Since people with no honor have a tendency to act dishonorably, we should not be surprised to learn that the rat is back on palestinian television, to serve as the purveyor of nightmares the jihadist haters of life need him to be.How can any living human being watch these videos and not become enraged at the sheer evil of it all?
12-year olds call in and sing songs that testify to their willingness to die for allah. Nice fellow, this allah who wants to see little children kill other little children. Nice people, these palestinians who so gleefully poison the minds of yet another generation, and by so doing curse them to a rubble-filled life of failure, pain and death.
In the face of such towering malevolence the following may sound trite, but it is nonetheless appalling to use Mickey Mouse, of all things, as the container for this twisted brainwashing; as the iconic symbol of America's belief in progress, through being the agent of change in one's own life, Mickey Mouse is as far removed from the self-perpetuating cycle of failure that is palestinian culture as one could get.
Born out of frantic necessity, Mickey was the brainchild of two extraordinary men, Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks. When Disney lost most of his staff and the star character they were creating, through the unscrupulous sharpster a step up from him in their distribution chain, Walt could have whined and complained, succumbed to the paralyzing despair of depression, or gone into another business; instead he chose to keep going, start fresh and try again with a new character, soon to be known the world over as Mickey Mouse.
The delegation of creative labor being as it was in studios in those days, much of the mechanical aptitude that Mickey exhibits in his first few years of films comes from the hand that drew him, Walt's old friend Ub Iwerks, as gifted in mechanics as he was with cartooning. Iwerks love of tinkering with machinery and mechanical innovation helped Mickey conquer a new frontier: sound film, positioning the Disney studio into a role of artistic leadership that the company only relinquinshed decades later. Iwerks relished working in an exciting juxtaposition of spontaneous invention and thorough pre-planning, allowing him to become the most prolific animation artist in that young medium's history. Creative differences pushed the two partners apart, yet Mickey's popularity continued to climb, his shell now "animated" by the happy-go-lucky, never-say-die, shrug-off-your-problems attitude of the guiding spirit similarly breathing life into the whole studio emerging around him.
Walt Disney was the type of ambitious crafstman who was continually attracted to new challenges, always pursuing a vision of entertainment that seemed tantalizingly out of reach, thereby improving at his trade, even when failing to achieve his goal; in failure he would still be going forward. Working in what can so easily remain a solitary art, and a formulaic business, Disney forged a new division of labor, turning the art from a group effort towards a Team effort, gaining the unexpected artistic treasure that this more complex form ensured, for now each participant got to measure and compete and compliment every other participant's efforts.
Disney went further than any of his contemporaries in his perceptive assessment of an employee's talent, where each individual contributor was acknowledged as being an actual individual, capable of a unique contribution. Whole new specialized departments would be created, based entirely on an individual's demonstrated specialty; some of these adaptations proved more practical than others, but to Disney such risks were merely the nature of his business. Delicately, yet unhesitantly, a constant re-assessment of production methods and techniques would constantly be underway; a creative restlessness allowing every film to be different because every film was made differently, a "like-but-not-same" panorama, the manufacturing process behind the scenes as flexible and malleable as the bouncy figures on-screen.
Sadly, as Disney's creative energies demanded trials more challenging than those he felt the world of cartoons offered him, his studio's work took on a more infantile dimension, to the point where today, Mickey Mouse is considered a character to be aimed at children. Under Walt's more hands-on direction, however, Mickey was more subtly meant to speak to the child in all of us, recalling us to the memory of more hopeful times, holding us to the promise that all children **should** cling to, that the future can be a bright, beautiful world, filled to the brim with productive possibilities. Mickey and his creator believed in acting on faith such as this; that if we can dream it, then we should be able to do it. If at first we don't succeed, spare a chuckle for the vainglorious folly that is inescapable to our human nature, then roll up your white gloves for a plucky second try.
Would that the palestinians could have adopted Disney's inner characteristics instead of stealing the physical shell produced by the end result of those attributes... then the world would be spared the horror of seeing the future being sucked out of these children, chaining them to a perpetual formula for despair in order to keep them from escaping their parents undying resentment, denying these children the love of creation that we in the west take so much for granted that we seemingly have given up dreaming ways for its light to shine over all parts of our world.
