Team Rodent

How Disney Devours the World

Plot

Disney is so good at being good that it manifests an evil; so uniformly efficient and courteous, so dependably clean and conscientious, so unfailingly entertaining that it's unreal, and therefore is an agent of pure wickedness. . . . Disney isn't in the business of exploiting Nature so much as striving to improve upon it, constantly fine-tuning God's work." --from TEAM RODENT How Disney Devours America "Revulsion is good.

Revulsion is healthy. Each of us has limits, unarticulated boundaries of taste and tolerance, and sometimes we forget where they are. Peep Land is here to remind us; a fixed compass point by which we can govern our private behavior. Because being grossed out is essential to the human experience; without a perceived depravity, we'd have nothing against which to gauge the advance or decline of culture; our art, our music, our cinema, our books. Without sleaze, the yardstick shrinks at both ends. Team Rodent doesn't believe in sleaze, however, nor in old-fashioned revulsion.

Square in the middle is where it wants us all to be, dependable consumers with predictable attitudes. The message, never stated but avuncularly implied, is that America's values ought to reflect those of the Walt Disney Company, and not the other way around.

About the Author
Carl Hiaasen (born March 12, 1953) is an American writer, author and journalist. A long-time columnist for the Miami Herald and Tribune Content Agency, Hiaasen has also written more than 20 novels which can generally be classified as humorous crime fiction and often feature themes of environmentalism and political corruption in his native Florida. He began his career as a news reporter and by the late 1970s had begun writing novels in his spare time. In 2002, he also started publishing books for young readers. Two of his novels have been made into feature films.