A Disneyland for God

 
No survey of Fantastique Film would be complete without mentioning the many contributions of Walt Disney Studios. Even if one ignores studio's animated oeuvre, one must acknowledge such seminal classics as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) and Tron (1982) , as well as the intelligently adolescent Escape to Witch Mountain (1975), the guilty-pleasure of The Black Hole (1979), and the well-intentioned Sleepy Hollow (1999) . 

We should also consider the studio's numerous scifi-themed comedies such The Absent-Minded Professor (1961), The Shaggy Dog (1959), Now You See Him Now You Don't (1972), and The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes (1969), etc.

Finally, of course, there is the studio's noisy and inisipid Pirates of the Caribbean series, which, despite being artistically barren, is nonetheless a financially lucrative cultural force here in the futuristic 21st century. 
 

Equal or greater to the studio's film legacy are its two North American theme parks, Disneyland in California and Walt Disney World in Florida. In operation since 1955 and 1971 respectively, they are filled with fantasy-themed attractions such such as the futuristic Monorail train, Space Mountain, and the Astro-Orbiter, entertaining and thrilling 3 generations of youth from around the world.

Disney's parks are rightly considered to be revolutionary, a pioneering attempt to make the impossible visions of the studio's enormously popular fantasies into solid, three dimensional reality. They arose from the soil of the wealthiest nation on earth, at the zenith of its economic prosperity and imperial power.

Disney's parks have enjoyed spectacular financial success and retain, even to this day, a special status in the longings and dreams of children. The very fact of Disneyland's existence as an actual physical place here on Earth where the fantastic and magical things could actually have a tangible presence has imbued the Disney films with a unique set of implicit, perceived qualities.

At the same time, the park's overt connection with the works of the Disney studios imparted a kind of psychic luster around the park as well. The mystique of the park and the magic of the movies quickly created a cultural feedback loop, mutually reinforcing each other.

The third leg of the table was Disney's weekly TV show, broadcast from the 1950's through the 1970's, which frequently and unabashedly promoted Disneyland, with several episodes specifically devoted to technical workings of the park or to a visit by the famous Osmond Brothers.

The Osmond Brothers at Disneyland

It was exquisite timing that the Disney aura was perfected in the crucial decades of the 1950's through the 1980's, when entertainment technology was heavily dependent on TV and movies, and the range of choices was much more limited than today.  In those years, the weekly Disney TV program was a ritual for millions...and the semi-annual Disney new release or re-release was something akin to a holiday. In our multimedia and portable technology era, to create a ubiquitous media juggernaut and infuse it with Disney's perceived magical and nurturing qualities would be more difficult.

The mass media had imposed brand-consciousness across the spectrum of American kids with admirable efficiency in the post WW2 period. But Disney became more than just a brand. Very early in the studio's history, a decision was made that all its productions would be aimed at children as a primary audience and that the productions would all ostensibly promote or reinforce white middle-class Judeo-Christian heterosexual nationalist center-right moral values.

Even now in the cynical 21st Century, nearly 80 years after the release of Snow White, Disney products are not only unquestionably accepted as 'safe' and 'moral' by Americans, but any skepticism regarding this notion is virtually outside the realm of possible thought. And while few Americans believe in the historical reality of Long John Silver, the corporation has successfully propagated a highly mythologized, idealized view of  history via Davey Crockett and similar productions.

For several generations of American children, Disney occupied a psychic space similar to that of a religion, except that, unlike religion, kids found it pleasurable and they partook of it voluntarily. But like a church, it was the kind of magic people would pay for.

Disneyland and Disney World, despite being objects of crass hype and despite being saturated with a simplistic morality and infected with wildly inaccurate history, are rightly celebrated as masterfully crafted 3-D fulfillments of American mythology, fantastic narrative, and the power of pure imagery. Nothing in North America can match them, although parts of Las Vegas come close.

Walt Disney summarized his vision in these words:

'Disneyland will be based upon and dedicated to the ideals, the dreams, and hard facts that have created America. And it will be uniquely equipped to dramatize these dreams and facts and them forth as a source of courage and inspiration to all the world.'

(The Fascinating Original Disneyland Prospectus)


But it isn't all happy 'toons' and fairy tale characters. The North American Disney parks both feature  a show comprised an assortment of amazingly realistic robotic U.S. presidents giving speeches representative of the company's idealized and sanitized depiction of US history. The Hall of Presidents is a textbook example of this hagiographic propaganda. 

But more popular by far is the famous Haunted Mansion, full of 'animatronic' ghosts projected via a truly brilliant array of analog era optical tricks.

The juxtaposition of an attraction essentially devoted to characters who might be considered to be the 'undead' in the midst of the often forced cuteness and sweetness (see: It's a Small World) is notable. It is also notable that the notion of a houseful of  mischievous spirits of dead persons is contrary is directly contrary to much religious dogma circulating in the USA. 

North America, home to the first two Disney parks, is dominated by worshippers of the bronze-age Hebrew war-god Yahweh (also known as God or Allah) and the legendary Jewish demi-god Jesus. Strictly speaking, most of Yahweh's official doctrines do not provide for the souls of the undead to go cavorting about the Earth for mortals to view.

The fact that the Flapdoodle Files could find no record of Christians ever protesting the Haunted Mansion is interesting. The Disney brand banks heavily upon the perception that Disney products are wholesome and moral, and in America, religion is almost universally conflated with morality.

But then, America also loves ghosts and many other supernatural legends not officially sanctioned by the quasi-state religion. And based on box-office receipts and TV ratings, America also loves these spooky supernatural legends more even more than cute anthropomorphic mice and ducks.

Even as inventive, relentless and crassly commercial as Walt Disney and his 'imagineers' were, it is unlikely Disneyland would have arisen had it been without a prototype.  And so it is that throughout the history of the species, the human animal has constructed many architectural edifices whose aim was to impart a sense of physical reality to the most fantastic of our imaginings. 

Since some of the best extant examples of such prototypes were created during the Italian Renaissance, it was determined that the Flapdoodle Investigators should travel to the two great centers of this movement, Florence and Rome. 

What we call the Renaissance began in Italy during the 14th Century, concurrent with the rising wealth of the mercantile class, especially certain families such the notorious Medicis. By the 15th century, the Medicis owned one of the largest banks of Europe, and one of their clients was the Pope himself. 

