I’m sure you’ve had the experience of getting a song stuck in your head—a song not of your choosing, but one inflicted on you by your inescapable environment. “It’s a world of laughter, a world of tears, it’s a world of hope and a world of fears…it’s a small world after all!” If you know that lyric, then it’s likely that now you have that song stuck in your head!

My wife’s family and I went to DisneyLand in San Diego as part of a family reunion celebration this summer. I love my wife, and I love her ebullient Italian family, but I failed to see, and still fail to see, the attraction of waiting in line, to be herded onto a train, to be forced through one goofy chamber after another, listening to the same small song over and over and over again…and it is no relief that the lyrics are sung in different languages during this insipid small world tour… And that was my favorite ride!… Pirates of the Caribbean displayed dozens of plastic pirates drinking and discharging weapons, and plastic skeletons doing the same. The hidden Jack Sparrow look-alike upset me—not because it was scary, but because it scares me that we were on this ride featuring a plastic pirate bearing very little resemblance to the actor Johnny Depp. This whole park is at least three times removed from reality! In fact, DisneyLand is so far from anything real, that Plato himself would have a hard time coming up with his platonic ideal that this park is striving desperately to participate in. Besides that, the world is really not all that small.

I think what all this means, and what I’ve discovered about myself this summer, is that I’m now too old to enjoy DisneyLand, but still small minded enough to have vapid songs stuck in my plastic mind. 

I give Disney Land and old age one star.