It Was A Small World After All
I don't know how you're spending your airplane time lately --- maybe you've arranged your life in some eminently sane manner that doesn't require periodic four-hour stints spent breathing other peoples' fecal particles and noroviruses in a 25-year-old metal tube indifferently steered by a recent graduate of low-cost simulator training --- but I'm spending mine reading Godel, Escher Bach for the fourth and, I hope, final time. It's not an entirely voluntary re-perusal. My son is crawling through The Turing Omnibus and "GEB" is the logical next step after that. He will want to discuss it. I will need to be prepared.
Much of this book concerns the mechanism by which we might construct "consciousness loops", at least in a mathematical sense. As they currently exist, computers are awfully powerful but they have no ability to "step outside" their processing loop and examine themselves. We can nest levels within levels, and indeed that's our current moronic H1-B-centric computing paradigm of Docker-inside-Kubernetes-inside-VMWare and so on, but none of these levels have the ability to "think" about themselves. That's the beginning of consciousness. A computer (or a dog, or a monkey) can run a program and exhibit all sorts of fascinating behaviors, but at no point can it stop and ask itself "Why am I doing this?" To our knowledge, human beings are the only devices in the universe with the ability to consider themselves in the abstract. Dolphins, maybe. I wouldn't bet on that.
It's a neat trick, but only if we use it. Any time you find yourself explaining your past actions to an employer, spouse, or officer of the law with "I don't know why I did that," what you really mean is that you didn't take a moment to be conscious, to examine your behaviors and motivations from a distance. In those unexamined moments, you were no better than a chimpanzee and considerably worse than, say, an array of Core i7 processors operating in parallel. It is never wasted time to pause what you are doing and use that uniquely human faculty of consciousness to evaluate your actions from a third-party perspective.
Perhaps that explains why I found myself wheedling a "FastPass+" for Space Mountain out of a bored foreign national with a journeyman's command of the King's English on Martin Luther King Day --- or perhaps it does not. As you'll see, however, applying a bit of human consciousness to Disneyworld raises more questions than it answers.
The day before, John and I had gone to Bushnell Motorsports Park, about ninety minutes north of Tampa, for a long morning of 206cc kart testing. Two years ago, my son decided he'd rather race bikes on the weekends than race karts. This has been a real financial boon for me; a first-rate kids' bicycle can knock on the door of $4,000 these days and he uses four of them for slightly different disciplines, but they're not nearly as expensive to run as a $5,000 cadet kart and their resale value is more than theoretical.
We've been doing a bit of indoor karting over the past two years, but there's not much challenge in it for him. He's always the fastest driver of the week or whatever and he gets hugely frustrated with the kids who are just at the track to have fun. Meanwhile, a lower-cost 206cc four-stroke engine formula has been gaining traction in the Midwest, leading me to think that we could do a kart season in 2021 without spending fifteen grand on rebuilds. To put this theory to the test, I arranged for us to rent a pair of Ignite karts in cadet and adult sizes respectively.
John had a great time, in all sense of the word. He was remarkably quick from his first lap and only improved as he figured out the line. As you'd expect, he has some way to go when it comes to race theory, line selection, and the various defensive/passing maneuvers which make up such a big part of the sport --- but he can hang the tail of the thing out at 40-45 miles per hour without breaking a sweat. He was ready to come back and drive again the next day, but I thought we should close the experiment on a high note. Also, I was in physical misery from 90 minutes of karting at fairly high speeds over a lot of very rough curbs. Adult karting is the only motorsport which has a separate category for over-30 drivers, and I understand why after Monday. Anyway, I felt that one long session was enough for this trip.
Which gave us a free Sunday evening and Monday morning to spend somewhere in central Florida. The slack-jawed hotel concierge mumbled through some plodded through the procurement of Universal Studios and Disneyworld tickets for us. In exchange for the robust sum of six hundred and fifty-five (655) dollars, my son and I could visit two Universal Studios parks and just one Disneyworld park. Plus sixty-two dollars for non-premium parking. Plus the ten dollars my concierge suggested I tip her for the favor of staring at her inkjet printer for the better part of half an hour muttering, "...something is wrong..."
