The Epcot Pillar of Progress

      Why is it that we are more interested about the surface of the moon and galaxies hundreds of light years away than the bottom of our own ocean?  Why are CGI explosions, laser fights and physics bending escape sequences so popular in our movies rather than real human emotions and acute storytelling?  Why is our culture consumed with cheap repetitive 2 minute pop ramblings about some chick getting hammered and then hammered rather than the works of Chopin, Beethoven, Mozart or Wagner?  Why is it that the news is filled with stories of space tourism for the ultra rich while the potholes on the state roads multiply as budget cuts play a game of triage?

What do all of these questions have in common and what can they teach us about the culture we live in?  I hope I can provide perspective on these questions in this and the upcoming weekly post on this blog.  I hope to take my readers on a journey through our past, our future and even our own minds.  

               I recently took a trip to Florida the past few weeks.  My fiancee and I spent some time hiking and camping around one of the barrier islands of the gulf coast.  As we pressed down the sandy trails the salt air filled our noses and the sound of steady waves massaged our ears.  When we stopped on the shore to take in the tranquility and enjoy some snacks we sat motionless as a herd of busy sand pipers probing with their tiny beaks the tidal area for small marine delicacies flowed around us like school of fish.  The sand dunes behind us practically untouched allowing the grass to spread its unrelenting roots over every area hugging the hills like a skillful net.  Freshly washed up coquina shells littering the beach were at first mistaken for butterflies with iridescent wings of every imaginable shade of blue and purple. 
           
            The next day at camp we passed our time with the warm crackling embrace of our fire and a game of dominoes.  We sometimes passed out time observing the small slice of American culture settled around our campsite.  The shrill fearful barks of two chihuahuas pierced the campsite as their people droned away on their handheld electronic games under the sliding mechanical awning of their RV.  The site over was the most confusing as we watched a man briefly leave the comfort of his enormous RV only to light a fire and promptly flee from the mildly displeasing chilly breeze, to the inside. Keep in mind, the temperature was only in the 60's. His wife only made her grand debut once to loudly voice her worries about bears eating their five purebred dogs bag of shit.  Keep in mind this island is maybe 20 miles long and a mile thick at most only host a few squirrels as its largest mammals.  The naivete was palpable. 

        
         Flash forward a week and we had the chance to visit the heavily contrasting ecosystem of  Central Florida.  A place of retirement communities where handicap spaces fill half the parking lot sprinkled by golf carts.  One of the unique places where vans fully dedicated to refilling oxygen tanks actually exist. Once you ventured miles away from the artificial world of gated mega neighborhoods guarded graying old men, you got a glimpse at the very poor rough looking locals who never got on the middle class train of easy six figure salaries three decades ago. 

The dwindling flow of retirement checks and social security barely supported an economy of chain restaurants and big box stores. On the side of the road a few orange groves dotted the landscape hinting at a past vibrant local economy rather than the current corporate vampires "set up", hunting for the last few dollars of dying old men. Apparently a few severe frosts and some orange molds had irreversibly devastated the area long ago leading the way to this more tenuous transformation.  

           The real gem of central Florida which inspired this first series post takes us farther south to the cultural icon, Disney World.  Disney World is a place where dreams, magic and fantasy come to life in the form of a medium size city of logistical marvel. The park inside Disney Land that we visited was Epcot, which contains future world east,future world west and then the world showcase.  In the way the Disney caters to the most culturally acceptable middle class values, Epcot is a marvelous reflection of our own beliefs and values, and, if you look critically enough, where they fall short with reality.

         
         As you first drive into Epcot you are flagged into the absolutely massive parking lot. After that is a trolley to take people to the park entrance, literally a 1/6th of a mile away.  In some messed up way it makes sense when you consider American's have on average become so unhealthy that they need a trolley to take them to a park entrance where they will have to continue to walk much longer distances anyway.  Once at the entrance, you are greeted with TSA style security where you need to wait in a 30 min long line if you are carrying a bag.  I wonder to myself if this was what Disney was like before the 9/11 security paranoia.  Once you get your tickets, which are actually unique credit card style cards, you head through a heavily secured entrance where you associate your card with your fingerprint on these "futuristic heavily chromed" turn-style machines.  I think this 1984-esque feature is one of the few things Epcot actually got spot on about the future.  Flanked on all sides by a mass of Spanish, German, Dutch and Chinese speaking people you look up to see the largest structure in the park, Space Ship Earth.  A massive Geodesic dome symbolically letting you know "This park is about the future, and by the way, it's the everything is chrome kind, enjoy!"  

