George Monbiot (Guardian Utd): Of mice and money men

[Jack Rabbit]

From the Guardian Unlimited (UK)
Dated Tuesday February 17

Of mice and money men
The sinister grip that Disney exerts on children's imaginations may finally loosen
By George Monbiot

If Comcast's takeover of the Disney Corporation goes ahead, the world's biggest media conglomeration will be built around one of humankind's most ancient practices. Investing animals with human characteristics is something we've been doing since we first applied charcoal to the walls of a cave. Ten thousand years later, as the $500m we have just spent watching Finding Nemo suggests, we still see ourselves as animals and animals as ourselves.
This suggests two things to me. The first is that, however much we assert our independence from nature, our consciousness remains in its thrall. Our minds were shaped when nothing was more real to us than the fear of being eaten and the fear of not eating. Peter Jackson, in his Lord of the Rings trilogy, deliberately exploits this primordial memory, by exposing us to giant hyenas and mastodons: two of the palaeolithic animals with which our minds evolved. Steven Spielberg's tyrannosaurs and velociraptors, though they appeared more real, were less compelling. Could this be because, pre-dating rather than predating us, they played no role in the development of our evolutionary consciousness?
The second is that, though our engagement with the world is supposed to have been governed by a detachment from the objects of our curiosity ever since the Enlightenment, our tendency to project our minds into animals, plants and inanimate objects is undiminished. Anthropomorphism is an irredeemable human characteristic, and let he who has never sworn at his computer be the first to deny it.
But while there is something very old about Disney, there is, or was, something very new about it too. It welded commercial, cultural and political power in a way the world had never seen. I remember being struck in the 1980s by the conjunction of two images. One was a photograph of the May day parades in Moscow, with rockets looming over the heads of the marching soldiers. The other, taken six weeks earlier, was a photograph of a St Patrick's day parade in New York, in which giant Goofys and Donald Ducks were suspended above the marchers. The Soviet display was a conscious attempt to project power, the New York parade merely a celebration of the symbols of nationhood. But the St Patrick's day iconography seemed to me almost as sinister as the May day manoeuvres, and for a while I couldn't understand why.

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