John liked Universal, although we didn't do much in the way of rides. He was an enthusiastic roller-coaster participant two years ago, but now he says that he doesn't like not being able to steer the train. When he expressed an unwillingness to ride the "Hulk" looping coaster, I pointed out that he had no fear of jumping a forty-foot tabletop at about the same speed on a mountain bike without any sort of track or guidance whatsoever, and that he'd just driven a go-kart between two concrete posts at fifty-five miles per hour.
"I don't trust the roller coaster people as much as I trust my own riding," he replied, and that settled the matter. He was selected out of the crowd to assist the painfully attractive young woman who serves as a tour guide on the "Poseidon's Fury" attraction.
"What's your name, cutie?" she asked him.
"Billy," he straight-face lied, "and I'm from Canada." She snaked her arm around his shoulders and drew him into her khaki-clad crotch and belly. He was obviously frustrated by this, which is normal for a ten-year-old. I believe the only thing that will keep him from being massively successful with women in the long run is the unfortunate fact that he looks like me, which is another way of saying he probably won't grow up to be handsome. At least he wont be short.
On the way back to the hotel, John asked me a few questions about Disneyworld. He and I went there with his mother when he was four years old, but he doesn't really remember that. I told him that I'd gone for the first time in 1978 or thereabouts, way back in the era when you got a book of tickets to be used for each attraction. The tickets were labeled "A" through "E". The "A" tickets got you on a Main Street trolley. The Astro-Orbiter and Space Mountain required an "E" ticket, thus the common Car and Driver phrase "E-ticket ride" used when referring to Berlinetta Boxers and the like.
At some point in the Eighties Disneyworld became a one-price park. Some people just stood in line all day for the Astro-Orbiter. To combat that issue, and to reflect the increasing polarization of our society, Disney created "FastPass", which lets you pay extra to skip the line. This has the effect of making the normal line move much more slowly. There's a moral here for all of us, but Disney tactfully skirts the issue nowadays by giving each person three FastPasses to use as they like.
The chunky concierge hadn't been capable of figuring out our FastPasses on her computer, telling us instead to download the app and handle it ourselves. The app, which occupied 97MB on my phone and rang the notification bell every three minutes all night, told me that I had to have the ticket scanned at the park before I could get my FastPasses. So the next morning we waited for an hour to get a monorail ride into the Magic Kingdom, where we learned that the concierge hadn't bothered to distinguish between me and John on the tickets, which made them invalid since they were both for "John Baruth". By the time we got that sorted out, every FastPass timeslot had been filled by other guests.
As we walked down Main Street USA, I told John how to see the Wizard behind the curtain. We discussed the apparent size of Cinderella's castle, then we walked up to it so he could see the Imagineers' tricks of perspective. There isn't really a full-height third story window in the whole park. It was all designed to seem tall to a child. I told him about the underground passages which allow the workers to scurry beneath us, which in turn prevents a child from the trauma of seeing a Mickey Mouse with his head off. I called on him to note how many of Disneyworld's workers were foreign nationals. I alluded to Disney's repulsive habit of inshoring their labor. I told him how Danger Girl worked for Disney in their summer program as a teenager twenty years ago. I did not tell him how I lost Kellee, the woman who once felt like my soulmate, to a fellow Disney summer intern.
Truth be told, I had considerable doubts about taking him there at all. I think that Walt Disney was probably a good dude, but the purity of his vision didn't long survive his death. Today, the alt-right talks about "the Devil Mouse", which molests children and also turned "Star Wars" into a steaming pile of riotgrrl manure. I don't want my son to have any particular respect or affection for Disney and its products. And yet... my consciousness loop demands that I step outside my prejudices and give him a chance to decide for himself on the matter. That's the difference, I suppose, between education and indoctrination. The ability to evaluate the evidence on your own.
Through the park we trudged, avoiding the parades where possible. The Haunted Mansion, which I remembered as being a cornucopia of technological fascination, didn't impress him. "They're using reflective glass for the ghosts and projecting face movies on blank heads." Well, he's not wrong. As I'd suspected, John didn't have much interest in anything outside Tomorrowland. At Cosmic Ray's Starlight Cafe, he admired the coordination of animatronic motion and recorded music. "It doesn't look that fake." The Tomorrowland Speedway, which had delighted me thirty-nine years ago with the chance to drive a real gas-powered car along a rail with a little bit of wiggle room for steering, didn't hold much fascination for a young man who had been effortlessly countersteering his way out of big full-speed slides in a 7-horsepower kart the morning before.
