Disney Invades Iraq? by John Ostrander
You may already know about this story – it surfaced in late April elsewhere. I found out about it thanks to This Is True, a weekly newsletter and website run by Randy Cassingham and one of my fave e-mails of the week each week.
Here’s the story, in case you missed it. An American entrepreneur has looked at the mess in Iraq and decided that what Baghdad needs is an entertainment park. Llewellyn Werner, chairman of C3, which The Times of London online says is “a Los Angeles-based holding company for private equity firms” is putting 500 million dollars – a cool half billion – into the Baghdad Zoo and Entertainment Experience outside but near the American “Green Zone.” It will comprise fifty acres and, in addition to the former Baghdad Zoo, will include a skateboard park, rides, a concert theater, and a museum.
The Baghdad Zoo itself now has only 35 animals out of about 700 it had originally. The rest were lost to the war – starved to death, stolen, and killed so they could be eaten by Baghdad citizens who were afraid there was going to be no food.
The project will cost $500 million and will be managed by Iraqis. Under the terms of the lease, Mr. Werner will retain exclusive rights to housing and hotel developments, which he says will be both culturally sensitive and enormously profitable. “I wouldn’t be doing this if I wasn’t making money,” he said. “I also have this wonderful sense that we’re doing the right thing – we’re going to employ thousands of Iraqis. But mostly everything here is for profit.”
A $1 million skateboard park, the first phase of the development, will open in July. Parts for 200,000 skateboards and materials to build ramps will be shipped from America to Iraq for assembly at state-owned factories and distributed free to Iraqi children along with helmets and kneepads.
Wait. There’s more.
When the sport catches on Mr. Werner will start to sell the boards – which bear the slogan “Ride Baghdad Skate Park” in hot pink Arabic script – for cash.
Paul Brinkley, Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Business Transformation, is working on this from the government. According to Mr. Brinkley, General Petraeus is a “big supporter” of the project.
John March, executive veep of Ride & Show Engineering, Inc. which is designing the place, was asked on Fox News about possible safety concerns for the park and replied, “Well, you live here in Southern California and there’s drive-bys and everything else. So there’s danger everywhere, and I think the key thing is this will be tremendous for Baghdad.”
That answer appeared to satisfy Fox News. Fox News and The Times of London share a common owner – the Republican Party’s own Rupert Murdoch.
By the way, on the homepage for Ride and Show Engineering, Inc, the company describes itself as follows: The world of entertainment and amusement is constantly changing and becoming more sophisticated. Ride & Show continues to be on the forefront. From motion base simulation to unique show action equipment, Ride & Show challenges and overcomes the barriers between reality and dreams.
Sounds like the right company for Iraq.
ThinkProgress.com has still more, including a radio snippet from NPR’s Eric Westerveldt which included part of Werner’s pitch. The site states: In pitching his Disneyland idea to a deputy Baghdad mayor, Werner – displaying little sense for Iraqi culture – said the waterpark is “integral to the sex appeal” of the new amusement center. Speaking in deliberately slow English, Werner told the Iraqis, “One of the fastest growing sports in the world is skate…boarding.
NPR’s Eric Westervelt additionally reported: After explaining skateboarding, Werner tells the assembled Iraqi business and government men, “I’m a businessman. I’m not here because I think you’re nice people. I think there’s money to be made here.”
It’s not the only permanent American element designed for Baghdad. According to ThinkProgress: The AP reports that the Pentagon is backing a $5 billion dollar plan to “transform the U.S.-protected Green Zone” into a “centerpiece for Baghdad’s future,” resulting in “big paydays for early investors.”
For Washington, the driving motivation is to create a “zone of influence” around the new $700 million U.S. Embassy to serve as a kind of high-end buffer for the compound, whose total price tag will reach about $1 billion after all the workers and offices are relocated over the next year.
“When you have $1 billion hanging out there and 1,000 employees lying around, you kind of want to know who your neighbors are. You want to influence what happens in your neighborhood over time,” said Navy Capt. Thomas Karnowski, who led the team that created the development plan.
An incentive for the project, which would include hotels, resorts, and commercial development in the Green Zone, appears to be lining the pockets of investors and allies rather than re-building Iraq’s economy. In fact, Karnowski acknowledged that American officials would vet potential investors because of a “vested interest” — mirroring the cronyism of Saddam’s Hussein’s regime.
This whole thing just depresses the hell out of me. Not because of the apparent lunacy. That’s actually hilarious in a jaw dropping to the floor kind of way. The scenario is ripe for all kind of riffs – will they work bombs and mortar rounds into the fireworks displays? Will the Marines act as Disneyland-type guides for the place? I could go on and so could you. Many of you have.
Or I could get pissed off about it. I could make the same observations that everyone else had made by now – that this project epitomizes American “tone deafness” when dealing with another culture. Or that it symbolizes every misguided step that we’ve made in Iraq. At a time when there are still mortar attacks and sniper killings, this guy Werner wants to open a skateboard park. Baghdad citizens don’t get electricity on a regular basis and he thinks he is going to open an amusement park.
I’m not going to decry the very idea of opening an American style amusement park in Baghdad, however. Before the war, Baghdad had two amusement parks and a new Disneyworld-type park is going to be built in Dubai. Amusement parks are not essentially non-Arab. We liberal types should try to maintain a certain consistency – we keep insisting that Iraq wasn’t a center for terrorists because it was a secular society. If its a secular nation, why not a Disneyworld?
