DO I REALLY HAVE TO DEFEND DISNEY?

Oh, God. Really? Do I really have to defend Disney?

Disney, which I regularly placed on my list of places for my then-new agent not to send my screenplays - ahead of scientologists, new agers and Jon Peters? (I really did that)

Disney, the place about which a fellow screenwriter once said he would have no problem writing a dystopian science-fiction novel about life in a “not-so benign totalitarian dictatorship” because “I did a project at Disney”?

Disney, where a director friend once was hired to direct an episode of “Home Improvement” and while at lunch one day in the studio café with his First Assistant Director, took the position that Chuck Jones cartoons were creatively better than Disney cartoons in an aesthetic argument, only to find when he returned to his office that there was a note to him, personally signed by then-Head Mouse Michael Eisner, informing him how much the company liked working with him and stating he should keep his artistic opinions to himself?

Disney, where a very good screenwriter and nice person I knew, who was at the time involved in having a project “Disneyfied,” put on her phone answering machine “... and if this is one of you Disney cocksuckers, I hope you die alone in the dark in excruciating pain from a socially-unacceptable disease”?

Disney, the company responsible for the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, aka The Mickey Mouse Copyright Act, that kept the Mouse out of Public Domain for another 70 years while eviscerating the concept of “intellectual property”?

Disney, the place commonly called “Mauschwitz” by those who have worked there?

Disney, the company that really didn’t like seeing people like me show up at The Most Wonderful Place On Earth?

Disney? That place? I have to defend Disney now? Really??

iT’S IRONIWell, now that we have gotten to threats of government retaliation from the Party of Free Enterprise and No Government Intervention, with Bitch-of-Belsen Laura Ingraham threatening reprisals against private corporations for engaging in free speech, saying on her show last Thursday: “When Republicans get back in power, companies like Apple and Disney need to understand one thing: Everything will be on the table, your copyright/trademark protection, your special status in certain states, and even your corporate structure itself…”

Now that we have Ron DeSantis, upset by Disney’s criticism of his legislation restricting teaching about sexual orientation,threatening retaliation against his state’s biggest private employer, giving support to calls to strip Disney of its 55-year special status that allows the company to act as a government around Disney World in Orlando, stating that Disney “crossed the line” with their statement following his signing of the “Don’t Say Gay” bill that they would work to see it repealed or overturned in the courts.

Now that these things happened...

We’ve been assured by all the “smart people” that DeSantis is just a normal Republican and not at all a Trump-clone.

But there’s a word for the use of state power to threaten and punish private individuals and entities for political speech. Starts with “f” and ends with “m,” seven letters.

It’s ironic that believers in democracy need to defend Disney, the company founded by Unca Walt, a guy who really did like that Mussolini could claim he made the trains run on time, the guy who went after his cartoonists for being “communists” in 1941 for wanting to create a cartoonist’s union, the guy who promoted “snitching” by employees on his “campus” there in Burbank, the guy who was one of the most ambitious supporters of McCarthy and the Hollywood Blacklist. If he wasn’t an out-and-out fascist, he was certainly “fascist adjacent.”

And now we have to defend the company he founded against shit like the following:

Christopher Rufo, the wingnut scum who creates the memes for their bullshit “culture war” issues, the guy who came up with calling everything having to do with race they don’t like “Critical Race Theory,” claimed last week that the head of Disney said something in a video that she clearly did not say, firing up the wingnut jihadis against Disney with what he excitedly described as a SCOOP: “Disney corporate president Karey Burke says, ‘as the mother [of] one transgender child and one pansexual child," she supports having "many, many, many LGBTQIA characters in our stories" and wants a minimum of 50 percent of characters to be LGBTQIA and racial minorities.”

He attached a video with the smoking wokeness, only the video doesn’t say that at all. Nowhere in the video posted by Rufo does Karey Burke say she “wants a minimum of 50 percent of characters to be LGBTQIA and racial minorities.”

Even the Washington Examiner acknowledged Rufo was full of shit: “In the video, Burke does not appear to make the claim regarding half of Disney characters that Rufo cites. However, she does say that ‘we don't have enough [LGBT] leads,’ despite having ‘many, many, many LGBTQIA characters.’"

Rufo could have run a correction, but instead he and the other crazies are doubling down.

Rather than admit he was wrong, Rufo insists on the “truthiness” of his deception, by pointing to something different that someone else wrote in some other place.

So, once again, everything these people say is a lie. They live in an alternative universe where up is down, in is out, left is right, and day is night. Or as I used to describe it, “Wingnut World, where the sky is green and the grass is blue.”

And at least a good third of the 70 million droolers who voted for Fatso Fatass in 2020 believe them on any given spew of their bullshit.

This stuff isn’t new. Richard Hofstadter wrote about it 68 years ago in “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt”:

“It can most accurately be called pseudo-conservative — I borrow the term from the study of The Authoritarian Personality published five years ago by Theodore W. Adorno and his associates — because its exponents, although they believe themselves to be conservatives and usually employ the rhetoric of conservatism, show signs of a serious and restless dissatisfaction with American life, traditions and institutions. They have little in common with the temperate and compromising spirit of true conservatism in the classical sense of the word, and they are far from pleased with the dominant practical conservatism of the moment as it is represented by the Eisenhower Administration. Their political reactions express rather a profound if largely unconscious hatred of our society and its ways — a hatred which one would hesitate to impute to them if one did not have suggestive clinical evidence.

“From clinical interviews and thematic apperception tests, Adorno and his co-workers found that their pseudo-conservative subjects, although given to a form of political expression that combines a curious mixture of largely conservative with occasional radical notions, succeed in concealing from themselves impulsive tendencies that, if released in action, would be very far from conservative. The pseudo-conservative, Adorno writes, shows “conventionality and authoritarian submissiveness” in his conscious thinking and “violence, anarchic impulses, and chaotic destructiveness in the unconscious sphere. . . . The pseudo conservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition.”

Trump didn’t create this. He’s just the inheritor of 70 years of bullshit.

And now I have to defend Disney against these scum.

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