On Main Street, in Disney World, I am moved thinking back on my long and deep writerly fascination with Walt Disney and his powerful and creative notions of technology. It seems I’ve been coming to Orlando for much of my adult life – for Wired, Rolling Stone, for a book I was working on with daughter, with Maria, to the vet conferences here. I see the power of the corporate way everywhere, in the vast complex of Disney that grown beyond even Walt’s fertile imagination and also in the growing corporate scientific and medical presence at the North American Veterinary Conference.
In past years, I enjoyed wandering around the booths of the small exhibitors who usually gave away cups of jelly beans and licorice sticks to lure the vets into examining their treats, funky collars, colorful sweaters, pet jewelry, and surgicial instruments. Most of them are gone and in their place have come the big companies selling medicine, and expensive surgical and hospital equipment. Big medicine and big money health care has come to you and your vet, ready or not. These companies are in very in huge booths and they are not giving away jelly beans but Ipads. You get the same sense at Disney where Walt’s ideas about utopian communities and his naive belief that technology and the imagination would make the world a perfect place have been usurped by synergistic marketing and movie tie-ins. There are as many market researchers with notebooks crawling around as characters.
I am noone to complain about the corporate world, although I have. I am giving that up, as it seems a bit hypocritical when I have a corporate publisher and have accepted the money and generousity of corporations to come to Orlando and talk to vets, which I really enjoy doing. They have been very good to me, and I appreciate it.
I need – want – to keep my sense of individualism, but drop the clucking. Americans like corporations. They like to vacation with them, shop with them, and get their law, medicine and health care from them. Who am I to squawk about that? Or to tell other people how they ought to spend their money. I am letting go of the idea that I know what is best for others.
In fact, I have a sense at NAVC this week that I’m at a turning point in terms of acceptance. I walked through the convention floor with Maria and I didn’t see one booth I wanted to stop at. I didn’t pick up any free candy. What, I thought, is this writer doing here, really? So as much as I enjoy communicating with vets, I have the curious sense that this isn’t my place anymore. There’s no good guys or bad guys in that, just messages.
Disney is more complex. The man and his spirit and legacy touches me, and doubt that I will leave him behind. It touches something inside of me, which is how I know I am connected to something. Every time I come to Disney World, I come and talk to Walt at his statue with Mickey Mouse near Disney World. See what you’ve done, I say.