       Looking at our map we eye up Space Ship Earth to be the first attraction we hit, but alas, there is a 50 minutes wait.  Looking around we try to hit up Ellen Degeneres Energy Adventure.  Having researched energy depletion, "green" energy and Biophysical Economics (the Energy returned on energy invested stuff) for years. I knew this would be quite entertaining for my first reflection on popular culture.  As we walked towards our destination and I couldn't help be distracted by all the foreign workers manning or "womaning" every merchandise station which you were funneled into before you got where you actually wanted.  We head into a large building "chromed" out in the same sort of style as the giant geodesic dome in the middle.  Once inside you get onto these track led roller coaster seats that go throughout a few different rooms. 

             Our journey starts as Ellen is having a dream about being on jeopardy against Einstein and Jamie Lee Curtis.  Bill Nye the Science Guy comes and rescues her to take a trip back through time and space.  As they go back in time the lights darken and you are carried along the track into a room full of steamy mist and animatronic dinosaurs while Bill and Ellen have a dialogue about the origin of fossil fuels. Of course they perpetuate the whole oil comes from dinosaurs myth which is not true.   Oil formation is from marine sediments where zoo plankton sunk to the bottom of the ocean floor over millions of years.  Coal is from the lignin in wood that built up for millions of years in swamps and peat bogs and was preserved over millions of years.  Coal creation stopped abruptly after fungi evolved to break down the massive amounts of wood that couldn't be decomposed by other organisms.  Anyway, we get through the Cretaceous and Carboniferous and end up in the modern age.  We go through wind power, solar power, nuclear power and various other aspects of energy.  Eventually Ellen ends up back with Alex Tribek and Jamie Lee in order to make a last second bet on her double jeopardy. The last question is something along the lines of "what form of energy will never run out."  Here is our first explicit example of the worship of progress in action.  The answer was brain power!  Of course, human ingenuity has nothing to do with energy and everything with way we see ourselves in time and the future.  The irony was intense, here we are in 2013 talking about green energy technologies leading to a grand Utopian vision of progress.  In reality, the video judging by Jamie Lee Curtis actually looking pretty good, meant the video was made in the early 90's.  The animatronic dinosaurs looked embarrassingly fake for anyone who grew up with Jurassic Park and CGI.  The technology the ride used to ferry us around on hydraulic/electric tracks looked like it from the 60's.  If there was a grand vision of progress to be seen here, it's that it never happened.  

       After our energy adventure we decided to head towards a space mission type simulator which would continue our immersion in the delusion of progress. Mission space it was called and it was supposed to be a ride simulating a mission to the red planet.  You could either do the orange mission which was more intense or the green mission for older people with blood pressure issues. We waited in line for about 40 minutes, in order to get in our seats.  They had Disney employees in a mock control room pressing random buttons constantly to keep up the immersion. I really hoped they at least let those people the browse the internet or something, or else that would be officially the worlds most boring job.  Perhaps the Disney employees thought if they spend their time in the control room loyally pressing glowing buttons that do nothing, in character, they will be selected as the next Justin Timberlake as a respite for years of hell.  We had a flight briefing from a teenage kid who's excited persona was a little worse for the wear.  Then we got into the flight simulator bay where we simulated a takeoff, moon slingshot, asteroid dogging and mars landing.  We all has little buttons to press and it was a fun time joking and laughing with Laura and her family.  You could feel some substantial g-forces during take off.  The briefing video was absolutely hilarious as the actor looked like he really truly hated himself for selling out so hard.

      The real irony of this ride was the X-35 space shuttle we were "riding" on our way to Mars.  If you know anything about the space program the shuttle program was a massive failure with half of them exploding or burning up during re-entry.  The cost of the shuttle program was outrageously expensive which was the other reason NASA scrapped it. The X-35 was based upon a failed vision of next generation reusable re-entry vehicles. Of course in Disney, we are fed the standard science and technology vision of progress all the way to the stars. 
           The reality is that nothing of the sort will ever happen like that which was in Sci-Fi series like Star Wars or Star Trek.  I grew up as a nerdy kid who loved science fiction so I know from experience there is a genuinely large portion of the population who genuinely believe humanities destiny lies among the far-off stars and galaxies of the universe.  Telling them how unrealistic that narrative is, is like telling a kid that Santa isn't real.  they go through all the stages of loss with denial, anger, bargaining, depression and sometimes even acceptance.  It was a good time on our space mission but it was also hard for me to ignore the themes of fiction and religion that make up the story for the ride.  the fact that policy-makers, politicians and businessmen go everyday making decisions with full complete expectations of this science fiction becoming reality is what makes it disturbing.   

