Obama Was Destined To Be Our Leader

Reader Norm pointed me to an article on Miceage.com about the revamped Hall of Presidents exhibit at Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom in Florida. Although the writer has praise for the new exhibit, he notices that along with adding a new president, the theme has changed a bit too:

The attraction sports new marquees, a new countdown clock indicating how many minutes until the next show, and a new subtitle: "A Celebration of Liberty's Leaders." There are new movies (well, slideshow presentations), and they are displayed in eye-popping, unrealistically bright and cheerful projections, the result of a switch to digital projectors. It's jarring, in fact, how "fresh" that part of the show looks when compared to your memory of the dingy, cracked, faded, and often dirty film print that used to run here.

But this is no mere freshening of the same show, with the new president plopped into place at the end. This was a fundamental rethink of the show's purpose, scope, and orientation. The bottom line is that the show now offers park visitors an actual, honest to goodness thesis: everything in American presidential history, it claims by virtue of a new storyline, has been inexorably leading up to this moment, and the election of Barack Obama is the culmination of a long "development" in us as a culture and a society. There will be many who cheer this line of reasoning, but it strikes me that others may resent the apparent taking of sides. Had John McCain won the election, would the show celebrate in a similar way?

Of course, Obama's presidency is historic in a way that McCain's would not have been, if for no other reason than Obama's multiracial background. His victory reflects a major change from the past, and the revamped show would want to acknowledge that. It would be hard to have any objections on these grounds.

But no matter how you personally voted in the 2008 election, we all recognize that some folks voted for candidates who didn't win, and those folks are arguably being excluded in the celebration promoted by the new show, since the show is not as neutral as its previous versions had been. That's the problem with developing a "story" out of the list of presidents over time; such a narrative by definition creates the impression that Obama was supposed to win…and furthermore implies that anyone else was supposed to lose in that election. I think this will alienate some folks.

You can read the whole thing and see photos here.