ABSTRACT
Think of how much of the Hegelian dialectic might be summed up, as an overall title, in the idealist Coleridge’s favorite proverb, ‘extremes meet.’
(Kenneth Burke)
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL COMMENT: WHY I DID NOT VISIT DISNEYLAND
When I was 18 or 19 and in my early 20s, I drove past Disneyland many times, cruising the freeways of Orange County in southern California, but I never stopped.2 I knew that this was the pilgrimage center of fundamentalist capitalism, Mickey Mecca, and that terminally ill children often expressed their desire to visit Disneyland before they died, as their ‘last wish.’ At age 19, this seemed to me reason enough not to go. But there were still more personal reasons for my resistance. At that time, I was active in mountaineering-I passed Disneyland most often on my way to meet other climbers in the southern Sierra. From my moving vantage point on the freeway, all I could see of the park was the huge plaster model of the Matterhorn sticking up above the fences. Each time I saw the fake mountain, I thought of the four climbers who perished in the Whymper party when their rope broke on their return from the first successful ascent of the real Matterhorn in 1865. Disneyland became associated in my mind with death. Disney’s Matterhorn itself reminded me of the grotesquely distorted plaster ‘death masks’ I had seen in museums. It made no sense to me, at the time, that someone would want to make a death mask of nature.