The Medici Pope Leo X, by Raphael

The Medici collected taxes for the church, with such ruthless efficiency that they were granted 10% of the take. Prior to the demise of the Medici Dynasty in 1737, no less than 4 members of this clan had achieved the papacy itself. 

The Medicis were lovers of art, learning and culture (as well as sex, drugs and alcohol), and used much of their wealth to promote these interests, which included classical sculptures, especially depictions of naked people.

When Emperor Constantine I converted to Chrisitianity (circa 312 AD), the Roman Empire effectively merged with Christianity. Christians were then vigorously encouraged to loot and destroy Pagan art, and the outlawing of Paganism in 391 by Emperor Theodosius I reinforced the idea that all non-Christian art was sinful. (The Roman Church had previously executed the first of many so-called 'heretics,' the bishop Priscillian, in 385.)

But the Medici Family, along with other key figures, appreciated the value of the ancient Roman sculptures, which emphasized hyper-realistic depictions of the human form. Of special interest to the Flapdoodle Files is the fact that the technology of super-realism was often utilized in the context of pure fantasy.

And so by virtue of the Medici's economic power over the church, there began at a last a degree of toleration, preservation and scholarship of the ancient non-Christian works.

Since the Romans sculptors were masters at realism, it is around this time that rapid advances in the techniques of visual realism resume in Europe. Adding to the realism was the discovery of Linear Perspective, a set of methods utilized by artists to create the illusion of 3-D 'depth' to a 2-D 'flat' painting.

The Florentine genius Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446) is generally considered to be the first Rennaissance artist to discover and utilize linear perspective, and it is also he who made another crucial innovation in the quest for the original European Disneyland: the magnificent dome of the Florence's greatest cathedral.

Work on the Santa Maria del Fiore Cathedral had begun in 1296, stopping and then re-starting and stopping again several times (stopping once due to the Black Plague in 1348). The originators of the project had specified a self-supporting dome but no one in Europe knew how to design one, even 100 years after the project started.  Finally in 1418, a contest was initiated to determine who would design a dome to cap the edifice.

This was more audacious than the 1961 JFK proposing to land a man on the moon by 1970. Although theoretically possible, it would require revolutionary new technology. Brunelleschi had to design new construction equipment just to build the structure:

The Classical Romans had built domes, and so had numerous societies in Asia and Africa. But in 1418 no one in Europe had the technology or the expertise to construct a self-supporting dome. Luckily for the church and the Medici Family, the secretive and eccentric Brunelleschi won the contest, therefore claiming the glory of creating Europe's first self-supporting post-classical dome.

Even here in the futuristic 21st Century, the Florence Cathedral dome is still considered to be the largest masonry dome in the world and it remains a triumph of design. But in the year of its completion, 1436, with most of Europe still living in medieval hovels and other dark, dank dwellings, Il Duomo, as it became known, stabbed 376 feet skyward, a wonder far beyond most peoples' wildest imaginings.

While the overwhelming majority of the population lived a lifestyle similar to Monty Python peasants digging for 'some lovely filth', some of Europe's elite were beginning to travel, and their travelogues were among the most popular literature of the period. The Gutenberg printing press, another technological wonder, was introduced to the Holy Roman Empire about 1440, and this early mass media device aided and accelerated the dissemination of accounts of Il Duomo.

 
Additionally, the rising mercantile class was expanding and improving trade routes, so that more and more visitors from other lands also viewed the spectacular new edifice. The result of these cultural and commercial contacts was that descriptions and illustrations of this truly incredible structure, dedicated to the glory of the bronze-age Hebrew war-god Yahweh and the legendary Jewish demi-god Jesus, were gradually disseminated outward, no doubt benefiting from some unconscious exaggeration and amplification along the way.

There were no plausible first-hand accounts of Heaven floating around the world of the early Renaissance, but there was ample testimony of the magnificence of the Il Duomo. The clergy, stooped in dank country churches or the dark gothic cathedrals of the city, were eager to evoke an invisible firmament, a spiritual connective tissue linking their own modest local House-O-Worship with the majestic and fantasitc dome.

An example of the artwork displayed in the cathedral is an illustration of the poet Durante degli Alighieri, considered to be the seminal genius of Italian literature. Dante's most famous work was The Divine Comedy (1320), has been mined extensively for the last 700 years by artists and writers of all stripes for its lyrical and explicit depictions of the tortures of Hell.

Because construction began in the Medieval era, there is an abundance of art from those years as well.  One example is this mosaic from the baptistry of the cathedral, begun in 1225:

As was the custom of the day, the cathedral contains sarcophegi of several high-ranking figures. Perhaps the most notable is the tomb of Antipope John XXXIII, who is depicted as though taking an afternoon nap. This work by Donatello and Michelozzo was completed circa 1420:

But it is the interior of the dome itself is is the most prominent and audacious piece, decorated with an immense fresco begun in by Giorgio Vasari in 1568, who worked in true fresco (wet plaster) until his death in 1574 (Vasari, BTW, was the first person to use the word 'rinascita,' translated to us as Renaissance, in print.) After that, the work was taken over by Federico Zuccari and other assistants, finally finished in 1579.

Since the dome was self-supporting, the interior was not cluttered with beams, arches, and other supports, but was instead a kind of vast empty canvas. As anyone who has lain flat on the earth of an open field can tell you, the human sensory-nervous default interface automatically depicts the sky as a kind of vast dome interior, therefore. With a canvas shaped like the sky itself, it was a truly revolutionary artistic opportunity. 

Commissioned by Grand Duke Cosimio di Medici, it is titled The Last Judgement, and it contains (from top to bottom) Choirs of Angels; Christ, Mary and Saints; Virtues, Gifts of the Holy Spirit and Beatitudes; and at the bottom tier: Capital Sins and Hell.

Here in the Futuristic 21st Century, our super-high-tech photography and media are useful for capturing and transmitting images of Il Duomo and its fabulous interior. Even still, it is not possible to fully appreciate the edifice without also experiencing its vastness.

From the outside, it's size evokes a veritable mountain, the archetypal nexus between humans and their sky-dwelling gods.

