by John Pilger
What immediately endeared Griswald to me was his disastrous odyssey to the juvenile Heaven on Earth. At an overnight stop, he tied the family dog to the back of the car and forgot about it. Further on, he was persuaded to pick up an unloved aunt who, once on board, expired. Thinking this one through, Griswald tied the body to the luggage rack, finally depositing it on the doorstep of an equally unloved cousin. ‘Nothing can stop us now, kids!’ he declared. ‘Wallyworld, here we come!’
When he finally reached Wallyworld, it was closed for repairs. Griswald, being American, pulled a gun and demanded that the security guard open it up. (I won’t tell you what happened then; you’ll have to get out the video.)
None of this was necessary when Zoë and I arrived at the gates of the real Wallyworld the other day. As a precaution, I had had my hair cut. Long before Zoë was born, in the days when the length of your hair was as hot a political issue as trees are today, I sought entry into Wallyworld, only to be stopped by a man shaped like a cigar-store Indian with ‘MARVIN’ on his lapel.
‘Sir,’ said Marvin, ‘you have a Factor Ten problem.’ Factor Ten turned out to be ‘undesirable facial hair’ and hair that overlapped your collar. (Factor Seven, mysteriously, was feet.) The Magic Kingdom was then an oasis in an America said to be in turmoil. Disneyland in California, and later Disneyworld in Florida, were places where all those threatening images of long-haired youth, and an unwinnable war in Asia, dissolved into Mickey, Donald et al., and Prince Charming’s castle lit up every night with ‘Honor America’.
Much has, and hasn’t, changed. Facial hair is still an issue, but only for those who work at Disneyworld. They must have none; and their teeth must be white and straight. If you want a ‘life with Disney’, you must wait six months while your background back to childhood is scrutinised. If accepted, you become a Disney Person, relatively well paid and with privileges otherwise regarded as the thin edge of socialism in America: medical cover for you and your family.
Zoë and I are not doing anything by half measures here. We are staying in Disneyworld – actually, on the corner of North Dopey Drive. The street signs have ears and the buses say ‘MK’ (Magic Kingdom). There are Mickey and Goofy dollars that are legal tender: and people are so nice that the trial of an all-American serial killer on the news (not the Disney Channel) comes almost as a relief.
This is not to say there are no ripples here at Disneyworld. The other day as Zoë and I, together with a wedge of other Griswalds and their kids, ran to get Snow White’s autograph, a scrum developed. ‘Please children, please parents,’ implored Snow White, ‘one at a time . . . Oh dear, oh dear, oh shi . . .’ There was no hulking Marvin to protect her. Only ‘new men’ with a pure past now guard the kingdom. They wear pink-striped shirts and they broadcast just the one tape: ‘Have a nice day . . . have a nice evening . . . have a nice day . . . have a nice evening . . .’
Alas, the Griswald pack was soon out of control as small people were thrust forward to be photographed, videotaped and otherwise authenticated by the hand of a Disney star. ‘Please,’ said one of the Nice Days, ‘let’s have some order here.’
‘Assholes,’ mouthed Snow White, her smile intact. Fortunately, several of the Seven Dwarfs were not far behind and were able to create a diversion. The Griswald pack now fanned out to seek the attention of Grumpy, Sleepy and Sneezy. Zoë and I, of course, hung in there.
Something similar occurred in the Hall of Presidents. A huge Griswald in red-striped calf-length shorts and multiple-zoom lens burst in. There were two small Griswalds, one of them armed with a Super Soaker 100, which is a neon-coloured imitation machine gun that spurts water for up to fifty feet. (It’s the current rage here.)
‘Look, you guys,’ said the huge Griswald, ‘they’re all here . . . Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt . . .’
‘This one was a crook wasn’t he, Dad?’
They were standing next to a picture of Richard Nixon that looks like John the Baptist.
‘He was,’ came the reply, ‘our president!’
What is striking is the number of adults here without children. For many, Disneyworld is the logical extension of America itself: a vast shopping mall, albeit with cars and trolleys provided in which to load children instead of groceries. Above all, Disneyworld is brilliant child’s play; and all attempts at deeper analysis usually founder there. America’s two enduring gifts to modern civilised life are its music, based on black culture, and Walt Disney.
