The Mouse That Roved

I'm still marveling at the whats and whys of Disney's rationale for sinking $40 mil into a crockumentary hole that was sure to cause a ruckus. Perhaps they thought they'd get away with it unnoticed, as if half the internets aren't keeping an eye out for exactly this sort of contrived nonsense. Perhaps, since the project began in the wake of the last reiteration of Republican dominance -- a political lifetime ago, it seems -- they assumed that no tremendous reversal of fortune would take place, that fall 2006 would continue to see the accrual of Rovian hegemony.

It makes sense that Disney wants to curry favor with whoever's in charge; as Matt Stoller points out, Disney's ongoing desire to consolidate market share and preserve intellectual property rights for its hundred-year-old cartoon characters far beyond normal copyright law give it a seriously invested interest in keeping the "right" people happy.

Given what I know about how big corporations think, I bet the political slant to the movie wasn't strictly intentional on Disney's part. I bet that Disney's ABC division used a set of PR firms and flacks that decided that 9/11 belonged to conservatives, and so hired conservative movement players to produce, market, and distribute this film. They got Tom Kean, so there was adult supervision. What a perfect event setup, to make ABC the place for the country to turn on 9/11. In this fragmented universe, wouldn't it be great to have a time when the country came together, on one place, to really understand this event through the medium of television. And how wonderful if this were on ABC. It would be AN EVENT.

Disney can, one supposes, be forgiven to a certain extent for not anticipating huge intervening events and paradigms that would cast Chimpco's manifold incompetencies in sublime relief. The only people left are the brain-dead die-hards who just keep telling themselves that Nancy Pelosi would somehow be even worse, while two-thirds of the country continues to see malign incompetence for exactly what it is. Disney understands that red and blue don't matter nearly as much as green; the other two colors are just useful tools to manipulate in pursuit of the third.

And of course it's pure coincidence that the director of this thing just happens to hail from an evangelical institution that quite publicly avows to "take Hollywood back" from within. It's coincidence that only right-wing goofballs got preview copies. It's coincidence that supposed elder statesman and serious person Tom Kean, only a few degrees removed from Osama bin Laden to begin with, and certainly cognizant enough of the facts of his own report to know which scenes in the movie were real and which were pulled completely from Cyrus Nowrasteh's sphincter, vetted said invention as "reasonably accurate".

I think Disney's about to find out the hard way just how badly they misjudged this one. In the meantime, I guess I'll grudgingly have to boycott According to Jim. That'll show 'em.