The subjective impression of the dome's interior is only slightly less expansive, especially since the rest of the cathedral is strangely dark and austere. And if one tries to sort, identify, and make sense of the teeming mass of biblical heroes, saints, prophets, angels and other members of the Christian pantheon, one easily succumbs to a sense of confusion, as though trying to make sense of Cirque du Soleil.

There is one area of the fresco that stands out dramatically, and whose meaning is clear and obvious, even from the floor to the cathedral. And that is the artists' depiction of the eternal punishment in store for those who don't follow Yahweh's instructions:

This is, conveniently, the largest section of the concentric rings of visuals, and it is also the closest to the seats, all the better to be seen close-up. In fact the lower portion of the dome is ringed with an interior catwalk, accessible via stairs, so that Hell and its torments can be viewed close-up. From any place the public might access, the fresco is heavily dominated by Hell:

These billboard-sized renditions of horned, lascivious demons burning and rending the flesh of sinners, with the Great Beast himself devouring these poor unredeemed wretches is a masterwork of the fantastique. For our money, it is more frightening than most contemporary horror movies, retaining its potency even after more than 500 years.

It is this combination of a supremely powerful, uncompromising vision, plus a technical genius which stands the test of time, which ultimately make this Renaissance theme park a marvel superior to the optical and electronic effects of Disneyland.

Of course, there might be another, darker reason for the power of these images. The tortures performed by Satan's minions, as well as and hundreds of others, were inflicted upon so-called 'heretics,' the hapless victims of the Holy Inquistion, which had been established in the 12th century and which would continue until the 19th.

In fact, at the time of the fresco's creation, the Inquistion was expanding rapidly and would continue to do so for at least another hundred years. The original audience would have been acutely aware of the painting's deeper, more sinister meaning.

Theologically, this vivid, horrific depiction of Hell makes perfect sense. Saint Thomas Aquinas himself had this to say regarding visions of Damnation:

"In order that the happiness of the saints may be more delightful and that they may give to God more copious thanks for it, they are permitted perfectly to behold the sufferings of the damned . . . The saints will rejoice in the punishment of the damned."

Additionally, there is the curious fact that many Renaissance artists, in pursuit of anatomical realism, observed and participated in dissection of human corpses. It is well-documented that Leonardo and Michelangelo, for example, both dissected cadavers at certain points in their respective careers. To see the damned, suffering the torture of flaying, knowing that artist himself had most likely skinned corpses himself, enhances the horror.

Just as Disneyland inspired its creator to create the larger, more elaborate Walt Disney World fifteen years later, on 18 April, 1506 the Church began the construction of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.

St. Peter's is the largest edifice within a complex of buildings and gardens best known as Vatican City, headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church since 1377. Thanks to the efforts of Benito Mussolini, Vatican City is legally recognized as an independent nation, which is tremendously effective at thwarting independent scrutiny of finances and legal issues.

Occupying 110 acres, the Vatican is somewhat smaller than the California Disneyland, which occupies 160 acres. Annual visitors to the Vatican exceed 5.5 million per year, whereas Disneyland gets about 16 million per year. 

Despite its smaller scale and attendance, it should be noted that St. Peter's Basilica was completed in 1626, without any of the technological and infrastructure advantages which Uncle Walt could utilize. It remains to be seen what kind of crowds the Magic Kingdom will draw 350 years after its opening.

A major attraction for Vatican tourists is the Holy See's art collections. Pope's have been collecting art here since 1506, and four museums on the property are devoted to sculptures alone. 

As in the case of the fictional Charles Foster Kane, no one seems to know just how big the whole collection really is. Aleria Lapidaria, single part of just one of the five museums, contains more than 3,000 stone tablets and inscriptions, which is the world's greatest collection of its kind. The collection ranges from the Classical Roman era to the modern. Like much of Rome, rapid transitions and juxtapositioning between Classical, Medieval, Renaissance and Modern gives the visitor a strange sense time travelling, ala Dr Who.

The dome of St. Peter's reaches a maximum height of 448 ft., exceeding that of its Florentine predecessor, but it's interior is decorated with a kind of grid-pattern of reliefs, depicting the usual ecclesiastical personages, and is sadly lacking in horror and torture imagery.

St. Peter's Basilica is said to to be the largest church on Planet Earth, and in fact its mammoth size creates a paradoxical effect for visitors to its interior. The peculiarities of human sensory perception are such that it is difficult to correctly interpret space and distance when encountering something of unusual scale. 

But the natural distortion is amplified by the fact that much of the interior statuary was constructed to be larger than life, so that a cherub, which would be approximately toddler-sized in real-life, is instead the size of an adult gorilla.

This was done to make it possible for persons on the floor to discern visual works placed near the ceiling, but a by-product is that the interior seems smaller than it actually is. It is the opposite of Dr. Who's TARDIS.

The most famous art work at the Vatican are the frescoes of Michelangelo, which decorate the interior of the Sistine Chapel. These magnificent paintings are justifiably considered to be among the greatest art treasures of the western world, with the images being republished by many sources, and of course the inspiration for a movie featuring the great scifi thespian, Charlton Heston.

(Click to read a fascinating archive article on Charlton Heston!) 

Contemporary audiences were justifiably awed and the Flapdoodle Files encourages the reader to seek out the many hundreds of fascinating details of the fresco, if he has not previously done so. Being mindful of the passage of time, we shall sidestep most of these and focus on the Michaelangelo's The Last Judgement (completed 1541).

As with Vasari's painting of the same name, it is the lower portion, closer to the audience, which is of the most interest. As with Vasari, Michelangelo is unambiguous regarding the fate of sinners, shipping them en masse to their eternal punishment, herded like cattle by grinning gargoyles:

While Michelangelo opted not to depict the actual torture of the damned, he nonetheless triumphs in his exquisite depiction of their stark wretchedness. A special treat is Cheron, a character borrowed from Dante:

It's also notable that in Michelangelo's vision, the Hosts of Heaven are not idle bystanders. Below is a magnificent detail showing Yahweh's angels beating back damned souls who try to escape their fate:

Another point of interest is the artist's depiction of St. Bartholomew, who according to the legend, suffered death by being skinned alive. He is depicted here as healthy and robust, yet also holding a flaying knife and a human skin (in one piece), which is said to have been a kind of gruesome self-portrait of the artist.

