I got to pondering in my meanest wolf way this teevee special I saw last night on Uncle Walt Disney’s Goofy teevee network, ABC (the Animated Boob Company), where Diane Sawyer, who really does look like Martha “Jailbait" Stewart, is in North Korea, walking around in her designer teevee doll clothes, Diane’s trademark style being masculine, black pants and jacket with a tailored man’s-type white shirt, no tie, but she could easily wear a man’s tie with this outfit. One time she comments on how the North Koreans all dress alike, the women in tailored but drab pants and jackets, not much different from what the men are wearing. Then she goes prowling among their schools, shops, streets, and ends up getting permission (she keeps intimating that they’ve needed permission to film everywhere they go) to visit a typical family apartment. That’s the final occasion in these US network specials when they go to commie countries, like when they used to do specials on “inside the Soviet Union,” remember those? They always end up taking you into one of their Disney-labeled “drab” apartments, emphasizing as they exit the elevator and start down the hall toward the apartment how low the lighting is in the hallways, how “drab”—a Disney word—everything is. Then they get to the apartment. It’s always the apartment of a younger couple with young children. The couple Diane visited were exactly that, young and with curtainclimbers. [I live among Asians here in NYC and I gotta tell you, their kids are the best damn little rascals you’ll ever see, bending immediately to mother-commands and following like little lambs their mama-san elders who take care of them during the day while their parents are out working like dogs running restaurants, delis, junk stores, karaoke parlors, massage parlors, contracting companies, flea markets. Good kids, though the more Americanized they become the more sociopathic they get and when they get to be teenagers, iPods, cell phones, and the use of the word “fuck” become their favorite pastimes.]
And this nice Korean couple is friskily bowing like animated butterflies to big tall Diane as she pretends it’s so cramped in this apartment—the apartment is in a 50-story high rise right in the middle of Pyongyang, a huge city filled with 50-story buildings, which Diane especially pointed out as looking great on the outside (architecturally exactly like the 50-story high rises going up all over NYC—and I’m sure Diane Sawyer lives high up in one of those herself) but as being wrecks on the inside, with elevators that don’t work (implying people who live on the 50th floor have to walk up and down every day), with no water or electricity.
Diane keeps emphasizing right in the faces of the commie couple how cramped the apartment is. The couple keeps bowing and, by God, hey, Diane, look, they're smiling at you. As is also the usual with these Uncle Walt specials, this man and woman are chemical engineers or physicists, you know, always some high academic job, jobs that pay the big bucks in NK; of course, nothing like old Diane socks away offshore, or at least that again is Diane’s implication as she sneers at this couples’s cozy-looking-to-me apartment on the grounds that since they're the highest paid workers in North Korea, couldn't they live better than this? Also, I was quick to notice the commie couple, who were, yes, midgets compared to big tall fine gourmet-fed Diane, did not look like they were starving, nor did their curtainclimbers. They all seemed healthy as Shetland ponies.
So I got to further thinking. In this country, when Diane does a piece on US apartments and homes, they always show the most expensive F-ing places in the most expensive areas of the country, usually celebrity apartments and homes—I mean gaudy with Capitalist geegaw, totally worthless shit, actually a waste of money most of the crap, and then there's the usual pool, the usual hot tub, the usual bar, the usual fabulous stereo system, the usual work-out room, the usual views, the usual marble and granite, though when you look close you see the sheetrock and aluminum stud walls and cheap crap you see in any old Yahoo home or apartment. Never does Diane take you to say an apartment in the South Bronx section of NYC. The only time they show you those apartments is on the local news when a brutal landlord is exposed or it’s winter and old people and children are freezing to death in NYC apartments because they have no heat, their elevators don’t work, they have no running water, their toilets are stopped up, their ceilings are leaking and collapsing—why Diane “Super Star” Sawyer wouldn’t get her Ferragamos vilified by going into the South Bronx and visiting say one of the apartments of a single mother with six kids who Mussolini Rudi Guiliani took off welfare when he was mayor-for-a-day and put to work doing slave work—like scrubbing down the subway platforms all night for chicken feed wages…shit. Sorry, it’s the maddening wolf in me. I’m growling; it's like these creeps are coming after my precious young elk carcass I’ve just gutted—stay away, you bastards! It’s my fresh kill, dammit.
