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I first posted a piece by Ariel Dorfman at TomDispatch in October 2004 and began my introduction this way: "I met him in the spring of 1980 soon after he arrived in the United States. He had already been in exile from Pinochet's Chile for seven years. I was an editor at Pantheon Books when one day he swept into my office, tall and exuberant, with his youngest son in a stroller. At the time, I knew his name only because it sat next to that of a man named Armand Mattelart on the cover of How to Read Donald Duck, an account both Marxist and amusing the two had written for the Allende government on the impact of Disney comics in the Third World. Soon after we began to talk, he launched into a critique of Babar, the French elephant whose adventures were chronicled for children by Jean de Brunhoff. I was particularly interested because de Brunhoff's books had been icons of my childhood."
And we've never stopped talking. But when he first walked into my office more than 40 years ago, despite his grim experiences in Chile, I doubt either of us could have imagined the world we now find ourselves in. Yes, he already had plenty to say about Donald Duck (and Walt Disney). But honestly, could we have dreamed of an America in which the other Donald and you know just who I mean! had already been this country's president for four years and now stands a reasonable chance of returning to the White House in 2025 and turning the U.S. into a distinctly authoritarian-style state (with all too much help from various right-wing think tanks)? Only the other day, he stated quite clearly that, if president again, he wouldn't hesitate to target anyone he considered an opponent with the full power of a transformed state. And given his attitude toward climate change and fossil fuels, he would undoubtedly play a grim role in the further transformation of this planet into a living hell.
In the context of Dorfman's piece today about Donald Duck and our Disneyesque planet, think of that Donald of "ours" as the ultimate American quackpot.
And in the increasingly flaming world of fire and war we now live in, after you've read Dorfman's article (while you're at it, don't miss his remarkable new novel The Suicide Museum), my one piece of advice is, as its title suggests: Duck! Tom
Duck!
Walt Disney and Salvador Allende Are Still Fighting for Our Souls
This year marks the anniversaries of two drastically different events that loomed all too large in my life. The first occurred a century ago in Hollywood: on October 16, 1923, Walt Disney signed into being the corporation that bears his name. The second took place in Santiago, Chile, on September 11, 1973, when socialist President Salvador Allende died in a military coup that overthrew his democratically elected government.
Those two disparate occurrences got me thinking about how the anniversaries of a long-dead American who revolutionized popular culture globally and a slain Chilean leader whose inspiring political revolution failed might illuminate and I hope you won't find this too startling the dilemma that apocalyptic climate change poses to humanity.
This isn't, in fact, the first time those two men and what they represented affected my life. Fifty years ago, each of them helped determine my destiny a time when I had not the slightest hint that global warming might someday leave them again juxtaposed in my life.
In mid-October 1973, as the Walt Disney Corporation was celebrating the 50th anniversary of its founding, I found myself in the Argentine embassy in Santiago, Chile, where I had sought refuge after the country's military had destroyed its democracy and taken power. Like 1,000 other asylum seekers, I was forced to flee to those compressed premises in my case, thanks in significant part to Walt Disney. To be more specific, what put me in peril was Para Leer al Pato Donald (How to Read Donald Duck), a bestselling book I had cowritten in 1971 with Belgian sociologist Armand Mattelart that skewered Uncle Walt's as we then called it "cultural imperialism."
That book had been born out of Salvador Allende's peaceful revolution, the first attempt in history to build socialism by democratic means rather than by conquering the state through armed insurrection. That Chilean road to socialism meant, however, leaving intact the economic, political, and media power of those who opposed our radical reforms.
One of our most urgent cultural tasks was contesting the dominant stories of the time, primarily those produced in the United States, imported to Chile (and so many other countries), and then ingested by millions of consumers. Among the most prevalent, pleasurable, and easily digestible of mass-media commodities were historietas (comic books), with those by Disney ruling the market. To create alternative versions of reality for the new, liberated Chile, Armand and I felt it was important to grasp the ideological magic that lurked in those oh-so-popular comics. After all, you can't substitute for something if you don't even know how it works.
Our goal was to defeat our capitalist adversary not with bullets but with ideas, images, and emotions of our own. So, the two of us set out to interpret hundreds of Donald Duck historietas to try to grasp just what made them so damn successful. In mid-1971, less than a year after Allende's election victory and after 10 feverish days of collaboration, he and I felt we had grasped the way Walt's supposedly harmless ducks and mice had subtly shaped the thinking of Chileans.
In the end, in a kind of frenzy, we wrote what John Berger (one of the great art critics of the twentieth century) would term "a handbook of decolonization," a vision of what imperial America was selling the world as natural, everlasting, and presumably unalterable by anyone, including our President Allende. We did our best to lay out how Walt (and his workers) viewed family and sex, work and criminality, society and failure, and above all how his ducks and mice trapped Third World peoples in an exotic world of underdevelopment from which they could only emerge by eternally handing over their natural resources to foreigners and agreeing to imitate the American way of life.
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