The Sistine Chapel is only one of tens of thousands of great art works on display at the Vatican. And since Christianity is intensely focused on suffering, punishment, torture, and death, there are are countless crucifixions, and numerous depictions of saints enduring the gruesome horrors of martyrdom. Yet nothing rivals the scale, virtuosity or fame of the Sistine Chapel frescoes. 

But in fairness, there is more to this place than just the mere visceral terror of the flesh. It is, for example, impossible to tour Vatican City and ignore the massive, impervious power conveyed by the edifices and artifacts.

Saint Peter's Basilica, like the Cathedral of Florence, is a palace. And such terminology is entirely appropriate for a religion which promises access to an eternal and perfect Kingdom of God. 

To the vast majority of persons living in the Medieval and Renaissance eras, such phrases were not metaphorical, just as the tortures of hell, and the gruesome agonies of the saints were not metaphorical. The horrors were every bit as real as the Inquisition itself, and the promise of God's Kingdom as real as the Medici's money.

Speaking of the Medici's, one of the many brilliant minds to emerge from this period in history was Niccolo Machiavelli, who had been a government official in Florence but who made the mistake of resisting the power of the Medici Family. Having suffered torture and exile at their hands, he wrote his seminal work of political science, The Prince, which contains this pithy passage:

...a question arises: whether it be better to be loved than feared or feared than loved? It may be answered that one should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with. Because this is to be asserted in general of men, that they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous, and as long as you succeed they are yours entirely; they will offer you their blood, property, life and children, as is said above, when the need is far distant; but when it approaches they turn against you. And that prince who, relying entirely on their promises, has neglected other precautions, is ruined; because friendships that are obtained by payments, and not by greatness or nobility of mind, may indeed be earned, but they are not secured, and in time of need cannot be relied upon; and men have less scruple in offending one who is beloved than one who is feared, for love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.

The Bronze-age Hebrew war god Yahweh, commonly known as simply 'God' to most Christians, certainly seems to have followed Machiavelli's axiom, at least until very recently. His biography, The Bible, contains numerous accounts of plagues, a genocidal flood, murders of Egyptian children, atrocities against the Canaanites, and other various horrors. For Yahweh's Christian worshippers, the culminating moment is the torture and execution of His Son, Jesus, which seems strangely to foreshadow Keyser Söze, of The Usual Suspects fame.

Put bluntly, someone who believed in the factual existence of the Biblical Yahweh and didn't have the bejeezus scared out of him would be a highly unusual person.

The Vatican, containing its vast array of Ecclesiastical simulacra and architectural constructs of the highest technology available at the time of its construction, culminating with Michelangelo's masterpiece of terror, gives form and substance to much of the Biblical mythology, and including the largely apocraphic Cult of the Saints.

The Numero Uno saint of course is Peter, for whom the basilica is named. The Catholic Church purports that his remains are entombed at the Vatican, despite the fact that Rome is 4000 miles from the reported residence of the legendary Peter and despite the fact that stories of Peter moving their did not appear until about 20 years after his reported death. Why Peter would, after the Romans executed his boss and friend, have migrated to the heart of Roman power and control, is also a mystery.

Not to mention the fact that Jews of the First Century AD did not commonly collect the remains of dead clergymen for worship, such practices being considered idolatry.

The Church promoted the concept of the Pilgrimage, specifically to Rome, specifically for Christians to utter prayers and adoration within hearing range of Peter's alleged corpse. Ostensibly, this was done so as to reaffirm and fortify the faith of the flock, but prodigious cash donations were also collected. 

St. Peter became a tourist attraction in Rome at about AD 400, long before the construction of any of the surviving Vatican buildings. By the time Michelangelo began painting, Rome was so full of alleged body parts of legendary saints that at any one moment a Christian was likely in shouting range of a piece of God's Forensic Evidence.

St Peter is the number one corpse in Rome, but not the the only skeletal tourist attraction. 

While Vatican City is unquestionably the absolute zenith in God's quest for His Own Disneyland, it is also true that Rome, which surrounds the Papal State, is itself a vast cornucopia of Christian tourist attractions.

Within walking distance of the Vatican sits another of the world's great monuments to Yahweh, the Capuchin Crypt.

This is relatively small space, comprised of several tiny chapels is located beneath the church of  Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini, near Piazza Barberini. Since 1631, the church has been occupied by monks who brought with them 300 carts containing the remains of an unknown number of their dead brethren, along with burial soil from Jerusalem, as ordered by the Pope.

The estimated number of dead friars in the crypt is now about 3700. But it is not the number of corpses which is interesting.

Constructed somewhere between 1732-75, there are five underground rooms which hold the bones of the friars as well as indigent Romans, including children. At some unknown point, a decision was made to arrange the bones into artistic compositions of macabre genius.  

The Capuchin Order insists that the display is not meant to be horrifying or sensationalist, but  instead 'a silent reminder of the swift passage of life on Earth and our own mortality.'

One of the earliest writers to note the crypt was the Marquis de Sade. Pioneering Fantastique writers Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mark Twain also published their comments, with the latter being suitably irreverent and blackly humorous. 

Mark Twain's comments on the Capuchin Crypt & other Roman sights 

Besides pain and punishment, Christianity is of course obsessed with death as well. Despite the rationalizations created after-the-fact, it is unlikely that the skeletal tableaux would have been created without the artist's awareness that his creations would scare the pants off his audience.

Before we end this macabre travelogue, we will consider one more attraction, this one also within walking distance of Vatican City.  In Campo de Fiori, stands a tall, black metal statue of a hooded man with a book, with a dignified, unemotional countenance. 

 

The sculpture represents the philosopher/scientist Giordano Bruno, who was burnt at the stake for the crime of heresy in this very square, in the Year of Our Lord, 1600. 

Bruno was a pantheist, and, like his acquaintance Galileo Galilei, theorized that the earth moved round the sun, as opposed to the sun moving around the earth. 

Per the Church's orders, Bruno's executioners tied his tongue so as to preclude him from uttering his heresy to the onlooking crowd. Mercifully, one of them tied two bags of gunpowder round his neck, which, when the flames finally reached them, detonated so as to end his suffering slightly sooner. 

Thirty-three years after they burnt Bruno, they lured Galileo to Rome and arrested him. The Roman Inquisition interrogated and threatened him with torture till he recanted his statements on heliocentrism. The last 9 years of his life were under house arrest. 