UPDATE: A busy week kept me from seeing this follow-up to the original broadcast: Walt Disney's daughter, Diane Disney Miller, calls the palestinian Mickey rip-off "pure evil":
"It's not just Mickey, it's indoctrinating children like this, teaching them to be evil," said Miller... "The world loves children and this is just going against the grain of humanity."
[HT: Little Green Footballs]
5 comments:
Great post. What can I say? some people know how to respond to an offensive cartoon, and some don't...
Someone needs to create a new strip: Mickey's Jihad, in which our hero goes about saving the children of third world slavery from their masters.
denying these children the love of creation that we in the west take so much for granted that we seemingly have given up dreaming ways for its light to shine over all parts of our world.
Ever wonder, Charles, what it would take to put together a studio that would focus on the children of Islam and socialism, as a way of helping them overcome all the resentful, unrealistic, hopeless politics preached to them?
Whose cool? Yves Kline? Pollack? Rothko? Not Disney. Warhol? Those folks are likely all passe for a long time since, not nearly cool enough to attract the elbow-patches and irony crowd to showings. But maybe Disney is now "ironic" enough for them.
I'm not a real Disney fan, preferring Chuck Jones and Tex Avery. Better still, the Marx Brothers. But I can sit and enjoy "Flubber" back-to-back with "The Seventh Seal" or "Andrei Rublev." I seem to be one of the few people on Earth who can sit through and enjoy Werner Herzog films over and over.
What I cannot sit to watch is the contortions of those who disparage Disney, who twist themselves into the most painful postures of "coolness" for the sake of "fitting in," with the worst losers in history, i.e. socialists. Those without the aesthetic and emotion sense to appreciate Disney films will be those who mindlessly parrot the cliches of adulation one hears regarding-- who should I pick? - Miro? Kahlo? any generic leftoid with a super 8 video camera who is now a "documentary filmmaker?" The Left dhimmi fascist poses would break the bones of most people who attempted to imitate them. I can't bear to watch. Those who do the Left tango with killer primitives must be either so limber in the head as to fit into anything Houdini couldn't have escaped from, or else so ossified they can't come out of the pose to save themselves regardless. It's too terrible to watch.
Disney is not cool. Thank God. It's probably unknown to most, but the truth it that Herzog, Tarkovsky, and Bergman aren't cool either. Cool suckth. Kool is for Deth Hippies. Long Live Mickey!
Someone needs to create a new strip: Mickey's Jihad, in which our hero goes about saving the children of third world slavery from their masters..
Well, Disney himself did a cartoon called "Mickey in Arabia", which is full of slaves; but, they are presented as just another bit of local color, happy with their fate, posing cheerfully for tourists Mickey and Minnie. (Chained slaves even dance in the market..!) Back when the film was made, in 1932, the common cultural view of saudi arabia and North Africa seemed to be that islamic nations practiced slavery and were not about to change. Judging by the broad range of yawns and indifference throughout the west in response to this hamas hate video of Mickey, there's not that much more raised expectations for progress or modernity, to this day..!
Dag, you may be interested to learn that at one time Sergei (Battleship Potempkin) Eisenstein himself wrote that Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was the greatest film ever made, for its unprecedented use of cinema (they drew camera angles and camera moves unachievable with live action techniques of the time). I don't know how long Eisenstein held on to that opinion, but it's interesting that the filmmaker whose work tried to ignite a socialist revolution still found the love of knowledge itself an attractive enough quest, that he was able to watch, and even appreciate, the work of a fellow filmmaker whose bourgeois values were diametrically opposed to his belief system.
I like Werner Herzog films; i once knew a girl who did too. Let's roll...
I love Eisenstein's films; all the moreso that Stalin hounded him and probably had him killed. Art transcends the politics of coolness among artists. Herzog is likely a rotten leftard but his films are extraordinary because they are the work of a great artist. Lots of fine people are fine people who don't make films. It's a rare and good thing when the two coincide.
On which topic, I look forward to the next video at You Tube....
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