Hey, Diane, baby, come over to thegrowlingwolf’s den and lets talk elevators working or having plenty of heat on the coldest damn days of the year. We used to joke in my building about having plenty of heat when it was in the 50s and having no heat when the temperatures dropped below 20. Ah, come on, Diane. I bet you didn’t grow up living in a penthouse overlooking Central Park. I’ll bet you were nothing but a little cheerleader type just like Katie Couric and Martha Stewart.
I watched the Disney network again this morning—ABC (the Animated Bullshit Company)—and all of their shows were aimed at a numbskull kid population, the adventures of Hollywood kids, fabulous adventures all over the world without a parent in sight, all of these geeky shows sponsored by Disney films being released either in the theaters or on DVDs. It seems the Disney Cartoon Kingdom and Fairyland Workshop can turn out 4 or 5 movies a week if these commercials aren't lying, most of them animated, though now they’re combining animated characters with real live actors in one movie they were promoting. All of Walt Disney's wonderworlds seem to have something to do with the worship of kings and queens and princesses and princes—monarchies—even The Lion King, dig it? Check it out: all of Disney's kids's fantasy shit promotes a monarchy as the ideal state. There are never many parents involved in Disney kid movies--it's kids alone against the horrible devilish tricks of nature in the battle of human kids versus the animal kingdom. I suppose Walt Disney believed if we all were anthropomorphized our problems would all be solved.
Uncle Walt's first cartoon character, Mickey’s predecessor, Steamboat Willie, was a wise ass cocky mouse that reminds me of Itchy on The Simpsons. But then, Steamboat Willie turned into Mickey, and, dammit, I grew up with a choice of watching Disney cartoons or Loony Toons or Merry Melody cartoons (Warner Brothers cartoons) and I chose the Loonies and the Merry Melodies over Mickey. Why? Because, folks, Mickey Mouse was never funny. Cute, yes, but not funny. Nor was Donald Duck. Goofy was a good idea and was a funny character but only in the sense Goofuses are funny anyway, like Mortimer Snerd, one of Edgar Bergen’s dummies, a typical Hollywood hayseed image of dumbass Yahoo humor.
Compared to Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse deserved to be decapitated in a mouse trap. Bugs and Porky and Daffy and Foghorn Leghorn, bad-ass funny characters—hell, they ruled over Disney’s lame little ninny characters.
Disney has always promoted a monarchy. Look at Snow White. Look at Cinderella. Even the Little Mermaid. Look at the Disney classic Fantasia –same thing, the monarchy rules. Even when Mickey’s the Sorcerer’s apprentice, the supernatural Sorcerer is Mickey’s master. Master/slave. King/peasant. Princess/cleaning maid. That’s the fractured world of old Hollywood pompous Walt Disney. Disney tried to turn New York City into a Disney World but so far they’ve failed, though anyday I expect to see our little-man billionaire mayor announce he’s sold half of Manhattan Island to Disney for a theme park. I’m sure our billionaire mayor must know Michael Eisner; hell, he maybe even knows the whacko Roy Disney.
We live in a cartoon world. Georgie Porgie our “president” is nothing but a cartoon character.
Hell, I, thegrowlingwolf, am a cartoon character.
“Ah-be-ah, ah-be-ah, ah-be-ah, that’s all, folks!”
for The Daily Growler
Walt Disney is being kept on ice in the Epcot Center--which may be a lie but I think he's in a block of ice around Disney World somewhere. When nanomedicine finds a way to restore old Uncle Walt to life, he'll dress up like God and declare Los Angeles, California, as the New Jerusalem--and then turn us all into cartoon characters.
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