Of course, it’s encroaching American culture – and the odd Army base – that seems to really hack off the Moslem fundamentalists. And it’s the timing of the whole enterprise that just seems mind boggling – it would seem that the people of Baghdad need more essential things than a skateboard park. Even assuming it gets off the ground, how long before the extremists start having skateboard suicide bombers?
But that’s not what’s really bothering me about all this, bunky.
What depresses me is – I’m an imaginative guy. I write GrimJack and we’ve had battle cherubs in the current storyline. Battle cherubs, for crying out loud. In our previous story, we had ninja mimes. I writeMunden’s Bar. I wrote Wasteland! Wasteland! And I didn’t dream up “The Baghdad Zoo and Entertainment Experience”!
I mean, c’mon! “Ride Baghdad Skate Park” in hot pink Arabic script on skateboards to be sold in Baghdad? How am I supposed to top that?! Del Close told me once that he and a friend spent part of the late 60s in San Fran trying to figure out “how to be funnier than the environment.” When the environment starts generating this kind of nonsense, anything you can say becomes so obvious as to be redundant. How do you satirize something that is self-satirizing? Devoid of sense, it appears immune from criticism. You can’t improve on it.
Maybe we just borrow a classic Disney tune with a minor modification to the lyrics. C’mon, sing along. You all know the tune.
It’s a mad world, after all.
It’s a mad world, after all.
It’s a mad world, after all.
It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.
John Ostrander writes all the stuff he just said he writes, plus more. Including something amazingly new that’ll be showing up soon as we work some stuff out and shanghai the right artist.
Sounds good to me.If Disney's busy jumping into the quagmire with both feet, it won't have time to do to New Orleans what it did to Times Square, which i've been afraid it *would* since about the third day after Katrina hit.
Contrary to the title, I don't believe Disney is actually part of this plan. JO just used them as an easy to recognize name to draw attention to the piece. Disney is too busy preparing its invasion plans for Cuba. I know in my heart that off the coast of Florida are a series of boats; one owned by Disney, one by Microsoft, one by, ahem, "Organized Crime" and probably a couple others. As soon as the news comes down that Castro is dead, those boats are gonna hit the gas and drive hell bent for leather for Cuba. Whoever hits it first is gonna OWN the place. We're all just waiting for Castro to die out of courtesy.
Actually, I wrote the headline. I picked the Disney reference off of John's column, but the creative license speeding ticket is my bad.But I can easily imagine The Evil Empire invading Cuba. It'll be great fun to see the Mouse on his knees shooting craps. From Lansky to Castro to Disney. Poor Cuba.
Wasn't trying to cast aspersions; it was a perfectly reasonable headline, intended to generate interest, as opposed to mislead.Cuba is the last great frontier America has for expansion. The speech in Godfather 2 still rings true today. It's gonna be *crazy* when that place opens up. Ten years, max. They may pull an L Ron Hubbard and pretend Castro is alive after he dies, precisely to stave it off.
I don't know that it's the aura of Castro (which is all they've had for a couple years) is what's keeping Cuba Communist. Most Cubans grew up under Castro, and most of those that are older remember Batista as a puppet of Lansky, Luciano and Eisenhower. Cubans' lives were no better under Batista, except for a handful of very rich people.I think Cuba is likely to go the way much of Central America and South America is going, which is hardly pro-USA. We'll try to bribe them into giving up their turf, but I think the only way the US will have any influence in the area is if we invade the place and overthrow the government, exactly like we did in Hawaii.
Which is pretty much what I think will happen. But unlike certain activities drawing ire from the populace which shall remain nameless, I think this will be a corporate takeover. Cuba is small enough that I really believe it can be bought, literally. As opposed to the Batista situation where the money was only being made by the government, they could hand everyone in the damn country a million dollars. And since there's not all that much to buy in the country, the companies would get it all back and more in a couple years. They did a gag in The Onion where they said that what the US planned to do in Iraq – just hand the 40 billion out to each Iraqui. Crazy thing is…it might coulda worked. Give the people of a country money to keep them happy and quiet. Sound familiar?Cuba has no big allies, no one from neighboring countries that can sneak across the border without being seen (to the best of my knowledge, the Middle and South American submarine fleet is exceedingly small), it's like our own little Galapgos Islands. And like the Middle East, they have something we want – lovely weather (most of the time) and a great location. Played right, they could end up with the highest income per capita in the western hemisphere, and STILL have a great heath care system.Or they could get greedy, keep it all in the ruling class, have that massive abyss between the rich and the poor, and it'll all repeat again in 30 years.
Cuba has no big allies except Venezuela, which is big by virtue of its oil holdings.
People are still getting killed INSIDE THE GREEN ZONE, and this dweeb thinks he can build a theme park OUTSIDE the Green Zone.My suggestions:Whack-A-Mole Baghdad—skateboarders randomly appear at the top of their jumps, and snipers try to pick them off.Baseball Toss Baghdad—if you can knock over 3 milk bottles with a mortar from 500 yards, you win a stuffed animal.Burst A Balloon Baghdad—based on the carnival game where you use a stream of water to expand and explode a balloon, the object here would be to use a water hose to be the first to get your suspect to confess.Shirley, there must be more…
"Baseball Toss Baghdad—if you can knock over 3 milk bottles with a mortar from 500 yards, you win a stuffed animal."Considering how hard it is to knock those damn things down, that may be harder than it sounds. Woody Allen used to do a joke about a hurricane laying waste to Coney Island, and the only thing left standing were those three milk bottles…