Certainly, Disney has given to millions of children all over the world a joy that his best imitators have never quite matched. A friend of mine, Peter Brown, who works for British Airways at Heathrow and helps to organise ‘Dream-flights’ to Florida for seriously ill children, can vouch for the positive effects of that first glimpse of the Magic Kingdom.
Why is Disney different? For one thing, Walt and his original draughtsmen and animators knew about kids. They almost never patronised them. There is a cinema just inside the main gates that shows some of Disney’s earliest, vintage cartoons that are both funny and wry to the point of irony. The story of Goofy as a suburban man who changes personality behind the wheel of his car is unsentimental social comment. I clearly remember seeing it at a Saturday matinee; I must have been only a year or two older than Zoë, who laughed out loud when we saw it together.
The highlight here is the electric parade at night. It was all going magically, as we say, until a great eagle appeared, lit up in incandescent white, its imperial beak spotlighted. ‘HONOR AMERICA!’ the eagle commanded yet again, thereupon the Star Spangled Banner boomed forth in super-fantastic Disneyworld stereo. Missing were Stormin’ Norman as Peter Pan and Saddam Hussein as Captain Hook. Then I read that General Schwarzkopf – whose child victims still suffer in Iraq – has been signed up to tape an ‘I’m going to Disneyworld!’ TV commercial.
He is in good company. According to the porter in my hotel, two US Army helicopters use a clearing near North Dopey Drive and a big, stooped guy with broad shoulder pads can be seen stepping out of one of them. ‘Mr Reagan,’ said the porter, ‘comes down to Disneyworld at least twice a year.’
August 16, 1991
HAVE A NICE WAR
ON VETERANS’ DAY last week, the Walt Disney company announced it was building a new theme park near Washington, devoted to a ‘serious fun celebration’ of American history. ‘This won’t be a Pollyanna view of America,’ said Disney vice-president Robert Weiss. ‘We want to make you feel what it was like to be a slave. We want to make you a Civil War soldier. We’re going for virtual reality. And, look, we’ll be sensitive about the Vietnam War.’4
The Vietnam War, which was America’s longest war, will be part of a permanent exhibition entitled ‘Victory Field’. Just how the war will be ‘sensitively’ depicted is not explained in Disney’s handouts. Neither is there reference to other colonial wars and invasions, such as the assaults on civilian populations in Latin America, the Caribbean and the Philippines. These events are largely eradicated from primary and secondary education in the US, while the Vietnam ‘experience’ is taught, if at all, as a costly, well-intentioned ‘mistake’, even a ‘noble crusade’.
The ‘cost’ is frequently represented in mawkish, self-serving terms that concentrate on America as victim and the relatively few American casualties of the war (compared with the Vietnamese) and the fraudulent saga of Americans missing in action, which was the device for maintaining an 18-year embargo against Vietnam. Hollywood, thankfully, has tired of Vietnam angst and moved on to other box office concerns, leaving the sustenance of myths to others.
Last Friday, the Washington Post devoted almost all of its front page to the Disney announcement and to a story headlined: ‘Our place for healing’. This was the unveiling of a $4 million Vietnam War women’s memorial by Vice President Al Gore. ‘We never listened to the women’s story,’ said Gore, ‘and we never properly thanked them. This memorial does that.’5
The bronze memorial shows three American women helping
a wounded soldier. In fact, most of the women who served in Vietnam were seldom near the fighting, contrary to what is now being suggested. They were nurses, secretaries, clerks, air traffic controllers and intelligence analysts. Eight were killed in fifteen years of war.
During the same period more than five million Vietnamese died, a disproportionate number of them women. These women died beneath a rain of American bombs and ‘anti-personnel’ devices that made Vietnam a laboratory for the new technology of ‘civilian wars’. They died in the paddies and fields, in fragile bunkers, trying to protect their children from the Napalm that struck their villages in great blood-red bursts. In North Vietnam, they died in all-woman militias, courageously putting up a curtain of small-arms fire as American F105s and Phantoms came in at 200 feet; and they died on hillsides such as Dong Loc, where I found the graves of an entire anti-aircraft battery, of young women . . . Vo Thi Than, aged 22, Duong Thi Than, aged 19. And they died in prison ‘tiger cages’, tortured to death, and from drug overdoses in brothels and bars that served the invader.