The Bruno sculpture was unveiled in 1889, 63 years after the last officially-sanctioned execution of a heretic. Like the Capuchin Crypt, it is not an artifact of the Renaissance, and it owes its creation to the Freemasons, rather than the Church. 

And yet the somber Bruno, representing the lengths to which the Yahweh's followers will go, underscores a deadly truth as we conclude our tour of Theological Theme Parks.

Walt Disney and the leadership of the Church both understood the deep psychic power of the simulacrum, of technology, and of the edifice, combined and interwoven with archetypal mythologies. 

The Church used this power to create and maintain a near universal belief in an invisible, silent being, whose only alleged witnesses were long dead, and whose alleged miracles all took place in the ancient past. 

Disney used this power to create and maintain a pervasive belief in the virtuosity, benevolence and morality of his entertainment company and of the government which had allowed his empire's growth.

Disney and the Church both achieved fabulous wealth and power, and have maintained the power to inspire awe and wonder, even as they seem quaint and old-fashioned.

The Church of course, exerts a power over humanity beyond Disney's wildest dreams of avarice, but then again, it had a 1900-year head start.  

Disney, being the product of 20th-Century entertainment technology, is now ahead of the Church so far as digital and portable media of the present is concerned; if they can capitalize on this lead, they may someday surpass the Church's vast cognitive infrastructure of belief. 

Or, in a manner similar to the merging of Christianity and the Roman Empire, Disney might absorb the Church, transforming both in ways we cannot foresee.

This essay is respectfully dedicated to the great Umberto Eco.

The Liquid State

From the Diary of Flapdoodle...

July of 2015 has been recorded as the hottest month ever for Planet Earth, since global temperatures began to be recorded, back in 1880. 

In Portland, Oregon, where dwells the eponymous Flapdoodle, Summer 2015 is now on record as the city's hottest summer ever. As the season winds down, I reflect upon hot summers, rivers, civilization, nature and some of the surreal aspects of life here in the futuristic 21st century.


This meditation begins along the banks of the Allegheny River, in Pennsylvania, where, in the 1960's and 1970's, my grandparents had a small cottage. Many happy summer days were spent swimming in that river with my family's Labrador Retriever, whilst unbeknownst to me, the current carried petroleum byproducts steadily downstream, to join with the Ohio River in Pittsburgh, then to mix with other pollutants and eventually flow into the Gulf of Mexico via New Orleans. 

The woods lining the river banks were filled with big glacial boulders, leftover when the last Ice Age melted, and tangles of wild grape vines, and there was one big very strong vine which we used for swinging. 

The vine carried you off one of the big boulders and over a small ravine before tracing its pendulum-arch back to your starting point, all of which felt extremely thrilling to a 6-year-old. We called it the Tarzan vine, after the hero we knew through old movies on TV, and wearing cutoff shorts and no shirt, one could indeed imagine himself a child of nature beneath the arboreal canopy. 

The genius of Tarzan is that besides being one of the seminal superheroes of the 20th century, he personifies humanity's contradictory, complicated and ambivalent relationship with nature.

Tarzan protects the jungle from greedy men who seek to exploit or despoil it, and yet he is also the Lord of the Jungle, embodying the mythology of Africa's white colonizers, a supposed force of fair and benevolent governance in a dangerous world. Despite our admiration for Tarzan, we know that in real life, Africa's white rulers are usually despots at best. 

Tarzan was created by Edgar Rice Burroughs, who had the business sense to form Edgar Rice Burroughs Incorporated in 1923, which controlled most of the author's literary works and the licensing of his characters. This meant that even though the writer did not care for swimming champion Johnny Weismuller's portrayal of the Ape Man, Burroughs nonetheless made a handsome profit from the 12 films the Olympic medalist made, between 1932 and 1948. And long after age and unwise eating sidelined Weismuller from the franchise, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. continued to draw income from the films. 
 

In the late 1990's, many years after the days of the river and the Tarzan vine, I found myself living far away in Oregon, day-trading in the early morning hours before my regular job, watching Squawk Box on TV, fancying myself a capitalist. No longer immersed in a river, a relentless current of financial and business news flowing over me brought the eventual realization that the mighty USA, the biggest and baddest of Planet Earth's nation states, was now being steadily and relentlessly co-opted by the corporation.  

The US government, (along with all its counterparts across the globe) were increasingly subservient to corporate power, often to an obvious  extent. The edifices and offices of these governments would continue exist in the future, but only so much as they cooperated with and carried out the will of corporate power. In fact, that was the reason they would continue to exist: the persistence of the traditional trappings of governmental power would deflect scrutiny from the corporate powers, and confer legitimacy on the actions those government agencies took on behalf of their corporate masters. 

Paid lobbyists, for example, write virtually all the legislation in the US. Speaking of payment, since all US elected officials must obtain astronomical amounts of cash in order to run for and maintain their office, they are de-facto employees of the corporations which contribute. And since the 1990's, there has been a strong and pervasive trend to privatize government functions, including even war, as is the case with the notorious Blackwater Corporation, now known as Academi. And so on.

 

I would later learn, during events like the Occupy Movement of 2011, that Corporate Rule would use the police and military forces, and all their requisite armaments, with those respective forces operating in effect as corporate mercenaries.

But by the time I noticed, it was all in fact, old news.  

Rollerball (1975) and Robocop (1987) are famous scifi films relating to this theme.  

And the 1953 novel The Space Merchants, by Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth is one of the earliest and most incisive treatments of this subject. It tells the story of an advertising man, caught in a web of intrigue and counter-intrigue, in a future world where the official government of record is in fact merely a front for corporate rule, bestowing a veneer of legitimacy whilst capitalist oligarchs pull all the strings. When it was first published, it was considered satiric, but like so many other dystopian novels, it has turned out to be far truer than anyone would like to admit.  

In The Space Merchants, the only organized resistance to corporate rule comes from a group known as the 'consies.' Although the word sounds like 'commies,' a term in high usage during the cold war, it is in fact short for 'conservationists.' That's what environmentalists were called in the 1950's. 

Writing now from my vantage point in the 21st Century, I often meditate on the fact that our time period was once considered by my favorite writers to be a very futuristic year indeed. 

Prior to reading the novel, I watched the classic TV-movie, on PBS, in 1980.

