Distant Voices (51 page)

Much has, and hasn't, changed. Facial hair is still an issue, but only for those who work at Disneyworld. They must have none; and their teeth must be white and straight. If you want a ‘life with Disney', you must wait six months while your background back to childhood is scrutinised. If accepted, you become a Disney Person, relatively well paid and with privileges otherwise regarded as the thin edge of socialism in America: medical cover for you and your family.

Zoë and I are not doing anything by half measures here. We are staying
in
Disneyworld – actually, on the corner of North Dopey Drive. The street signs have ears and the buses say ‘MK' (Magic Kingdom). There are Mickey and Goofy dollars that are legal tender: and people are so
nice
that the trial of an all-American serial killer on the news (
not
the Disney Channel) comes almost as a relief.

This is not to say there are no ripples here at Disneyworld. The other day as Zoë and I, together with a wedge of other Griswalds and their kids, ran to get Snow White's autograph, a scrum developed. ‘Please children, please parents,' implored Snow White, ‘one at a time . . . Oh dear, oh dear, oh shi . . .' There was no hulking Marvin to protect her. Only ‘new men' with a pure past now guard the kingdom. They wear pink-striped shirts and they broadcast just the one tape: ‘Have a nice day . . . have a nice evening . . . have a nice day . . . have a nice evening . . .'

Alas, the Griswald pack was soon out of control as small people were thrust forward to be photographed, videotaped
and otherwise authenticated by the hand of a Disney star. ‘
Please
,' said one of the Nice Days, ‘let's have some order here.'

‘Assholes,' mouthed Snow White, her smile intact. Fortunately, several of the Seven Dwarfs were not far behind and were able to create a diversion. The Griswald pack now fanned out to seek the attention of Grumpy, Sleepy and Sneezy. Zoë and I, of course, hung in there.

Something similar occurred in the Hall of Presidents. A huge Griswald in red-striped calf-length shorts and multiple-zoom lens burst in. There were two small Griswalds, one of them armed with a Super Soaker 100, which is a neon-coloured imitation machine gun that spurts water for up to fifty feet. (It's the current rage here.)

‘Look, you guys,' said the huge Griswald, ‘they're all here . . . Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt . . .'

‘This one was a crook wasn't he, Dad?'

They were standing next to a picture of Richard Nixon that looks like John the Baptist.

‘He was,' came the reply, ‘
our president
!'

What is striking is the number of adults here without children. For many, Disneyworld is the logical extension of America itself: a vast shopping mall, albeit with cars and trolleys provided in which to load children instead of groceries. Above all, Disneyworld is brilliant child's play; and all attempts at deeper analysis usually founder there. America's two enduring gifts to modern civilised life are its music, based on black culture, and Walt Disney.

Certainly, Disney has given to millions of children all over the world a joy that his best imitators have never quite matched. A friend of mine, Peter Brown, who works for British Airways at Heathrow and helps to organise ‘Dream-flights' to Florida for seriously ill children, can vouch for the positive effects of that first glimpse of the Magic Kingdom.

Why is Disney different? For one thing, Walt and his original draughtsmen and animators knew about kids. They almost never patronised them. There is a cinema just inside the main gates that shows some of Disney's earliest, vintage
cartoons that are both funny and wry to the point of irony. The story of Goofy as a suburban man who changes personality behind the wheel of his car is unsentimental social comment. I clearly remember seeing it at a Saturday matinee; I must have been only a year or two older than Zoë, who laughed out loud when we saw it together.

The highlight here is the electric parade at night. It was all going magically, as we say, until a great eagle appeared, lit up in incandescent white, its imperial beak spotlighted. ‘HONOR AMERICA!' the eagle commanded yet again, thereupon the
Star Spangled Banner
boomed forth in super-fantastic Disneyworld stereo. Missing were Stormin' Norman as Peter Pan and Saddam Hussein as Captain Hook. Then I read that General Schwarzkopf – whose child victims still suffer in Iraq – has been signed up to tape an ‘I'm going to Disneyworld!' TV commercial.