      The next stop on our journey was the world showcase.  Around an artificial lagoon was a few 1/4 scale monuments and themed architecture of 10 different countries.  There were; China, Mexico, Norway, Germany, Italy, France, The US, Canada, Morocco and the UK.  I am not sure why they put a colonial style US in?  Maybe the real United States doesn't fit the image its "suppose" to?  Perhaps they should have a ride where your dodging around a fake Walmart cleaning supply section trying to mix shake and bake meth in a one liter coke bottle as fast as possible while you run from employees! We first made our way around watching Chinese Acrobats and absorbing the architecture.  Lunch was a delicious lamb and beef meal with hummus with some other Mediterranean style goodies.  The weirdest part was when we noticed every employee was actually from the "country" they were working in.  It was interesting seeing the languages but I couldn't imagine leaving my home country with poor English skills and working a minimum wage type job in central Florida.  I did a little research into Epcots recruitment practices and apparently they are somewhat misled as to the money they will be making and how enjoyable the United States will be.  Keep in mind the idea of "The United States of America" is more alluring than the actual thing in the eyes of people from developing countries.  Apparently some of the workers view as a kind of vacation opportunity where they pool money to buy a junker car and float around different areas of the US.  I couldn't imagine that, picking up the lunch trash of messy loud tourist conspicuously buying every cheap plastic thing in sight, was their idea of the American Dream.

                    

      After getting a feel for the World Showcase we headed back up to Future World to see a building titled "The Land."  We waited an hour to get on a hang-gliding simulator called "Soaring."  It was actually pretty cool, We flew over areas of California on hanging chairs.  Air was blown through our hair in some sort of immersion feature and sometimes blew fragrances such as citrus or pine when we flew over those sort of things.  The projector screen was bowl shaped to further the illusion of depth. 

      The next was a video by Timon and Pumba about environmental problems.  They start with Timon and Pumba damming up a stream in order to create a resort for other animals.  Timon takes on particularly ravenous industrial capitalist language.  It's only when Simba (grown-up) roars do they go on an aside to the current environmental problems.  It's really interesting how the popular environmental rhetoric shapes our views of serious issues.  This decade the tone is always very grave but has an optimistic ending.  The optimism is of a sort really vain and diminutive though.  These sort of videos always end with some short sputtering about recycling followed by the latest expo of "green technology."  They show a series of solar panels, wind turbines, electric cars and kids planting some genetically engineering plants and call it a take.  This sort of framing gives people the excuse they need to justify continue doing the same things they need to do.  As long as you put a solar panel on your roof or buy an electric car we can all continue the menial existence of driving to malls, buying things to distract us and make us feel better, forever.  We can discuss how that's not realistic in later post, but for now we'll continue to discuss the implicit views of popular culture.  How ironic was it to show a video like this in a place like Disneyland where it is a thousand times easier to find random cheap plastic stuff to buy than a damn water fountain. 

                   

       We ended up on a random boat ride after Timon and Pumbaa which lead us into a mini agricultural research center.  We went on a brief animatronic history of agriculture and world biomes and ended up in a hydroponics bay.  They had an endless variety of ordered rows of peppers, tomatoes and every possible sort of cultivar.  It was really interesting to see.  However, it saddened me that agricultural research is so focused on yields.  Feeding more and more people is the agenda and not be able to maintain feeding people with less fertilizer, pesticides and fossil fuel.  They had a "tomato tree" that had yielded some 30,000 tomatoes but the thing was so top heavy in had to be supported by a special lattice structure and of course scientifically managed nutrition.  Not to mention, there was no way this thing could ever survive in anything short of an artificially controlled greenhouse environment.
     

    

                   

        This is a good example of the unconscious push towards "progress" which blinds us to reason and the past.  This plant requires carefully managed care from people that required a large amount of education.  It needs; a greenhouse, special lattice space, climate controlled environment needing air conditioning, which in turn requires electricity from a natural gas or oil power plant, ect.  Efficiency breeds complexity as a new gimmick is needed to get each little boost in yield.  Efficiency adds dependency because any one flaw in the air-conditioning, hydroponically delivered fertilizers or god forbid that dinky little stem would turn your 30,000 tomatoes per year into 0.  An alternative?

