Newsgroups: alt.california
Subject: Disneyland and Eco/History (Was: Don't Move to Tucson)
From: dsewell@violet.ccit.arizona.edu (SEWELL, DAVID R.)
Date: 7 Sep 1992 23:00 MST  
Distribution: na,local
Organization: University of Arizona
News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.41    

(Eugene M., you're too much of a California fixture for anyone to think
you'd move.  Nice to see you elsewhere than rec.backcountry, now
that I'm in a civilized part of the world that gets alt.california.)

In my original post I probably shouldn't have seemed to be naively suggesting
that Tucson is some sort of eco or cultural utopia that honors & preserves its
sacred space & history in a way California should have but hasn't.  All you
have to do is look around or read, say, Charles Bowden's _Frog Mountain Blues_
(about humanity vs. the Santa Catalina mountains) to know that rapacity and
stupidity are here too.  But it is a very curious sensation to feel that in
some way I have come home here because the things I have always valued most
about Southern California are the things, mutatis mutandis, that people here
tend to honor.  

For example: Tucson doesn't have a major amusement park, but the closest things
to it are probably Old Tucson and the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum.  The first
is a kind of hokey Wild-West rendering of frontier history, the latter a
world-class zoo/arboretum covering Sonoran desert and upland ecosystems.  But
both are firmly rooted in their local place & history.  Now think about
Disneyland as a California place, as THE Southern California place, its one
single archetypal statement to the world.  When I was there this summer it hit
me how little Disneyland has to do with any California reality other than
Hollywood.  Not a single ride or exhibit based on a California theme (am I
wrong? correct me!).  Landscaping designed in large part to recreate Hannibal,
Missouri, the "Congo," New Orleans, Switzerland, what have you, with nary a
California scene (I almost said "native plant," but that's possible extreme) in
the place.  

My father worked for Disney Productions for 25 years & helped design some of
those rides, so it hurts me to say it, but Disneyland is the vision of a man
who was what I call a Ronald Reagan Californian: someone who lives there for
years without giving his soul to it (or vice versa).  (Remember Reagan's
favorite hobby at the ranch?  "Clearing brush."  Yeah, that ugly stuff that
burns when a fire comes through to help its seeds germinate.  The only good
chamise bush is a cleared one...)

Real Californians, as opposed to Reagan Californians, aren't made, they're
born, and they can be born in a matter of minutes.  Jerzy Grotowski, the
avant-garde Polish theater director, turned into one when he hit Irvine as a
visiting director in 1983.  He told an L.A. Times interviewer during his first
week or so there: "Everyone tells me that California is a very new place...but
the sea is old.  The mountains are old.  In this new place, we can find
something which is very old."

Am I wrong?  Is the bumper sticker I used to see in La Jolla that said "THERE IS NO LIFE
EAST OF I-5" right?  Has California never been more than a virtual place, with
Hollywood therefore the only real California?  Is Leisure Suit Larry what's
really real about Coarsegold, not the Sierra?  (...is the Sierra only On-Line
after all?)

End of rant.  Sorry for the incoherence; this is what happens when someone
exiled for 8 years in western New York gets access to West Coast newsfeeds,
kind of like Crusoe finding someone to talk to again...

--
David Sewell, English Dept, U of Rochester   |  "Grammarians without any
  dsew@troi.cc.rochester.edu                 |  character at all lecture
  dsewell@violet.ccit.arizona.edu            |  us upon that of Homer."
  (On leave in Tucson, Arizona, '92-'93)     |     --Diogenes the Cynic

Newsgroups: alt.california