Ursula LeGuinn's classic novel The Lathe of Heaven, written in 1971, is set in Portland of the year 2002. In the novel, the city experiences constant rain, as a result of the Greenhouse Effect. I have lived in Portland since 2000, and the overall trend is less rain, not more. Our last three years have been  outright droughts.

On the futuristic afternoon of July 29, 2015, I sat in my home watching a local TV special news bulletin. I had taken the day off work because my Labrador Retriever had just been released from surgery, with a long, freshly stapled incision on her abdomen, and I had been directed to closely monitor the dog for the first 48 hours post surgery.

The live news broadcast showed that environmentalists had rigged harnesses and climbing ropes from the St. Johns Bridge, rapelling themselves 100 feet down to dangle just about 100 feet above water level. This would put them in the path of the the icebreaker Fennica.  If the Fennica were to pass, it would be forced to collide with them. The rapellers were acting as human shields.

The deck of the St. Johns Bridge is 200 feet above the Willamette River. Coincidentally, that is the about height of the point on the Brooklyn Bridge from which Tarzan famously dived in the 1942 film Tarzan's New York Adventure:
Tarzan Dives from the Brooklyn Bridge

Fennica was part of an oil extraction fleet belonging to Shell Oil, and it had docked in Portland for repairs a week earlier. The ice breaker would need to pass under the St. Johns Bridge via the Willamette River Channel in order to rejoin Shell's arctic fleet. Shell's arctic drilling had already caused a disastrous oil spill in 2012. 

In one of the universe's trademark displays of irony, the area where Shell proposed to drill in 2015 was previously inaccessible due to the ice pack, but now the Greenhouse Effect, AKA Global Warming/Climate Change had cleared the path for Shell. The burning of carbon fuels, such as petroleum, is the primary cause of the Greenhouse Effect. 

Word of the Fennica's layover at the Portland dry-dock had gotten out earlier, and the environmentalist group Greenpeace had hastily organized the rope crew to obstruct the path.  

In addition a small flotilla of 'kayaktivists' (paddlers aboard kayaks, canoes, and paddleboards) had stationed themselves on the water beneath the bridge, also intending to obstruct the path of the icebreaker.

It worked for a little more than a day.  On the first day, a United States district court judge in Alaska ruled that Greenpeace would be fined $2,500 per hour for every hour that the ship was obstructed. This by itself was not sufficient to stop the protest.

Then on the afternoon of July 30, Portland City Police and the Oregon State Police began to direct traffic away from the Saint Johns Bridge, clearing it of cars, buses, trucks, motorcycles, bikes, and pedestrians. This was so that the police could, without unnecessary drama, forcibly lower the rapellers down to water so as to be picked up by patrol boats and taken out of the path of the ship. 

Extraction, it was called. This turns out to be the term that oil companies use as a euphemism for drilling. Small world. 

At the same time, an extraordinary action took place on the water. A combined fleet of boats, operated by the Multnomah County Sheriff's Dept.,  Clark County Sheriff's Dept., the Portland Fire Bureau, and the US Coast Guard, cleared the kayaks way from the path of the ship. Later I would read that the Coast Guard, whose duty it is keep the shipping channel clear, was officially in command. 

As some kayaks were pushed out of the shipping channel or pulled from the water, some of the paddlers plunged into the water, in hopes of their bodies being considered floating obstacles. These floating paddlers were eventually pulled out of the water with boat hooks.

Local Portland News Video of Fennica Protest

By about 6:30 PM, it was over...enough of the climbers on their ropes had been moved, enough kayaks and floaters had been moved, and the channel was clear. The Fennica moved forward toward the mighty Columbia River, and then into the Pacific, to rejoin the corporate fleet so as to continue the defilement of the Arctic on behalf of the great and powerful corporation, Shell, which is reported to have a market capitalization just shy of $200 billion.

The extraction of the rapellers and the clearing of the channel was a compelling spectacle for the TV news people, and their ambivalence bore a passing resemblance to objectivity. They could express a tacit sympathy with the Greenpeace cause in abstract, and simultaneously have deeper empathy for the thousands of motorists, stuck in traffic for many hours as a collateral effect of the crackdown.  

Even through my shame at missing the protest, it was still thrilling to see the bravery and determination of the protesters. I longed to on the water myself, shouting obscenities and shaking my fist at the Fennica and her escorts. Being Quixotic would be better than doing nothing.

Everyone knew the best that could be done was to slow the ship, but at least they had delayed it for a commendable 36 hours and the spectacle had been broadcast on national media. People had been made just a little uncomfortable, maybe uncomfortable enough to think. 

Besides the dramatic visual spectacle, there was the unavoidable realization that the federal courts, the military, the fire department, the state police, the city police, and two local sheriff's departments -seven tentacles of governmental authority- had simultaneously worked in concert to assure that a single corporation could resume its exploitation and despoiling of the Planet Earth. 

It was one of those moments when a pattern becomes visible with crystal clarity. 

Shell extracts and sells petroleum, currently one the most valuable liquids on the planet.  The value of petroleum appears to be sufficient to justify the ruin of vast tracts of ocean and wilderness, the poisoning of drinking water, and the gradual degradation of habitability for the planet.

Two days after the the Shell action, on August 1, the Willamette River would again be obstructed by a flotilla of small private craft, but in a rather different context. 

The Red Bull corporation, privately held since its inception in 1987, makes and sells another fluid...a so-called energy drink, selling over 5 billion cans of a year. 

To create a mental linkage between their frankly awful tasting potion and that most exalted of mental states, fun, Red Bull sponsors many public spectacles of physical skill and bravery. 

One of these events is the annual Flugtag (German for 'flying day'), wherein teams build eccentric or humorous-looking gliding devices which are propelled off a floating dock, the objective being to see how much horizontal flight can be achieved.  The current record for Flugtag is in excess of 200 feet.  

Red Bull obtained a permit from the City of Portland to utilize Tom McCall Waterfront Park, an open sloping area that serves as a natural amphitheater. They also obtained a permit from the US Coast Guard to operate on the river.  

My dog was now doing well and could be left alone for half a day, (provided she wore the Cone of Shame, so as to prevent her from chewing out her staples) so Mrs Flapdoodle and I determined to attend the event. 