And they are still dying from the effects of the American programme of defoliation, which was known as Operation Hades until it was changed to the friendlier Operation Ranch Hand, and which destroyed almost half the forests, and poisoned the earth and food chain. As a result of the chemicals used, countless Vietnamese women continue to give birth to babies without eyes and brains.
So Gore is right when he says ‘we never listened to the women’s story’. In America there is no ‘place for healing’ for the women of Vietnam, just another reminder of how the historical truth can be manipulated in an open society. President Bush may have been right when he announced in 1991 that his ‘victory’ in the Gulf had extinguished the ‘Vietnam syndrome’, which is the euphemism for the deep misgivings of many Americans for what their government did in Vietnam.
I happened to be interviewing a former US government official, who served in South East Asia, the day after the Disney announcement and the memorial unveiling. A troubled man, he spoke about the killing of a third of the population of East Timor by the Indonesian dictatorship, which was armed and encouraged by the same Washington group responsible for the devastation of Vietnam; he mentioned Henry Kissinger’s name a great deal. Looking out at the falling leaves in Connecticut Avenue, he said, ‘You know, I walk past these memorials and I think it’s a real shame people are not aware that our dead are a fraction of those we killed or whose deaths we oversaw. This distance between myth, the big lie, and truth, is amazing to me, even after all these years.’
There will be no tableau for East Timor in Disney’s ‘Victory Field’. And I doubt if El Salvador will be represented, even though the truth of what happened there – and is still happening – made a brief public appearance last week. Some 12,000 official documents, released under pressure from Congress, revealed that Presidents Reagan and Bush conspired with the tyrants running the death squads in El Salvador. Some 75,000 people were killed between 1980 and 1991, most of them murdered by death squads and by government ‘security forces’, equipped, funded and often trained by the US. Today, El Salvador is said to be a United Nations ‘peace triumph’. In fact, friends of Reagan and Bush are still running the death squads. In August, they killed 271 ‘suspected leftists’.6 This is their contribution to the election next month, in which the left and popular forces have been persuaded by the UN to take part. President Clinton has promised to restore $11 million in aid to the new El Salvador regime.
And will the ‘sensitive’ treatment of Vietnam by Disney extend to Operation Restore Hope in Somalia? The similarities are striking. The American ‘gunship’ attacks on civilians are little different from Vietnam, where the helicopter ‘gunship’ was developed as an effective means of ‘pacifying’ people on the ground. And Clinton, who is said to have opposed the war in Vietnam, has strongly backed its rapacious echo in Somalia. Most of the dead are, of course, ‘local’ – a Washington term. In Vietnam, they were known as ‘merelies’, short for ‘merely gooks’.
In the second half of the twentieth century, the Vietnam War provides us with a unique historical context; it remains the touchstone for understanding modern imperialism. Those who were seduced into believing that George Bush sent the marines to Somalia for charitable purposes would have been spared their present disillusionment had they referred to the ‘saviour’ role of the marines in Vietnam in 1965. The places, personalities and immediate goals may change; the presumptions of power do not.
I think Disney should not be too ‘sensitive’ in its approach to Vietnam. It should proclaim that the war was at least a partial victory for America. Most of the American objectives were met. Vietnam was physically ruined and the ‘virus’ of its alternative development model stopped from spreading to the region. An American-led blockade forced the Vietnamese to all but abandon the gains of their system, such as universal health care and education, and to welcome the IMF and the World Bank, which are presently busy ‘restructuring’ the country to fit into the ‘global economy’. After a half century of repelling invaders, the Vietnamese now advertise themselves as ‘the cheapest labour in Asia’.7 I have never quite understood why Hollywood failed to acknowledge this achievement. Surely, in the ‘virtual reality’ of Disney’s Victory Field, the time is right.
November 19, 1993
THE SECRET VALLEY
IT SITS LIKE Picasso’s horseman in a terraced field of maize. Around the rider’s neck is a blue saddlebag, which is quiet now. For a while Bruno stood there, like a condemned man beneath a tree, grieving the silence.
I have known Bruno for almost as long as I have known Italy. He is one of the last to make charcoal in an earthen kiln, La Carbonaia, a natural source of energy that goes back millennia. He is as thin as a grasshopper and has worked his Tuscan farm since II Duce’s day. This is not classic Tuscany; the terrain is rugged and harsh. Umbria is just over the ridge, and the spurs of the mountains interlock in such a way that their sweep and acoustics are dramatic. When the late summer storms come, bringing swollen thunderheads and great arches of lightning, the echo is similar to that of heavy artillery. When Mita, who is Bruno’s wife, delivers her early morning monologue, all of us in the valley are informed of her wishes.
