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Before this night is done / Their plan will be unfurled / By the dawning of the sun / To take over the world! 20 days until my birthday! |
Tuesday, April 20, 1999 Mice and More Sheesh. First Phebe's place is burglarized, and now Mary Anne's. I suppose it's hard to say there's really a pattern, when they're on opposite ends of the country, but that hasn't kept me from checking the locks on my windows, and looking around my room a bit nervously. At least nobody was hurt. I guess that's the important thing.
Over in English 399, we've started Part II of the semester, in which we'll be tackling three different issues, with each one being led by a third of the class (two or three students). First up is Disney; particularly, how it shapes, influences, and reinforces cultural values. In honor of the occasion, I wore a bright neon pink Mickey Mouse baseball cap. (One size fits all children, and is only a smidgen small on this grown-up.) Class was okay. One of my classmates keeps getting hung up on the notions that Disney is only part of the overall system, and that we're reading way too much into what are only comic books. That's much of the point, though; by seeing how a particular ideology even permeates a mere comic book, one can get a better idea of how pervasive it is in general. Plus, while Disney is, indeed, only part of popular culture, it's one heck of a major part... which gave me the opportunity to go into part of my Disney rant, noting that first they produced the Mighty Ducks movie, for which they named the Mighty Ducks hockey team, for which they produce Mighty Ducks merchandise, which can be bought in their chain of Disney stores, while the movie sequels are discussed on Disney-owned ABC, and the team appears on Disney-owned ESPN. Not to mention the theme parks... and, at this point, one of the two students leading the discussion chimed in with the fact that you can then ride a Disney cruise ship to a Disney-owned island... I kinda regret not having worked in Touchstone and Miramax, especially the latter, but the discussion was veering a bit off topic.
In my mind, it's a race between Michael Eisner, Bill Gates, and Pinky and the Brain to take over the world. I'm kinda rooting for the last of those. (No, I'm not sure if I'm really being serious about that.)
This, I might add, has not kept me from being a consumer of Disney's products. I did see Shakespeare in Love; the Broadway cast recordings of The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast are very high on my list of CDs to buy once I win the lottery; and so on. Hey; knowing about the problem doesn't mean you can escape it. More to the point, one difference between Disney and Microsoft is that Disney's products are actually pretty well made. I don't resent the fact the Microsoft dominates the computer world; I resent the fact that Microsoft dominates the computer world with shoddy software. But now I think I'm really getting off-topic.
Wandering through the library, I came across The World of the Yeshiva: An Intimate Portait of Orthodox Jewry, by William B. Helmreich. I've been skipping through it over the past few days, and the author seems to have done a remarkably good job of describing and analyzing the culture in a way that can be understood by outsiders. It ain't perfect. For one thing, you can't really understand the yeshiva world unless you've been inside it. For another, some of the classifications he makes for ease of description are painted in overly broad strokes, although he does grant that. Finally, this was published in 1982, based on research conducted a couple of years before that, which means that two decades have gone by. A lot has changed since then. With all of that having been said, this does a much better job than I'd anticipated, and I can't think of any other work that even comes close. I'd recommend it to any of you who might be interested in this sort of thing.
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