In the Guardian Film and Music section today, there was a piece about someone called Selena Gomez. I freely admit to having no knowledge, prior to reading that article, as to who she is or what she does. I discovered that she is the most recent creation to have rolled off the production line at Disney. And it really is a production line. Hilary Duff, Miley Cyrus and the Jonas Brothers all came before her. Right now, in a lab somewhere, there's a foetus developing in a jar that in nine or ten years will star in a breakout role in a Disney film and then go on to recording contracts with Disney's record label, a TV show on the Disney Channel, made-for-TV movies, straight-to-video releases, and then, aged sixteen or some such, that child will be embroiled in a scandal and will be jettisoned like spent fuel from the Disney ship of dreams.
This does not bode well for Selena Gomez. Sure, it's all good now. Riding the wave of global celebrity. Well, sanitised celebrity anyway. So sex, no drugs, no rock and sure as shit no roll. A sell-out tour, legions of adoring (if barely pubescent) fans, platinum albums, a movie career, a hit TV show. For a regular human being, that is one not synthesised in Disney's secret lab, this kind of success in the entertainment industry is unheard of, impossible, the stuff of dreams and peyote hallucinations. But not for Selena Gomez. For her, this is the reality into which she was born (in a manner of speaking). Say what you like about Disney (and, be sure, I am about to) they plan ahead. Gomez is a 1992 vintage. She has, it might be argued, been aged that bit longer than normally would be the case. Perhaps this is due to the persistent success of her predecessors. Perhaps the formula was deemed to have required adjustment. Who knows? Well whoever does, they're not telling anybody about it.
So...what's my point here? Where am I going with this? Well, a lot has been written lately about News International and massive corruption, phone-hacking, political conspiracy, monopolisation of the media and so on, and I'm not going to add to that here. That dead horse has been flogged quite enough for the time being. But Disney...now there's a whole other kettle of fish. What concerns me is that I would, one day, weather permitting, like to have a child. I believe it to be a wonderful adventure and I look forward to passing on whatever wisdom or otherwise I might have gained from my own life etc, etc. But I worry. Yes, I worry that if my child was abducted and murdered that a newspaper would hack into her phone and then use that to fill me with hope that she was still alive and then print the story of my 'new hope' and so on...yes, I worry about that. But more than that, I worry that my child will fall victim to a corporation far more devious and insidious than News International...I worry that they would fall under the control of Disney.
Because you see, Selena Gomez, the Jonas Brothers, Miley Cyrus, they're not harmless entertainment for so-called 'tweenage' girls. They're marketing tools. They're machines for extracting money from parents and turning innocent children into mindless zombies. They do this through their music, TV shows, films, advertising endorsements, magazine interviews, live concerts, shows and public appearances. The article I read began with the story of three young girls who had skipped school to wait outside a London hotel for the appearance of Selena Gomez. This is what I'm talking about. This is not harmless. This is very fucking dangerous and no one seems to give a shit. It's like we've already given up on this generation. They're already lost to the power of Disney. And what kind of message are they getting from their adoptive corporate parents? Well I'm glad you asked, because this is where it gets a lot worse.
Once a child has been absorbed into the collective consciousness that is Disney, they become susceptible to the kind of messages that are encoded in all the products, songs, movies and TV shows. Their belief structure, the belief structure that as a parent, you may well have worked hard on helping them to develop, becomes Disney's belief structure. If my child came home wearing a Promise Ring, spouting that hateful nonsense, I would cry. I would scream out the name of the Beast. I would lament the loss of my child's free spirit. I would do everything in my power to undo that spell. But it's worse, because many parents see it as harmless. Some parents even see it as being a good thing. They encourage it. They buy them tickets to mass occult gatherings like Jonas Brothers concerts. They drive them there, and leave them. They willingly sacrifice their own children to the false gods of children's entertainment. Now I am no fan of organised religion, but wouldn't it be less damaging for a child to hear this crap coming out of the mouth of a Sunday School teacher, someone they're practically pre-programmed to ignore, someone boring and old who probably likes kids a little bit too much...
OK, so maybe I'm advocating handing your child over to a possible sex offender rather than take them to a Jonas Brothers concert...but I think I'm on to something here, so I'm going to run with it. To the modern child, a slightly touchy-feely priest is no figure of authority. A healthy mistrust of religion and the people who practise it is something that I would plan to instill in my own children, although allowing one of them to be molested might be going a bit far. But that's easy. Getting your child to mistrust Disney is surely much harder. The closest thing to a theme park that the Catholic Church possesses is the Vatican City aka Dullsville. The youngest priests are close to a hundred years old. The best looking ones, merely life-size puppets made out of old ball sacks. They're no competition for Jonas Brothers. Where are the friendly, down to earth, sixteen year old girl priests who seem like they live next door even though they inhabit a maximum security compound outside of Los Angeles? You get passed the collection plate in a Church, how much to you give? A pound? A few dollars? How much to you have to spend to satisfy the hunger of Disney? A tenner for a CD, twenty for a DVD, forty for tickets, not to mention the holidays to theme parks. You're talking hundreds, if not thousands of pounds. And all for a moral guardian no more suitable to the needs of a child than a paedophile.
Also, did I mention Walt Disney was an anti-Semite?
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