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Big Brother by Mickey Mouse

Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World. Carl Hiaasen, Ballantine, NY, 1998.
ISBN 0345-42280-5. 83 p.

Are you curious about Disney's motivations regarding historic preservation?
What is the company that was once king of cartoons (and is now, ahem, the
leader of the country's new cultural elite) planning to do with the New
Amsterdam Theater at New York City's Times Square? And, its abandoned plans of
an historic theme park at Haymarket, Virginia nearby the Manassas National
Battlefield? Are you interested in imagining what a colossal multinational
entertainment conglomerate might do if unleashed in Cuba, where there is
currently an impoverished preservation movement that is struggling for funds?
Would you like an insight into the real estate developer's land grabbing, mind
controlling, culture warping tactics? If any of the above applies to your
sense of preservation activism then this slim volume is a worthy read.

"Disney's recent ambitions in Times Square are modest compared to its original
mission in Florida: to establish a sovereign state within a state, a private
entertainment Mecca to which every working family in America would be lured at
least once and preferably several times."

It is evident that with the artfulness of an archetypal trickster Walt's
dreams went a lot further in the vein of fabricated history and unquestioned
dominion than the comparatively meager cultural propaganda of J.D. Rockefeller
with Colonial Williamsburg and Henry Ford with Greenfield Village. This is an
opportunity to look hard at the bone of the post-industrial vision.