He is in good company. According to the porter in my hotel, two US Army helicopters use a clearing near North Dopey Drive and a big, stooped guy with broad shoulder pads can be seen stepping out of one of them. ‘Mr Reagan,' said the porter, ‘comes down to Disneyworld at least twice a year.'

August 16, 1991

ON VETERANS' DAY
last week, the Walt Disney company announced it was building a new theme park near Washington, devoted to a ‘serious fun celebration' of American history. ‘This won't be a Pollyanna view of America,' said Disney vice-president Robert Weiss. ‘We want to make you feel what it was like to be a slave. We want to make you a Civil War soldier. We're going for virtual reality. And, look, we'll be sensitive about the Vietnam War.'
⁴

The Vietnam War, which was America's longest war, will be part of a permanent exhibition entitled ‘Victory Field'. Just how the war will be ‘sensitively' depicted is not explained in Disney's handouts. Neither is there reference to other colonial wars and invasions, such as the assaults on civilian populations in Latin America, the Caribbean and the Philippines. These events are largely eradicated from primary and secondary education in the US, while the Vietnam ‘experience' is taught, if at all, as a costly, well-intentioned ‘mistake', even a ‘noble crusade'.

The ‘cost' is frequently represented in mawkish, self-serving terms that concentrate on America as victim and the relatively few American casualties of the war (compared with the Vietnamese) and the fraudulent saga of Americans missing in action, which was the device for maintaining an 18-year embargo against Vietnam. Hollywood, thankfully, has tired of Vietnam angst and moved on to other box office concerns, leaving the sustenance of myths to others.

Last Friday, the
Washington Post
devoted almost all of its front page to the Disney announcement and to a story
headlined: ‘Our place for healing'. This was the unveiling of a $4 million Vietnam War women's memorial by Vice President Al Gore. ‘We never listened to the women's story,' said Gore, ‘and we never properly thanked them. This memorial does that.'
⁵

The bronze memorial shows three American women helping a wounded soldier. In fact, most of the women who served in Vietnam were seldom near the fighting, contrary to what is now being suggested. They were nurses, secretaries, clerks, air traffic controllers and intelligence analysts. Eight were killed in fifteen years of war.

During the same period more than five million Vietnamese died, a disproportionate number of them women. These women died beneath a rain of American bombs and ‘anti-personnel' devices that made Vietnam a laboratory for the new technology of ‘civilian wars'. They died in the paddies and fields, in fragile bunkers, trying to protect their children from the Napalm that struck their villages in great blood-red bursts. In North Vietnam, they died in all-woman militias, courageously putting up a curtain of small-arms fire as American F105s and Phantoms came in at 200 feet; and they died on hillsides such as Dong Loc, where I found the graves of an entire anti-aircraft battery, of young women . . . Vo Thi Than, aged 22, Duong Thi Than, aged 19. And they died in prison ‘tiger cages', tortured to death, and from drug overdoses in brothels and bars that served the invader.

And they are still dying from the effects of the American programme of defoliation, which was known as Operation Hades until it was changed to the friendlier Operation Ranch Hand, and which destroyed almost half the forests, and poisoned the earth and food chain. As a result of the chemicals used, countless Vietnamese women continue to give birth to babies without eyes and brains.

So Gore is right when he says ‘we never listened to the women's story'. In America there is no ‘place for healing' for the women of Vietnam, just another reminder of how the historical truth can be manipulated in an open society. President Bush may have been right when he announced in 1991
that his ‘victory' in the Gulf had extinguished the ‘Vietnam syndrome', which is the euphemism for the deep misgivings of many Americans for what their government did in Vietnam.

I happened to be interviewing a former US government official, who served in South East Asia, the day after the Disney announcement and the memorial unveiling. A troubled man, he spoke about the killing of a third of the population of East Timor by the Indonesian dictatorship, which was armed and encouraged by the same Washington group responsible for the devastation of Vietnam; he mentioned Henry Kissinger's name a great deal. Looking out at the falling leaves in Connecticut Avenue, he said, ‘You know, I walk past these memorials and I think it's a real shame people are not aware that our dead are a fraction of those we killed or whose deaths we oversaw. This distance between myth, the big lie, and truth, is amazing to me, even after all these years.'

