Detail, Splash Mountain, the Song of the South ride at Disneyland, 15 March 2009

Except when performing my duties as doting uncle or trusted family friend, I tend to prefer children in small doses and at a safe distance.  It should come as no surprise therefore that I am (mercifully) childless, and that until recently I had never been to Disneyland, a place I could only imagine being overrun by hordes of unruly little creatures with questionable conversation skills, voracious appetites and limited attention spans.  Cheek by jowl with something that won't stop asking questions, leaves sticky handprints and bites is not my idea of a good time.  A dear friend, however, stunned that my otherwise worldly resume should be so lacking in what he considered an essential experience, took matters into his own hands this past weekend, and off we went.

Of course I still cannot say whether Disneyland is the happiest place on earth, but I can safely say it is one of the more expensive.  Not only that, this past Sunday it was busy.  Whole enormous families trooping along beside and past us, and none of them I might add looked like they'd missed any meals lately.  My friend told me the parks can't keep up with the increased demand for the rental double-strollers, not for a spike in twin births but because so many of these extra large bundles of joy who won't fit in the single-serving sized ones.  So much for tightening our belts in this economic downturn.  Hard times, you say?  Who's cutting back?  Not these American families come for fun.  In a fleeting moment of objectivity, before sensory overload made logical thinking futile,  I attempted to calculate what an average daddy might expect to lay out in a few days here, excluding airfare, and I soon gave up the math, even more grateful I had no one tugging on my sleeve with suggestions on how to further deplete the family fortune.  

Disneyland is the ultimate achievement of capitalism, a beautiful and charming experiment in the art of creating and sustaining desire, an acropolis dedicated to consumption, immaculately maintained and manicured (I understand the gardeners come in and work at night after closing -- I saw not a single wilted leaf or dead flower anywhere).  The place is nothing if not a clever and sometimes cloying and yet very convincing study in seduction.  You keep thinking you are close.  "We must be close," I said, shortly after parking, although by that time we'd already passed through several gates and entry ways, and each time I had assumed and then dismissed the notion that we had reached the "main entrance."  Little did I know.  At Disneyland you are always close, which is part of the fun of delayed gratification, the anticipation of satisfying that desire -- to arrive, to get to the top, to get to the bottom, to ... you get the idea.  You are always close, and not as close as you think you are.  Disneyland has written the book on how to move people more or less willingly through queues and lines, and although we frowned when one of the more cynical members of our party made references to wooden bars of soap and fake shower heads and cattle cars, he was not so far off, in a way.  Like the Nazis, the designers and creative minds behind Disneyland know there's an art to getting a large group of people to do what you want them to do.  The Final Solution here, however, isn't death; it's the very opposite.  It is about getting people to line up for Happiness. 

Yes, I admit one could argue that the ultimate fun in life (Heaven, for instance, if you're a Christian or a Muslim, which will involve, depending on your persuasion, clouds and angels and gold harps and crowds of willing virgins), also involves dying.  And for the profane among us, let us not forget that "the little death" is a euphemism for a different kind of bliss.  But I digress.  No one really dies at Disneyland -- the pirates in the Caribbean are terrible shots, not able to hit the broad side of a ship with their canon balls splashing all around you.  And those skeletons?  And those piles of glittering booty and bullion stolen from whom, exactly?  I saw a giant menorah in that room of stolen gold and treasure back there with Johnny Depp -- but I'm gettting ahead of myself.

At one stage of the entering -- after the parking lot, after the tram ride to the entrance, after the walk from the tram to another entrance to the ticket kiosks to the entrance with the floral display of Mickey -- at some point we walked through an underpass and emerged into a turn-of-the-last-century town square. "You're now inside the berm," my host explained.

"The berm?"

He indicated the gentle graded earthen wall fortification which encircled the Magic Kingdom, blocking out any unsightly "real world" elements.  Inside the berm, Disney was in control: now everything you could see as far as you could see was designed to keep you in the fantasy, in the wonderful world of Disney.  You were inside the berm now.  You were in.

You were in and yet you were not in, that is, since the satisfaction of having arrived lasted only long enough to be swept away by the next desire, the next thrill, the next, "Now what?"  It was a kind of endless teasing and foreplay, I realized, and yet, though I was a virgin (of sorts), I kept thinking I knew what I was doing (and you know the type of virgin I mean -- the bossy kind). Oh yes,  I imagined I was more in control than I was, that I could read the signs and predict what came next: how long, for instance, the wait was going to be for the Haunted House, or Indiana Jones; what our chances were of getting on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride; how close to the head of the twisty, turny queue we were for the Matterhorn.  I thought I could tell.  It made me confident and excited at the same time.  It was, as psychologists would say, a way of managing my anxiety and fear -- the fear of disappointment, of rejection, of not getting mine, not getting off, not getting in.  We were always about to be where we wanted to be.  We were always about to satisfy a craving, an urge, a desire, although no sooner did we finish off one, we wanted another; we wanted more.

The subliminal message was everywhere, in the music, in the movement and shapes and colors, in the air: Desire, Consume, Desire, Consume, and since conveniently the metaphors for sex and food and money in our language manage to overlap, you could hear it every where.  Go for it.  Give it to me.  Splurge.  Shoot your wad.  So you felt you were always close.  Don't touch me I'm so close.  Hand me a towel I'm so close. I was shaking from being so over-stimulated and jacked up on sugar and caffeine and nervous energy and all this fun.  To cool me off, my companions suggested Splash Mountain.

The actor James Baskett (1904-1948) is perhaps today best known for his portrayal of Uncle Remus in Disney's 1946 Song of the South.  I have never seen the film but dimly remember the tale of Brer Rabbit and his comrades Brer Fox and Brer Bear and the briar patch.  And now I have been on the ride.  "Why is it called Splash Mountain?" I asked.

"Oh sit in the front," my friends insisted politely, waving toward the hollowed-out log that seats four (At last!  Finally!  We're here!), bobbing in the shallow canal.  We had arrived once more.  We had gotten to the head of the line, this is what we'd been waiting for.  I climbed in, a grown man excited about being in a vehicle I could neither steer nor control, on a motorized track in a watery channel, enroute on a subterranean journey through a tunnel decorated with animated  robots bobbing and twirling in tableaux vivants set to music, the whole thing ending in a roller-coaster climb and scream-inducing final plunge down a water slide.  

And afterward, thoroughly soaked, I wanted to do it again.  Or something like it.  Do something else, do the next thing.  Or eat something.  Or buy something.  I was sure I wanted to buy something.  And eat.  And do the next thing.  The next ride.  I looked about, my hear pounding, my face wet.  Was I happy?  I don't know.  But everywhere, as far as my eyes could see there were things to want and desire and consume.