The Lessons of Fairyland

 

One of the most alarming trends in modern culture is the suppression of fairy tales and fables. 

These are critically important. Along with reading, writing, and arithmetic, the Bible and the catechism, they are entirely what a proper general education consists of. Fairy tales and fables exist to teach each new generation the vital lessons they need for life. 

And most kids today don’t know them—not the real stories.

Disney has played a role in this—the original Disney. He took the traditional stories and always altered the message to “finding a sex partner is the key to happiness.” Which was never in the original stories, with their spiritual concerns. How much of the sexual “revolution” that began in the 1950s was due to this? For example, in the original Sleeping Beauty, when the prince awakens her with a kiss, the plot is still only half unravelled. Her greatest troubles lie ahead, at the hands of a cannibalistic mother-in-law. The real Snow White is not awakened by a kiss—she is only seven years old--but when her corpse is dropped in transit. Nor is any frog turned into a prince by being kissed—he transforms when thrown against the wall in disgust.

One sees the trend.

But once the tales had been so trivialized, it got worse. Largely at the hands of the latter Disney Corp, but also thanks to feminists and pomos generally. 

The new trend is not just to ignore or suppress the moral lessons, but to invert them; along with the warnings of dangers to a child’s well-being.  One is now to trust wolves and witches and ogres, who are all noble, well-meaning, oppressed and discriminated against. A good way to usher young people into witches’ ovens and ogres’ cooking pots and the wolves’ dark interiors.

It all seems part of a larger holocaust of the young, which is a general narcissistic tendency. Narcissists hate children, over the thought that one day their children will survive them. 

And our society as a whole has been turning narcissistic, immoral and selfish.

Disney Calls for Reparations

 

This little rap from the new Disney+ series “The (New) Proud Family” is causing a stir. It demands reparations for those of darker skin tone on the grounds that “slaves built this country.”

If the current prosperity of the USA is built on the labour of slaves up to a hundred and fifty years ago, why is it that, even at the time of the Civil War, the South, where there were slaves, was far poorer than the North, where there were none? How did nations like Canada, Australia, the UK, Germany, or Japan also get wealthy, without slaves; while any other country you might mention in which African slaves were a large part of the labour force remains relatively poorer: Brazil, Haiti, Jamaica, Trinidad, the other islands of the Caribbean?

Why isn’t black Africa rich?

The “slaves built this country” concept is Marxist: it sees manual labour as the only form of labour and the only source of value. And then black slaves as the only labourers.

Remove this materialist assumption, and it makes better sense to say that folks like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson built the USA. And maybe Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, Walt Whitman, the Wright Brothers, Stephen Foster, Mark Twain, and the like.

It looks as though the US suffered, rather than profited, from slavery. Enslaved workers, perhaps, do not do a very good job of it. And then the US paid a heavy price, in lives, money, and property destruction, to rid itself of slavery. Perhaps more than the profit slavery ever generated, for anyone.

And of course, it only generated profit for a small number of people, perhap one percent of the US population at the time. Poor whites necessarily suffered, as the jobs taken by slaves were not available to them, and their labour was devalued. They too were victims of slavery.

So perhaps we should trace family lines back to the actual slaveholders? Then their descendants could pay the reparations

If we did so, it is likely that many of their descendants would turn out to be the very blacks demanding reparations. Most modern “African Americans” are of mixed race. Much of this mixing surely occurred on the plantations, with plantation owners taking full advantage of their ownership for sexual services. It all has nothing to do, on the other hand, with the probable majority of “white” Americans whose ancestors arrived in America after the days of slavery.

Of course, there are other reasons to see the demand for reparations as nonsensical. It requires the sort of “blood guilt” that led to the persecution of the Jews for centuries. Everyone who was ever enslaved is now dead. Everyone who enslaved them is also dead. Far from being discriminated against, modern American blacks can point to many laws and “affirmative action” programs that discriminate in their favour.

One might counter with the “lingering effects of slavery.” Then what about the lingering effects of the Holocaust on the Jews? That was worse, and more recent. The lingering effects of the Great Famine and indentured servitude on the modern Irish—now apparently the richest nation per capita in Europe? The lingering effects of the Holodomir on modern Ukrainian-Americans? The Armenians? The Chinese?  Why are they not suffering economically as blacks are, and why are they not also deserving of reparations?

One reason these other groups are more successful, perhaps, is that they have never learned to depend on handouts. The result, not of slavery, but of progressive Marxist "Great Society" programs.

Underwater

 

There is a lot of opposition online to the new Disney trailer for a live-action remake of “The Little Mermaid.” Last I checked, it had over 1.5 million “down votes.”

My initial reaction is surprise. There is so little to the trailer; so there seems little to object to. Just a lot of underwater scenery, then a closeup of Ariel singing a few bars of a song, from a sitting position. No hint of action, character, or plot.

That may be the problem: there is so little here. Comments seem to emphasize this, ironically, by referring to the part they liked best, yet citing dialogue not in the trailer. The point is: there is nothing here.