There will be no tableau for East Timor in Disney's ‘Victory Field'. And I doubt if El Salvador will be represented, even though the truth of what happened there – and is still happening – made a brief public appearance last week. Some 12,000 official documents, released under pressure from Congress, revealed that Presidents Reagan and Bush conspired with the tyrants running the death squads in El Salvador. Some 75,000 people were killed between 1980 and 1991, most of them murdered by death squads and by government ‘security forces', equipped, funded and often trained by the US. Today, El Salvador is said to be a United Nations ‘peace triumph'. In fact, friends of Reagan and Bush are still running the death squads. In August, they killed 271 ‘suspected leftists'.
⁶
This is their contribution to the election next month, in which the left and popular forces have been persuaded by the UN to take part. President Clinton has promised to restore $11 million in aid to the new El Salvador regime.

And will the ‘sensitive' treatment of Vietnam by Disney extend to Operation Restore Hope in Somalia? The similarities are striking. The American ‘gunship' attacks on civilians
are little different from Vietnam, where the helicopter ‘gunship' was developed as an effective means of ‘pacifying' people on the ground. And Clinton, who is said to have opposed the war in Vietnam, has strongly backed its rapacious echo in Somalia. Most of the dead are, of course, ‘local' – a Washington term. In Vietnam, they were known as ‘merelies', short for ‘merely gooks'.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the Vietnam War provides us with a unique historical context; it remains the touchstone for understanding modern imperialism. Those who were seduced into believing that George Bush sent the marines to Somalia for charitable purposes would have been spared their present disillusionment had they referred to the ‘saviour' role of the marines in Vietnam in 1965. The places, personalities and immediate goals may change; the presumptions of power do not.

I think Disney should not be too ‘sensitive' in its approach to Vietnam. It should proclaim that the war was at least a partial victory for America. Most of the American objectives were met. Vietnam was physically ruined and the ‘virus' of its alternative development model stopped from spreading to the region. An American-led blockade forced the Vietnamese to all but abandon the gains of their system, such as universal health care and education, and to welcome the IMF and the World Bank, which are presently busy ‘restructuring' the country to fit into the ‘global economy'. After a half century of repelling invaders, the Vietnamese now advertise themselves as ‘the cheapest labour in Asia'.
⁷
I have never quite understood why Hollywood failed to acknowledge this achievement. Surely, in the ‘virtual reality' of Disney's Victory Field, the time is right.

November 19, 1993

IT SITS LIKE
Picasso's horseman in a terraced field of maize. Around the rider's neck is a blue saddlebag, which is quiet now. For a while Bruno stood there, like a condemned man beneath a tree, grieving the silence.

I have known Bruno for almost as long as I have known Italy. He is one of the last to make charcoal in an earthen kiln,
La Carbonaia
, a natural source of energy that goes back millennia. He is as thin as a grasshopper and has worked his Tuscan farm since
II Duce
's day. This is not classic Tuscany; the terrain is rugged and harsh. Umbria is just over the ridge, and the spurs of the mountains interlock in such a way that their sweep and acoustics are dramatic. When the late summer storms come, bringing swollen thunderheads and great arches of lightning, the echo is similar to that of heavy artillery. When Mita, who is Bruno's wife, delivers her early morning monologue, all of us in the valley are informed of her wishes.

Bruno's father, Agostino, whom I met when I first came here twenty years ago, was a commanding presence in what he called
la valle segreta
: the secret valley. His snap brim hat was always straight, his collarless shirt buttoned to the neck. He bought his farm with his demob money following the First World War and got it for a good price, he claimed, because he agreed to marry the daughter of the owner, a priest. He and Mario Rossi, the great accordion player, and the young Gianfranco Valli, were the
patroni
then – although Gianfranco was a part-time
patrone.
He was a veterinarian who served Cine Città, the movie studios in Rome, and who
was described as ‘the vet to the stars'. He had a wonderfully dry wit, delivered imperiously; he would declare, ‘It was I who saved the life of Elizabeth Taylor's poodle!'