Bruno’s father, Agostino, whom I met when I first came here twenty years ago, was a commanding presence in what he called la valle segreta: the secret valley. His snap brim hat was always straight, his collarless shirt buttoned to the neck. He bought his farm with his demob money following the First World War and got it for a good price, he claimed, because he agreed to marry the daughter of the owner, a priest. He and Mario Rossi, the great accordion player, and the young Gianfranco Valli, were the patroni then – although Gianfranco was a part-time patrone. He was a veterinarian who served Cine Città, the movie studios in Rome, and who was described as ‘the vet to the stars’. He had a wonderfully dry wit, delivered imperiously; he would declare, ‘It was I who saved the life of Elizabeth Taylor’s poodle!’
But I digress. Gianfranco is dead, crushed in his small vineyard when his jeep rolled over him three years ago this week. So too is Mario Rossi, who played the Mexican Hat Dance through the night at the festa that welcomed my friends and me, and our families, into the valley; so too is Agostino Antolini. And so is Diamanta, Agostino’s widow.
Bruno is patrone now. He is not a model farmer of the kind approved in Brussels. He has a confusion of wheat, olive trees and trellised vines, with tobacco as the only cash crop. In 1974, the year the electricity came, he and Mita were still living by barter. In 1981, the year they got the phone on and the bathroom with bidet was built above the stables, they were fully fledged consumers. I remember seeing for the first time the strange, flickering blue light of television in the silhouette of their fifteenth-century house. Directly behind and above them is the Monte Maggio, with its forest wall of beech, oak and chestnut. It was on these slopes that Mita’s family, who were landless peasants, worked as share-croppers. So it is not
surprising that she, not Bruno, is the most ambitious consumer; there is a second bathroom downstairs now, with gold taps and lights around the mirror.
As for Bruno, well, these days he is under siege from i cinghiali, the wild boar that come down from the Monte Maggio. They come when he leaves the fields and they eat the maize until he reappears at sunrise. They respect his authority, clearly. He carries only his ancient zappa, a heavy steel mattock balanced on a long wooden handle. So it made sense that he should make the scarecrow look like himself, or how he wished to look. It is mounted on a wooden steed, ever vigilant, an heroic figure. It even wears his best blue cap.
But the wild boar don’t give a damn. They come and eat the maize anyway. I doubt if they would be as bold were Diamanta, Bruno’s mother, alive. Like the boar, she would prowl the fields in the pre-dawn light, appearing in doorways and windows, motionless, hollow-eyed and swathed in black, scaring the wits out of bambini and unsuspecting foreigners.
So Bruno thought of something new. On my first night back in the valley, just before midnight, when all sound is limited to the plop of falling fruit, Bruno brought up his own artillery. For seven straight sleepless hours the valley was blasted by rap, heavy metal, Motown, Madonna, Kylie Minogue, Elvis and none other than Richie Benaud. Now Richie is normally a soft-spoken bloke; but here he was at four in the morning bellowing an old Test score to non-cricketing fans from Teverina to Seano. Richie, inexplicably, was on the tape that Bruno had made and which was broadcast at multi-decibel level from an outsized speaker in the saddlebag of his wooden Don Quixote. When I pleaded for a respite the next morning, he said, ‘Wild boars hate music,’ though he failed to explain why they should have it in for cricket.
Had I not realised this was a Bruno plot, I might have taken action similar to that of the miscreants who, in understandable desperation, shot out the speakers of the Miracle Nun of Teverina. The Miracle Nun lived nearby, in a hilltop fortress guarded by Filipinos. She claimed to have been blind and to have had her sight restored by a vision of the Virgin. This was fine; but there was a sinister and pecuniary air about her sect, like that of the Moonies; and she herself was seldom seen. But she was heard. At night three-foot speakers dispensed her diatribe to a local population that, while respectful of the Church, has a history of anti-clericism. One night there were four shotgun blasts and silence was restored. The Miracle Nun has now gone, owing, it is said, many millions of lire in unpaid tax.