Behold Disney/ABC straw boss and moral vacuum, Robert Iger. He’s got it all: A Disney CEO sinecure, 31.6 million dollar annual compensation package, and a soul you could scrape off the bottom of a shoe. He wears the self-satisfied countenance we see on so many of the oligarchs who infest our world: the serene assurance of a guy who drowned his conscience in the bathtub long before he was old enough to drive.
Millenia ago, a guy named Mark asked
For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?
Bobby here could answer that one without breaking stride: hollowing out your conscience like a Halloween jack-o-lantern turns out to be a pretty sweet deal in this day and age. Five stars, would recommend. That’s why Hollow Bobby here decided to give in to the regime’s pressure and cancel the Jimmy Kimmel show, after less moral introspection than most of us give to a Starbucks order. “Because,” thought Hollow Bobby, “what’s our country’s First Amendment, when there’s a 6.2 billion dollar Nextstar affiliate merger at stake?” No contest.
It’s no surprise that during his tenure Bobby has doubled down on turning “The Happiest Place on Earth™” (sic) into an earthbound version Spirit Airlines, but without the discount base fares. He did this by continuing to field strip the perks that visitors had come to expect and charging them to get them back. Who looks at the setting for fond childhood memories and envisions a fee extraction racket that would make a mob protection goon shake his head? I’ll give you three guesses, and two don’t count.
Corporate collaborators
If you’ve read the history of fascist takeovers, you know that rich people and corporations are the earliest and most eager of collaborators. This morning, when I read ABC network’s list of advertisers, a familiar leapt out at me: Bayer AG pharmaceuticals,
about which The Holocaust Encyclopedia notes:
As part of the IG Farben conglomerate, which strongly supported the Third Reich, the Bayer company was complicit in the crimes of the Third Reich. In its most criminal activities, the company took advantage of the absence of legal and ethical constraints on medical experimentation to test its drugs on unwilling human subjects. These included paying a retainer to SS physician Helmuth Vetter to test Rutenol and other sulfonamide drugs on deliberately infected patients at the Dachau, Auschwitz, and Gusen concentration camps.
That’s pretty typical of corporations. Where we see an unthinkable horror, they see a chance to turn a profit without those pesky ethical constraints. If none of them have sunk as far as Bayer did during the Shoah, it’s only because they haven’t been given the opportunity. So, left to their own devices, we have no reason to expect anything from them but more complicity. But do we intend to leave them to their own devices? Oh, no no, we do not.
It’s up to us
It’s funny/not funny how, as institutions crumble and Quisling quissle, the answer to “who will save us?” stays the same. We will. Nobody else can. At this, you may ask,
But how can I save anything? I’m just one person!
True, but you know who isn’t just one person? All the other people who feel the same way. There are a lot of us.
Here’s what I, who am just one person, did this morning:
I cancelled my Disney Plus account. You can too.
Click on this link to get started.
My cancellation alone will not cause Hollow Bob Iger to lose any sleep, but I’m not alone. Here’s top Google search suggestions for the phrase, “people cancelling.
If you want a detailed plan for other actions you can take to combat this, read this great article by Christopher Armitage
We’re not powerless.
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Done -- thanks!!