Red Bull's website stated that the event was to start at 11 AM, so at 10:30 AM I unloaded our kayak at the eastside dock of the Willamette, and my wife and I paddled across the river to the yellow floating barrier which separated the Flugtag landing zone from the rest of the river. 

There were already a few other kayaks, canoes, and paddleboards at the barrier, and a small armada of private boats, of various sizes and types, had been accumulating in the surrounding area since the day before. (Later on, I would learn that the Coast Guard estimated the total eventual number at approximately 500.) 

Nearby, on the west side of the Willamette, Tom McCall Waterfront Park was packed, and the temperature was already in the mid-90's. (As of this writing, Portland has had 26 days above 90F, exceeding the record from the summer of 2009, when there also 24 such days...in Oregon, Global Warming/Climate Change is not a hoax.) But we were floating on the cool river.  

Shortly before 11 AM, a powerful public address system began to fill the air with the inanity of contemporary pop music and the idle chatter of the Red Bull company's pet DJ's. Above the waterfront park, guests at the luxurious Marriott Hotel stepped out on their balconies to observe, perhaps a result of the rhythmic top 40 cacophony shattering their repose.

I took it all in stride until about 11:30 AM, when I began wondering aloud when the actual competition would begin. It was then that I learned that via 'social media' many people knew in advance that the main attraction would not begin until about 1PM. This realization immediately made me angry, first at Red Bull, but then at myself for being enough of chump to arrive 2 hours early.

Luckily, we had packed a small cooler with sandwiches and cold drinks, and, to give them due credit, Red Bull had arranged for some entertainment. 

Shortly after the strike of noon, we were treated to several performances by a couple of young aquatic acrobats flying hydro-jet powered 'aqua skates.' The aqua-skates were strapped to the feet of the acrobats, and attached to jet-skis via 30 ft. umbilicals. The jet thrust of the marine snowmobile was carried via the 30 ft tube to power the aqua-skates, giving the acrobats the ability to fly and do utterly fantastical stunts, literally like the kind of thing you see Iron Man doing via CGI at the cinema. Like Circe Du Soleil, you could see it, and yet not fully believe it.  

It was appropriate that the acrobats should remind me of Iron Man, for in the fictional worlds of his existence, Iron Man serves as the public face of Stark Industries, a giant weapons and technology business. Created in 1963, he was the first corporate superhero, and being encased in super-weaponized ultra-high-tech armor as opposed to a skimpy loincloth, he is in many ways the opposite of Tarzan.

The Jet Ski powered acrobats, amazing though they were, added to my feeling of dissonance. The idea of a 'sport' which requires a constantly running internal combustion engine is highly decadent in my view. Knowing that Shell Oil was now running wild in the Arctic so as to pump more oil, why in Heaven's Name had humanity invented a new sport that was 100% dependent on gas guzzling vehicles? 

A short while later, heads suddenly turned upward to see several parachutists, flying stunt para-foils, spiraling downward, making corkscrew turns, and finishing with a precise touchdown on the floating dock. One trailed an American flag, for which many in the audience applauded. The 'chutists were announced as 'the Red Bull Air Force.' This phrase caused something to click inside my head.

The public park, packed tight as a mini-Woodstock, the Red Bull logo everywhere, with the words in ten-foot-high letters emblazoned on the floating dock, the jibbering Red Bull announcers, Red Bull jet fliers and now a Red Bull Air Force.

Just as the old Roman Emperors had arranged public spectacles for the masses at the Colosseum, the modern corporation stages public spectacles on government property. It was a distinct moment, like so many others, when the reality of the corporate state was fully manifest.  

The Red Bull corporation, formed in 1987 and by now a megalith, owned this space, this day, this river. The entertainment had been bait, and now, with floating craft of almost every type literally filled in all around, we were seemingly locked in, with no alternative but to see this corporate pageant to the end, to ingest the entire smorgasbord of advertising. 

The actual Flugtag contest did eventually start, finally, about 1PM. The teams all strove for one or more of two objectives: gliding distance and/or creativity.  Each flying machine seemed to be a kind of hybrid between a parade float and a hang-glider, usually with the hang-glider portion detaching from the heavier, parade-float portion as the craft reached the end of the floating dock.  

One of the best-looking entries was a Lego craft. 

Another was The Flying Fish, from Bozeman Montana, painted with great care to resemble a giant, winged salmon, if such a thing existed. Coasting off the dock, it plunged downward in a slightly-arcing path, with the pilot immediately unseated and heading toward the water head-first. Thankfully, he popped up immediately, tapping his helmet, the per-arranged signal to the safety crew that he was OK.  The helmet, BTW, like all the helmets at the event, was blue and gold, bearing the Red Bull insignia.  

Many teams adopted images and nomenclature from movies and TV. There was a Star Wars team and a Big Labowski team. Each that we saw traced a similar, slightly-arced downward plunge.

We watched the first six teams, after which Mrs Flapdoodle said she'd seen enough, and we began the long awkward slog through all the small and large watercraft that had packed in around the landing zone. Every type of privately-owned watercraft was there, from inner-tubes on up to Bond-villian-type luxury yachts, but by polite persistence, we gradually squeezed out, moving by grabbing onto other other craft, since there was no room to put a paddle in. 

Finally the boats thinned out and we could paddle, but even then, even in 17 foot kayak, it was a matter of constantly dodging boats and other craft, till we beached on the other shore.

Later, as Mrs Flapdoodle and I watched the local TV news, we learned that the Red Bull Corporation had been forced to stop the Flugtag early. The US Coast Guard, charged with keeping the Williamette River Shipping Channel clear, had deemed that the mass of spectator boats had created an unacceptable navigation hazard. 

Besides arctic ice breakers, the Willamette Channel carries a local pleasure cruise company, barges from the Ross Island Cement Company, and the great Pacific-bound container ships. 

And in fact, a large tour boat had indeed lightly bumped a small pleasure boat. The Coast Guard had evidently decided that the needs of the many corporations outweighed the needs of Red Bull. 

Tour Boat Collides with Pleasure Craft

I reflected on the fact that within a few days' time, the Coast Guard had to exercise their legal authority to unblock the Willamette Channel twice and the idea that an armada of small private craft could block traffic on a working waterway.

The Willamette River, where these events took place, is a part of my daily routine. For about 5 miles of my bike ride to and from work, I follow a paved path along the river. I watch the river flow past its wooded banks, in the early morning and evening, in all seasons.

