Tuesday, July 27, 2010
… and it’s at Disney World, but it’s actually the Carousel of Progress in Tomorrow Land — it’s sort of a theater. It’s one of the few “rides” you’re brave enough to go on at Disney World, so Carousel of Progress it is.
You enter the theater and are hit with a tidal wave of nostalgia for… Tomorrow. I miss the way “tomorrow” used to be, the way we imagined it in the 1960s: a Jetsons world of robot maids and push-button meals, jet cars that would transport us happily through space. And the thing is, this bright and shiny World of the Future would be as comfy and cozy as a family den in the 1960s. The externals would have changed, but what Disney and the Jetsons failed to realize was that technology would change so many fundamentals about our society. You can’t just slap it like a veneer on the 1960s.
But back to the Carousel of Progress. You sit in the theater, and as a grandfatherly voice narrates the changes of a family’s life through the eras of American history as we watch the tableaux, the seats themselves revolve to the next “era.” But we got stuck. Stuck in, oh, 1880 or so. We saw 1880 three times till the audience cried mutiny and exited mid-program as the loudspeaker barked, “Stay in your seats! Do not exit the theater!”
Well, three times of this family in the 1880s was quite enough, and, having been through this Carousel before, I knew they’d be the same old family doing the same things, just with new appliances. What a relief to have finally escaped the next round of the jaunty “It’s a great big beautiful tomorrrrrow!” song.
And we went out into the real tomorrow.
And my latest discovery of Progress, one of modern society’s true achievements that we didn’t have in the 1960s is… Haagen Dazs Dark Chocolate Mint ice cream. 
