rhetoric tax

I've harbored a great surplus of ill will. No, I've built whole storage facilities to house the sense of disgust at the manipulation to which many submit in this life. For some reason, I continue to place Disney at the nexus.

This notion dawned on me when I was attending a showing of Spiderman one night, alone, coming off a marijuana buzz. There, in the theater, were parents and children watching with the same childlike awe as one of their childhood heroes fought generically bad guys and the occasional signature supervillain. There, seated next to each other were two kids: one adult kid and one age nominal kid. The invention of childhood is nothing new, but to what it is devoted is a perverse chain of fantasies leading to the consumption of the thing. The thing must be purchased, but it doesn't bring one any closer to attaining the Thing referenced by the thing, which stokes the desire that the perverse fantasy generates within the taught and coarse symbolic universe of youth. That's a world of good and bad, power and impotence; and my God to suckle on the desired end of the dialectical pairing is the closest kids come to drug abuse and intoxication. It's one of many ways that humans as a species spend much of their lives in a mental world loosely tethered to the world of the five senses. How did Kenneth Burke state it? He simply juxtaposed the words image and imagination. And he nailed it.

But before I go into a long harangue about media manipulation I'll simply stick to the topic's core--persuasion. But before I lead up to to my titular coda I want to dovetail into the topic just begun. To single out kids as receptacles for ideas and to build from them whole worlds which require a repertoire of mimed abilities to inhabit is not a new invention. That's the stuff of culture. Our traditional reverence for the aged stems from their wisdom or simply the amount of knowledge that they possess that can and should be passed on for survival, identity, and simply enrichment. That culture is a grab-bag of knots to learn, plants to avoid, cosmologies to kowtow, and stories that teach and entertain is nothing new. As I said, we're beings of time. We fix it in narratives and overlay onto our immediate day-to-day lives to give the moments significance and sometimes a sense of living in the future perfect tense: "I will have done this." We're all little Billy Pilgrims by way of our cultural inheritance, unstuck, as it were in time, living partly as slaves to a past and in the now as organisms reacting to the stimuli before us. The lattice work of sense making we place between our history and our present condition is an important condition of existence as a human.

Now that I've presented a fucking holistic picture of humanity in too many goddamned words, let me get to my point. Friends and family spend less time spinning these webs of significance. No, we're fed so many dead-ended stories about gain that lead us directly to a financial transaction. And to ensure that this process runs smoothly from cradle to grave is the grand manipulating scheme that nations, institutions, and businesses create to ensure that they exist into the future. Without highlighting each one, let me focus on the culture industry that is Disney.

Disney is more than a media company. Disney is more than a kids business. Disney is more than show business. Disney is more than an entertainment company. Disney is more than theme parks. Disney is an overwhelming experience machine. And it employs all the best in their respective crafts, crams them into so many think tanks and creation factories and pumps out the stuff that fill the lives of the youth. They are not alone in this. I simply singled them out for this reason alone. Walt Disneyworld in Florida has recreated the African savannah simply for the sake of experiencing lions "just like in the Lion King dad!", "Yeah son, just like in the Lion King!"

Acid is cheaper.

LSD is cheaper.

A drum circle and some esoteric root preparation is cheaper.

All share the same sense of surreality as the Disney train tour through the African savannah with real lions in Orange County Florida, but Disney's has some real-world impact. And it shows Disney's hand. They will not stop at the sides of the celluloid. They want a panorama of fantasy. They want so much as to manipulate your complete surroundings so that you may be entertained. As if our emaciated little neurons needed so much upon which to sup.

Fuck you Disney and your goddamned fantasy industry.

So to Disney and to all industries that generate their income from manipulating the many into buying their crappy food, clothing, media titles, and likeness I levy a rhetoric tax. To find that many terminally single women retreat to an adolescent moment and dress up as princesses and watch their complete collection of Disney videos while eating various sugary foods I am repulsed. This kind of compulsion to Disney is a mental illness shaped, handled, and maintained for the financial gain of a company that cares not that it's patrons are healthy and happy but that they're entertained.

I entertained an idea once, and it was to wipe Disney off the face of the earth.

Having blown my wad on all the fancy words, I've left no more inspiration for how this tax will be levied, collected, and to what ends it will be spent. To hell with the notion of a rhetoric tax. I was simply driving along to the visual assault of billboards when the notion hit me.

So there, that's your rhetoric tax.

And in the end, we'll continue to remain as kids, never able to make a decision because we grew up in a world saturated by choice. I'm with the homeless-by-choice. I'm for vagabondage. And I accept the bohemian lifestyle. To see a Disney artifact among any of these reminds me that the manipulation industry's objects are like mold spore. They cover the entire face of the earth, they comprise the flotsam on the ocean surface, and they lie dormant waiting for a face.

Perhaps, somewhere out there is a clown fish choking on its likeness only because so damn many of them were produced and thrown away with no thought to where they go. Why? They were too busy being entertained. And when the entertainment becomes the work we do, we have to wonder what happened to our freedom.