And as the economy has marginalized ever more persons, making them destitute and homeless, I have seen more and more people residing  beneath cardboard boxes and tattered tarps along the banks of the Willamette. 

There are also the boat people. As housing becomes even more excessively expensive and jobs ever scarcer, an increasing number of persons are obtaining small or medium-size private pleasure boats and using the cabin space for shelter from the elements. 

Most of these craft appear barely sea-worthy, and last year I saw one actually sink. But overall it seems more comfortable than sleeping beneath a tarp. Some of the crafts are actually tied up together, and presumably the occupants have also forged an alliance.

Actual Portland Boat Squatter Settlement, photographed by Flapdoodle

The overall aesthetic effect is somewhat odd, alternately bucolic and dystopian.

Foto by Flapdoodle

The boat people harken back to a time more than a 100 years ago, when a nearby section of the Willamette was described thusly:

 "a scowtown—a host of floating houses—and a graveyard for dilapidated ships called the Boneyard. ....floating shacks, or scows, as made of boards, lumber mill leavings, spare planks, and anything else that residents could get their hands on to construct a slum on the river...it was where all the old boats would go. Some of them they'd repair, and others would get junked and just float out there. And there were lots of people who were living on the boats...They would also take boards off the boats to make hovels.... There was one police report about a fight in the Boneyard over a bucket of beer. And I just picture a bucket of beer in the Boneyard as being really gross. Despite the river being filled with waste and raw sewage, living on a floating hovel had the advantage of being cheap. 'They didn't have to pay any taxes or anything, says  [Portland writer Barney] Blalock of the Willamette's floating residents. 'It was kind of a freebie place to live.'"

(from Portland Mercury, 4-28-15; for the entire article, follow this link:

History of Portland's Waterfront )

Although the growing number of boat people represents a return to an earlier state, they might also foreshadow our future. The boats and flotillas tend to be battered, tattered, and cluttered with mechanical and marine junk, often Jerry-rigged into ingenious, steam-punk looking devices. They tend to evoke images from the exceedingly silly 1995 scifi film Waterworld. 

Harry Harrison's Make Room! Make Room! is a 1966 dystopian scifi novel concerned with overpopulation and diminishing natural resources. Some of the action takes place on a scowtown, a place where impoverished people make homes on derelict boats.  

In 1973, the book was adapted into the classic film Soylent Green. Soylent Green, by the way, is the first scifi film to use the term Greenhouse Effect. Harrison's novel is set in the year 1999, but Soylent Green takes place in 2022.

The Greenhouse Effect, which describes an excessive accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere and which is steadily causing earth to warm, is the basis for Waterworld. This film posits a future earth after all the ice caps have melted, putting all the land continents underwater. 

Waterworld stages fantastic Jet Ski battles amongst the survivors of Global Warming/Climate Change. The film is exceeding silly because we now already that the hunger, thirst, resource wars, and diseases secondary to Global Warming will wipe all of us out long before the earth becomes Waterworld.


The Jet Skis in Waterworld are significant, seeing as they burn petroleum and make Greenhouse Gases. Jet Skis and other fuel-burning engines are a harbinger of evil. In this way, perhaps Waterworld is not quite so silly as I had thought.  

As I write this, Oregon's Umpqua River is 10F warmer than is healthy for the Steelhead Salmon, killing off 150,000 or so of them in the past couple weeks.

Riding along the river with my bicycle every day, temperatures and weather are things of which I am always keenly aware. When it is scorchingly hot, or when it is 38F in a steady rain, I think of the boat people, and their 'cousins', the homeless who occupy the wooded banks. 

Their numbers increase each year, and each year their ingenuity and resourcefulness, with regard to their respective dwelling spaces and the overall business of survival, seem also to increase. For now, they are mostly ignored by the city and the agents of the law. 

And since no meaningful alteration of the American economic and health systems are likely, it may be that the homeless and the boat people are destined to become parallel societies, alternatives (not necessarily pleasant) to the constrictive bonds of rent, mortgage, and taxes, to which I am subject.


Further upriver on the Willamette are Oregon City, and Champoeg, former territorial capitols from pioneer days. And further upriver still is Salem, the current state capitol. This is in keeping with a long, historical trend for national and regional capitols to be placed alongside a river, a tribute to the historical importance of river transportation.  

The State has also used rivers to delineate boundaries, between nations and provinces. The Columbia River, of which the Willamette is a tributary, marks the border between Oregon and Washington, just as the Rio Grande marks the border between the USA and Mexico. So it is that a river can serve as part of The State's central nervous system, as well as the wall by which it hopes to separate itself from its neighbors.  

Yet for now, this vitally important waterway is permeated with squatters who can evade the tolls and tariffs imposed on the State's other subjects.   

But the wooded banks are also home to deer and coyotes, just as beaver and otters ply the river. Over the years that I have followed this route, I have come to think of the river and these creatures somewhat animistically, ala Johnny Weismueller's Tarzan. That is to say, in a not-rational way, I have come to believe they are my friends. 

On these blistering Greenhouse Effect days, about halfway along my ride, I often stop at a certain public boat dock, lock up my bike, strip off my shirt and shoes, and then I dive, imagining Johnny Weismueller in the waters of the LA Arbouretum, filming an RKO Tarzan adventure. 

Like the aging Ape-Man, I am starting to feel my years, and my waistline is not necessarily appropriate for a loincloth. Yet in the water, I imagine the ex-Olympiad's joy at the simplicity and grace of fluid movement and the liberation from gravity, of the return to one's primal element.

Here in Portland, the current of the Willamette alternately runs 2 directions. Most of the time, it flows downstream, south to north, finally emptying into the Columbia. But the Columbia empties in to the mighty Pacific, and so when there is an incoming tide, the force is sufficient to send an upstream current all the way to Willamette Falls, roughly 100 miles from the coast.  

In the era of Global Warming/Climate Change and frequent droughts, the banks of the Willamette show the rocks and old pilings that would otherwise be underwater. Yet as the ice caps steadily melt, the ocean into which if flows creeps ever higher. 

The river is cool and shining on these summer days, and within its gentle paradoxes, I swim in conscious bemusement, flowing with the temporary relief from the contradictions of modern life.  
Special Bonus Tarzan Clip!