In that sense, the teddy bear is a reminder of the astonishing power of contemporary humanity. It’s hard to understand how dominant our species has become, but I sometimes find it helpful to consider it purely in terms of mass: The total combined weight of all living humans currently on Earth is around three hundred and eighty-five million tons. That is the so-called biomass of our species. The biomass of our livestock—sheep, chickens, cows, and so on—is around eight hundred million tons. And the combined biomass of every other mammal and bird on Earth is less than one hundred million tons. All the whales and tigers and monkeys and deer and bears and, yes, even Canada geese—together, they weigh less than a third of what we weigh.*
For many species of large animals in the twenty-first century, the single most important determinant of survival is whether their existence is useful to humans. But if you can’t be of utility to people, the second best thing you can be is cute. You need an expressive face, ideally some large eyes. Your babies need to remind us of our babies. Something about you must make us feel guilty for eliminating you from the planet.
Can cuteness save a species? I’m dubious. The part of the teddy bear origin story that often doesn’t get told is that right after Roosevelt sportingly refused to kill the bear, he ordered a member of his hunting party to slit its throat, so as to put the bear out of its misery. No bears were saved that day. And now there are fewer than fifty bears left in Mississippi. Global sales of teddy bears, meanwhile, have never been higher.
I give the teddy bear two and a half stars.
THE HALL OF PRESIDENTS
I GREW UP IN ORLANDO, FLORIDA, about fifteen miles away from the world’s most-visited theme park, Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom. When I was a kid, Orlando was such a tourist city that whenever you flew out of the airport, a message played saying, “We hope you enjoyed your visit.” In response, my parents would always sigh, and then mutter, “We live here.”
I first visited the Magic Kingdom in 1981, when I was four and it was ten. I loved the park back then. I remember meeting Goofy and allowing myself to believe it was actually Goofy. I remember getting scared on the Snow White ride, and feeling big because I could ride Thunder Mountain, and I remember being so tired at the end of the day that I’d fall asleep with my face pressed against the glass of our Volkswagen Rabbit.
But then I got older. As a teenager, I began to define myself primarily by what I disliked, and my loathes were legion. I hated children’s books, the music of Mariah Carey, suburban architecture, and shopping malls. But most of all, I hated Disney World. My friends and I had a word for the artificiality and corporatized fantasy of pop music and theme parks and cheerful movies: We called all of it “plastic.” The TV show Full House was plastic. The Cure’s new stuff was kind of plastic. And Disney World? God, Disney World was so plastic.
This period of my life coincided with a terrible blessing. My mother won a community service award, and the award came with four free annual passes to Disney. That summer, I was fourteen, and my family dragged me to Disney World All. The. Time.
I realize I’m probably not garnering much sympathy with my sorrowful tale of getting into Disney World for free dozens of times in one summer. But fourteen-year-old me hated it. For one thing, Disney World was always hot, and in 1992, I had a semireligious allegiance to wearing a trench coat, which did not pair well with the pounding and oppressive swamp heat of Central Florida summers. The coat was meant to protect me from the world, not the weather, and in that respect it succeeded. Still, I was always sweating, and I must’ve been quite a sight to my fellow theme park visitors—a rail-thin child with a hunter-green coat to my knees, droplets of sweat erupting from every facial pore.
But of course I wanted those people to be freaked out by me, because I was freaked out by them. I was repulsed by the idea that they were giving money to a corporation in order to escape their horrible, miserable lives that were horrible and miserable in part because our corporate overlords controlled all the means of production.
At any rate, I had to survive many long summer days at Disney World. I usually started out sitting on a bench near the entrance to the park, scrawling snippets of stories into a yellow legal pad, and then eventually the day would get unbearably warm, and I’d make my way to the Hall of Presidents, which was one of the least crowded and best air-conditioned attractions at the Magic Kingdom. For the remainder of the day, I’d return to the Hall of Presidents show over and over, writing in that legal pad all the while. I began the first short story I ever finished while sitting through the Hall of Presidents show. The story was about a crazed anthropologist who kidnaps a family of hunter-gatherers and takes them to Disney World.*
The Hall of Presidents was an opening-day attraction at the Magic Kingdom, and it has been a constant presence since the park opened in 1971. In a building modeled after Independence Hall in Philadelphia, where the U.S. Constitution was debated, visitors first enter a waiting room, which features busts of several presidents and also a bust of the Disney Company’s founder, Walt Disney, who is identified as “An American Original.”
Since there is almost never a wait for the Hall of Presidents, you soon enter the main theater, whereupon you are told that the attraction is dedicated to the memory of Walt Disney. This always struck me as a bit excessive, not only because Disney’s sculpted head appears in the waiting room but also because the entire park is named after him. After Disney thanks Disney, there’s a movie about American history before the screen eventually ascends to reveal the stars of the show—life-size animatronic re-creations of every American president. The animatronics are at once creepily lifelike and terrifyingly robotic—a proper descent into the uncanny valley. As my daughter, then four years old, said when we visited the Hall of Presidents, “Those are NOT humans.”
Only a couple of the presidents actually speak. Animatronic Abraham Lincoln stands and recites the Gettysburg Address, and since the early 1990s, the animatronic current president has made a speech at the end of the show, using their own voice. When we visited in 2018, animatronic Donald Trump uttered a few sentences, including, “Above all, to be an American is to be an optimist,” which is just a fundamental misunderstanding of how citizenship gets conferred in nation-states.
The Hall of Presidents doesn’t ignore the various horrors of American history, but it’s also an unapologetically patriotic celebration of the United States and its presidents. In fact, one of the last lines of the show is, “Our presidency is no longer just an idea. It is an idea with a proud history.” And I would argue it is an idea with a proud history. But it is also an idea with many other histories—a shameful history, an oppressive history, and a violent history, among others. One of the challenges of contemporary life for me is determining how those histories can coexist without negating each other, but the Hall of Presidents doesn’t really ask them to coexist. Instead, it imagines a triumphalist view of American history: Sure, we had some failures, but thankfully we solved them with our relentless optimism, and just look at us now.
* * *
Two of the Anthropocene’s major institutions are the nation-state and the limited liability corporation, both of which are real and powerful—and on some level made-up. The United States isn’t real the way a river is real, nor is the Walt Disney Company. They are both ideas we believe in. Yes, the United States has laws and treaties and a constitution and so on, but none of that prevents a country from splitting apart or even disappearing. From the neoclassical architecture that attempts to give the U.S. a sense of permanence* to the faces on our money, America has to continually convince its citizens that it is real, and good, and worthy of allegiance.