I found a Disney Guest rep named Eduardo and used my pidgin Spanish to get us a FastPass for Space Mountain. At my son's age, I'd been frightened by the blank futurism of the decor and thrilled at the prospect of riding an indoor coaster. John, by contrast, thought it was "retro", and noted that if you left the lights on it would be an extremely tame experience. (He's right.) As we pulled back up to the exit station of Space Mountain, I experienced what the Buddhists call satori, or sudden enlightenment. I realized that
virtually nothing has changed about Disneyworld in the past forty years;
I saw a lot more adults there than I did children;
the children I did see weren't having much of a good time.
I saw entire squadrons of Millennials in the Tomorrowland lines, plenty of socially awkward twenty-something just-married couples in yoga pants operating beyond design limits, quite a few people my own age on some sort of nostalgia trip. They don't want Disneyworld to change. They want it to reflect their youth. If our culture has been held hostage by the preferences of Baby Boomers, then Disneyworld has been frozen in amber by the preferences of the Boomers' children. "Tomorrowland" fills me with a sort of deep satisfaction because it's really "Yesterdayland" at this point. From the perspective of actual kids, it's a tired old amusement park with long lines and nothing of particular interest, a distant second place to King's Island or Six Flags. Maybe the new Star Wars park is different, and better. I'm sure I don't care enough to find out.
Sitting in the tram for our ride out to parking line Rapunzel 235, John squinted at me behind Oakley Quarter Jackets with his usual I-have-a-question expression. "Dad, Disneyworld was great. Thanks for taking me. Would it have been too expensive to do the kart again instead?" I had to laugh.
"Dude, it would have been way cheaper for you to drive the kart." I watched my son spin through a consciousness loop of his own --- what's the best way to express my strong opinion to my tired old father and his obviously sore feet? --- before replying.
"Maybe next time... we could just go to the kart track instead. But this was nice." Which is his polite way of saying that the Magic Kingdom sucks out loud. So I'll have to get my dose of nostalgia without him next time.
In truth, I don't think I ever need to go back, thanks in large part to another moment of satori, and sadness, I'd experienced on the Tomorrowland People Mover. There's a part of the ride where they drive you by the Progress City model. It made me think about what "progress" used to mean. The men who built Disney World had seen us go from Sopwiths to the SR-71 in forty years, from the Great Depression to the surface of the moon. Can you blame them for thinking that the next fifty years would see a leap just as great, just as important? How could they have known that we would turn pathetically inward, that we would abandon space to focus on video games and leveraged buyouts, that "progress" would come to mean an ever-more-mincing definition of victimhood based on race and sex?
It didn't escape my thoughts that we were visiting the park on MLK Day. The man once said:
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
Are we any closer to that than we were when he said it? Or have we simply traded one sort of elitist-approved bigotry for another, extinguished Bull Connor's ignorance and replaced it with Rachel Maddow's urbane but vile dictionary of outgroup hatred? We could have built real spaceships in my lifetime. Instead we spent trillions on meaningless wars and Peak TV. Has any era of humanity ever sold its dreams more cheaply? What did we get when we forgot about the stars and turned to Tinder instead?
Nothing to be done about that, at least not right now. I took my son to Disney World. I didn't let my own diffidence and dislike keep him away from the place. He can form his own opinion on the subject, decide if he ever wants to go back. The ten-year-old boy in me feels sorry for ten-year-old John. On one hand, my son has opportunities and experiences of which I would have been unable to dream at his age. On the other hand, he is growing up in a country that has stopped trying to make tomorrow better than today. He will never know a life without the moronic drumbeat of "climate change" and downright evil social engineering through careless manipulation of the powerful levers assigned to race and sex. As a child I believed I might travel to the stars. John knows he will spend his life fighting to exist right here, battling for resources and clean air with eight billion mostly unconscious and degraded inheritors of this world. And it's a small world, after all.
