"Team Rodent" was published last month and immediately made it onto the New York Times business best-seller list. In the book, Mr. Hiaasen, a best-selling crime novelist and a columnist for The Miami Herald, attacks -- informatively and hilariously -- the Disneyfication of the globe, with special attention to Florida and Times Square. (The latter, a once "skanky oozepot" of sleaze, tested our taste and tolerance, he argues. And revulsion, unlike the Mickey and Minnie garden statues at the enormous new Disney Store on 42d Street, is "essential to the human experience.")
The author says that over all, the Walt Disney Company is well run and even progressive in its policies toward its gay employees. And he discloses that he has made the parental pilgrimage to Disney World in Orlando, Fla. So what does he hate about the House of the Mouse?
For starters, its wholesome-image machine The company produces gritty rap music through its records unit, he notes, and distributes violent movies like "Pulp Fiction" even as it makes "101 Dalmatians.". One extremely funny chapter chronicles a frantic day last year when Disney's Hollywood Records division released, then withdrew, an album that contained filthy lyrics by a group called the Insane Clown Posse.
Mr. Hiaasen also condemns the company for the trample of tourists into Florida -- soon to reach about 46 million annually -- and for what he calls endless "roadside schlock" set up to relieve these Disney World pilgrims of any leftover cash. Paradoxically, he says, the only relief now from the ugly sprawl (once cattle ranches and fruit orchards) is the verdant Disney complex itself.
But his biggest complaint is against Disney's sheer power -- over our imaginations, municipalities and media. The company "touches virtually every human being in America for a profit," he writes, with its theme parks, movie companies and television networks. For baby boomers especially, he notes, Disney is the "benign enchanter-protector," an image embedded "in the collective parental psyche."
Mr. Hiaasen's sharp irreverence works wonderfully, as he takes jabs at Disney's new cruise ship and privately owned Caribbean island; its chairman, Michael D. Eisner, and what he calls its "shell municipality" in Florida -- the Reedy Creek Improvement District, a kind of parallel government, a "Vatican with mouse ears," in the words of a friend he quotes.
A special gem is the chapter on the "world's largest press party" given at Disney World to commemorate the bicentennial of the United States Constitution and the resort's 15th anniversary. The 5,200 people in attendance were offered mounds of food and souvenirs. They also got the chance to see a respected colleague -- a weary Nick Daniloff, the U.S. News and World Report writer wrongly jailed by the Soviets for spying -- welcomed back to America with outstretched arms. The furry arms, of course, of Mickey Mouse.
