From Mark Hackard’s essay, ‘Manifest Disney’:
As
we mark another Independence Day in America, it’s worth reflecting on
the meaning of our country’s much-trumpeted exceptional status. Our land is
indeed beautiful and blessed in many ways, home to millions of kind and generous
souls. But to pretend that all is well would be whistling past the graveyard.
The United States,
we must remember, wasn’t ever conceived as an organic nation, but as a
revolutionary construct, the herald of a dawning Novus Ordo Seclorum.
And so its progress is always unfulfilled, its nature not being, but becoming,
its vastness a continental-scale laboratory for social alchemy. Yet out of all
attempts to identify the meaning of the American Dream, no one depicted its
essence more aptly than a humble Orthodox monk, Blessed Fr. Seraphim Rose:
One
might take, as a symbol of our carefree, fun-loving, self-worshipping times,
our American ‘Disneyland'; if so, we should not neglect to see behind it the
more sinister symbol that shows where the ‘me generation’ is really heading:
the Soviet Gulag.
Fr.
Seraphim wrote these words in 1982, the year of his repose at age 48, and their
import today can only be deemed prophetic. A native of Southern California, Fr.
Seraphim saw nearby Disneyland as the most fitting analogy for the modern West
and its leading state, America.
No place better encapsulates a society of fakery, “fun,” and narcissism than
the Magic Kingdom, itself the center of a media
empire whose tentacles relentlessly manage market segments from infancy to
adulthood, bombarding populations worldwide with weaponized “entertainment,”
i.e. psychological warfare, subversion with a smile. And as America strives
toward its destiny, realizing ever more perfectly the revolutionary principles
of liberty and equality, so we witness Disneyland Civilization’s evolution into
its fullest expression, the digital Gulag.
. . .
The rest may be read here:
http://souloftheeast.org/2015/07/04/manifest-disney/
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