       This is the three sisters agriculture the Mayan and many native North American indigenous people used to feed themselves.   Corn, beans and squash all complement each other to provide an immensely resilient agricultural system.  These organisms can function OUTSIDE in the environment dealing with variable rainfall, different soil conditions and rough weather.  No air-conditioning or fancy wood/plastic support necessary.  The Corn stalk provides the lattice for the bean vine to crawl upon which in turn stabilizes it.  The broad squash leaves shade the soil keeping moisture in and keeping sunlight away from the soil in which weeds could take over.  The beans are unique in that they are nitrogen fixating, where they can ADD nitrogen to the soil.  This means no fertilizer is required, as would be needed with only corn because corn requires a large amount of nitrogen inputs.  Now which agricultural system would you be more comfortable getting your food from in the long run?  Which agricultural system would you choose in a turbulent world of change and increasingly scarce energy resources?   Which one could you manage yourself if you needed too?

      As night settled in we grabbed some delicious chocolate and vanilla gelato at Italy and had a fried fish and chips dinner at the UK.  We browsed a few shops looking for souvenirs and ultimately deciding on a riesling (white wine) that was imported through Tulsa from Germany.  While looking through Japan, which was more shopping space than anything else, we found some cute cat figurines but as soon as we realized they were made in China we laughed and scrapped the idea.  Then we waited. A night of conspicuous consumption for everyone ended in a massive fireworks show that put our local Norman 4th of july celebration to shame. We almost thought something had gone wrong when 40ft high natural gas flames were shooting out of the middle of the lagoon and  we could feel the heat on our faces.  It was all part of the show. There was a giant globe structure in the water which had graphics projected on it with music playing.

Now, I am not always one to sit back and analyze the meaning of things.  I really did just enjoy the fireworks show and the fact I got to spend it with my Fiancee.  The ironic part of the show that had me laughing was when they started showing some sort of progress show, on, the globe. It was a history of the world starting with the big bang of the fireworks.  We moved on into the age of "primitive" man with the famous cave paintings of aurochs, which are what modern cows are domesticated from.  Aurochs are extinct, having been hunted away, and were much larger and more fierce than modern day cows. 

The images told the technological story of progress from the caves to the stars.  thoroughly distorting and twisting history in order to satisfy a simple narrative borrowed from our not so distant past.

       If it seems like I was harsh on Disney World, It's because I certainly was.  However, I picked Disney as a first post because it is a mirror.  A reflection of societies belief in progress which defines our actions and values.  Progress is the dominant religion of the westernized world, which now includes much of the East, over Christianity, Islam, Catholicism, and Judaism.  Now, of course, you will never find someone in the street that claims to worship technology, science, and progress.  Because it is the main mode of thought in our society it is also invisible to us as a whole.  Progress isn't explicitly named as a religion and there is no acknowledgement of its presence in our thoughts. If progress were a religion it would have its holy trinity in science, technology, and economic growth.  The church of progress would include most Universities.  It's priest would include many, not necessarily all, scientists, businessmen, doctorates, and students.  The core beliefs would include capitalist enterprise, entrepreneurship, innovation, and technological advancement.  The famous figures from the mythology of progress would include Einstein, Edison, Galileo, Copernicus, Darwin, Alexander Graham Bell, Ben Franklin, and even Steve Jobs.  The heroic innovator archetype is personified by Iron Man's Tony Stark, who is a wildly popular figure in contemporary culture.  The fables of progress include the monkey scopes trial,  persecution of Galileo, discovery of plate tectonics, and electricity in lightning by Ben Franklin.  All of these fill the role of a persecuted quirky tinker genius who come across some idea where he sees the world so clearly through his divine gifts of intellect and is vindicated, continuing the legacy of progress, usually posthumously. Our society never acknowledges that this is what it believes because it doesn't need too.  The majority view is ever present, always accepted, requiring no need or explanation.  It is just there, obvious, questioning it would look foolish or excessive.  Questioning progress is as strange an act as asking why we go to school or why we drive cars. Progress is what separates us from savages, primitives, the destitute, and minorities.  Progress is our societies default, and by definition has no explanation.  Progress ascribes godlike qualities to those that are certainly not gods.  It's the difference between reality and the narratives we choose to represent it that cause problems.  Because, the most dangerous beliefs are the ones we don't realize are there, hiding just underneath the surface.

     Why does our society value putting a few odd looking ape like creatures in 1000 tons of aluminum and blasting them into the sky with millions of tons of explosives? Examining how we distort history to stitch together a grand narrative can tell us a lot about the world around us.  I'll leave you with these two pictures together as a hint to the nature of our next post.  Thanks for reading!

         
Please feel free to comment or ask questions!  This blog project, I am hoping, will evolve into a discussion with a diverse array of views and opinions!