Yes, Ariel in the clip is black. Who cares? What colour is a mermaid’s skin?

With the framing, Disney seems to offer no other reason to see the film but to see Ariel as black. That, however you cut it, is dull, an insult to the audience’s intelligence, and offensively racist.

Was Walt Disney Naughty?

Dante doesn't mention it, but I'm sure there must be a special place in hell reserved for biographers.

Not all biographers, to be sure, but for a certian type: those who write the inevitable highly-critical “revisionist” biography of a famous person after his death. The act itself is inherently cowardly, and inherently dishonest: the subject, no longer alive, can no longer defend himself, let alone sue for slander. It is done with the soul of a Lee Harvey Oswald or Sirhan Sirhan: the perpetrator seeks fame and fortune from the accomplishments of someone else, while at the same time destroying those accomplisments and their true author. Even if the accusations are true, they can serve no purpose, after the subject is dead, and so necessarily are the sin of calumny even when they are not a libel.

On YouTube, I recently ran across such a piece, done by Britain's TV 4, on Walt Disney. Their claims against them, as I could isolate them, were the following:
That he employed women in the relatively menial job of inker, but did not employ them as illustrators.
That he was anti-semitic.
That he took credit for everything the studio did, though he was not in fact the artist.
That he was actually a lousy artist who could not even draw Mickey Mouse.
That he fought unionization of Disney Studios.
That he was an informant for the FBI.
That he testified in front of the House Committee on Unamerican Activities, and named people as Communists.

Let's look at them one by one, in Disney's defense.

That he employed women in the relatively menial job of inker, but did not employ them as illustrators.

That's just good sense. Women would be better at inking than men, because they have greater manual dexterity. This is the same reason they were universally preferred, at the time, as secretaries. But to put them in responsible jobs requiring a very high level of expertise did not make sense, because they would almost always leave their jobs at marriage.

That he was anti-semitic.

This seems to be a total fabrication, perhaps an urban legeng. Disney hired scads of Jews for his studio, and many of his closest associates were Jewish. He donated to Jewish charities. He was Beverley Hills Bnai Brith's man of the year in 1955.

That he took credit for everything the studio did, though he was not the artist.

First, this is just good business. Aunt Jemima didn't really cook all those pancakes, either. Sara Lee didn't make all those cakes. Putting a single human face forward as spokesperson is of great value in establishing a brand, and in Disney's case, it was far more authentic than most. I'm sure no one really thought he drew all those pictures personally, did they?

Second, this follows well-established practice in the art world. In the case of sculptors or even painters, since the Renaissance and before, the named artist very commonly only supervised the work, with details left to apprentices. But, because it was his vision, it is still considered his work. Surely it is reasonable to do the same with movies?

That he was actually a lousy artist who couldn't even draw Mickey Mouse.

Disney may not have been as good a draughtsman as many he employed, but he was surely legitimately an artist. First, that is what he was trained in, and that is how he began—by drawing his first illustrations and cartoons himself. Second, anyone can see a single, unified vision behind the great Disney animations; anyone can tell there is one mind and one voice behind them. Anyone can see this voice was lost when Disney died.

That he fought unionization at Disney Studios.

Why wouldn't he? It was more or less his duty as an executive. Unionization is bad for business. Ask Detroit. But even so, Disney claimed later that he was not fighting against unions per se, and pointed out that Disney Studio recognized over thirty different unions in their operations. The problem was with this particular union, because it was refusing to allow a free vote of members. Disney claimed to be defending his workers' rights.

That he was an informant for the FBI.

This claim has apparently not been proven. But if so, why is that a bad thing? Isn't it, rather, the sort of thing one normally would expect of a responsible citizen, so long as the government is not oppressive? Aren't we more or less legally obliged to give the law enforcement authorities all possible assistance?


That he testified in front of the House Committee on Unamerican Activities, and named people as Communists.

The actual transcript of Disney's testimony is available online.

http://filmtv.eserver.org/disney-huac-testimony.txt

In it, Disney says nothing unreasonable. He does not name anyone as a Communist, because, as he notes, nobody can ever really know. He gives the names of people he suspects are Communists, and explains why he thinks so. Why wouldn't he?

Of course, as has since been revealed thanks to now-released Soviet archives, the US State Department and the Hollywood Studios really were targets for Soviet penetration, and many there really were active Soviet agents, apparently including the first name Disney puts forward.

So where's the problem? There is a problem, I suppose, if you hold the entire idea of opposing and rooting out Communists to be illegitimate, and a violation of one's freedom of thought. Then Disney is guilty of something—along, of course, with most Americans of his time. But I think there is genuine room for the thesis that Communism as a movement was bent upon overturning the American system of government. If so, to actually sign up for the Communist Party would be, legitimately, the classic crime of treason. This is not usually considered a trivial offense. And concealing the identities of those you suspected of it would not be a patriotic act.

The real question, I suppose, is this: when, in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, the Soviet Union targeted the American entertainment industry, the American press, and the American education system for infiltration, subversion, and conversion to their ideological purposes, did they succeed?