- 2. “Waste Please” by releasing your most excessive consumer impulses to profligate abandon: After all, that’s what the Corporate Kingdom is all about! The more you waste here of your precious resources, the more the Corporate Kingdom prospers, so please, please, please: Waste with profligacy all you that you can! Yay, o man, waste with utter abandon, by squandering all your cash on the glittering fool’s gold peddled in corporate paradise. And when you’ve wasted all your commodities, you’ll have to replenish them by paying Disney’s exorbidant cost because other vendors are not allowed in the Corporate Kingdom!
