When I worked at a Southern California newspaper years ago, we tried to get an interview with the actress who played Tinker Bell at Disneyland in Anaheim. We wanted to know more about the whimsical fairy who was whisked into the sky by pixie dust each night as “Happily Ever After” blended with a burst of fireworks that painted the night sky.
Disney said no.
We weren’t surprised. Finding out in an interview that Tinker Bell was an alcoholic with multiple DUIs would’ve killed the magic. So would learning that on her days off, Tinker Bell was really Tinker “Bill,” a blond-wigged dude with tiny wings and big calf muscles. Flying so high at night, you’d never notice otherwise.
Like the illusionist who guards his magic, the Disney magic glistens brightest when park-goers are hermetically sealed inside a metropolis of make-believe. “Cast members” (employees) who brush up against mere mortals are sworn to secrecy by ironclad rules designed to protect the sparkle of the Magic Kingdom.
And we don’t mind it a bit. The mystery is the entertainment, after all. And we gladly lose ourselves in the fiction.
“That’s the way to tour Disneyland,” novelist Ray Radbury said years ago, “with a complete suspension of disbelief, with a drunken sense of joy and eyes wide with wonder. Let the child come out and play. Laugh and shout!”
But what if Disney’s costumed characters walked out of the magic kingdoms in California and Florida, fanned out across America – not to entertain – but to convince the world that fairy tales are real? That they are real?
Bizarre. I know.
Yet, that’s exactly what it feels like in America these days. As Americans struggle to grapple with the real world, a cast of woke characters with mythical beliefs spout political magic non-stop to try to keep us hermetically sealed inside a world of make-believe.
Pinocchio has become president. Dumbo is vice president. Tinker Bell is the flitting press secretary who, with the touch of her magic wand, dispenses shiny “spin-psaki” – a partisan pixie dust designed to make dark policies sparkle. And the House has become a congress of political Dwarfs who, as America gets darker, paint the skies with rhetorical fireworks at the behest of Speaker Cruella De Ville who sits back in wicked delight as she rubs her fists and licks her dentures.
And no matter how many people get hurt, suffer, or die because of their Neverland policies, they stretch their mouths to a maniacal grin and sing “Happily Ever After” in bizarre unison because, they say, “it’s a small world, after all.”
We’re stuck in the dark magic of a litany of sick fairy tales:
John Kerry muttered his hope that the hideous Vladimir Putin would remember climate change once he’s done blowing Ukrainians to bits.
At the same time that Putin saber-rattles about nuclear war, the U.S. Army is immersing its soldiers in the Pentagon’s Transgender Service Policy that, last year, paved the way for transgenders to serve openly in the military. The training, mandatory for all soldiers by Sept. 30, teaches a fairy tale: gender is not a biological reality, but a social construct.
We used to laugh at “Defund the Police” as Neverland stuff. But we had no idea that Neverland is exactly where woke city councils, district attorneys, courts, media, and big business live and breathe. It’s a place where injustice to victims creates social justice for the perpetrators; where disorder creates order; and where crime disappears when you handcuff police and legalize crime. And where does all the violence and mayhem come from in Neverland? COVID.
Young blacks are the biggest killers of other young blacks. Smash and grabbers are mostly black. Blacks commit violence against Asians, and senselessly resist lawful arrests. But say the magic words: “systemic racism,” “mass incarceration,” “white privilege,” “police brutality,” and “George Floyd” and abracadabra! – the woke crowd becomes colorblind.
The magic of make-believe is how the debacle in Afghanistan became an “extraordinary success”; how, in late 2021, Biden said “our borders are not open”; how trans swimmer Lia Thomas, who’s attracted to women, can say “I’m a woman” while dangling his male privates in the women’s locker room; and how, after millions have lost their livelihoods, reputations, and their lives during the pandemic, COVID ends with a thud; and how, after rolling back Trump’s immensely successful policies, Biden says the country’s troubles are all Trump’s fault. It’s magic.
Although we never got to interview Tinker Bell while I was at the paper, I did find an interview she did last April on a Disney podcast. She’s 5-foot-4 aerialist Gina Rock, daughter of a nuclear physicist who, for 21 years, was Disneyland’s longest-serving Tinker Bell. Rock now works at Homeland Security (FEMA).
In the interview, it was no surprise to learn that the magic of Tinker Bell’s nightly 20-second flights above the 160-foot Matterhorn would not be possible if she were not fully grounded in reality: cables, riggings, ziplines, batteries, vise grips, wind readings, and years of training in acrobatic athleticism.
If historic inflation, out-of-control borders, butchered race relations, partisan bickering, and the frightening rise in big-city murder and mayhem was not enough to awakened us, the tragic invasion in Ukraine screams that it’s far past time for America – especially the Democrat party – to stop bending reality to fit political fairy tales. Were it not for their magical policies and pathological hatred of everything Trump, we could’ve focused the nation’s precious energy on solving problems in the real world.
“World leaders do not understand what is happening,” said Olena Gnes, a Ukrainian mother holding her baby in a bomb shelter when Fox’s Neil Cavuto asked her how her children were doing. “They (world leaders) are more like children because what is happening is terrible … they are killing us! … please, come and save us!”
For the first couple of days, Olena pleaded on every news program she could as if she were speaking to a world that was suspended in disbelief – as if what they were seeing on television wasn’t real.
It wasn’t long before she realized that believing that America – that somebody – would rush in to give Ukraine what she knew it really needed – superior military force – was like believing in a fairy tale. For millions of Ukrainians, it was already too late.
Given the response of John Kerry, the Biden administration, and others to Ukraine – after a few days of shock – it won’t be long before the same cast of woke characters with mythical beliefs spout political magic non-stop to try to keep us hermetically sealed inside a world of make-believe.