Something about this strikes me as deeply wrong, but I haven’t been able to articulate my discomfort.

During my family trip to Walt Disney World in late 2010, I had the great fortune to meet Zach, a Disney College Program Cast Member. He was working behind the counter at Cosmic Ray’s Starlight Café in Tomorrowland during that semester, but he was granted an extension for Spring 2011 and became a character performer. Zach has formidable experience in stagecraft, and he addresses the issue of these talking characters in a recent post on his blog:

• Time and Music: Talking Mickey Mouse?

Guests go into a character meet-and-greet knowing what they want to say, and get their answers from the characters by interpreting their gestures and “animation.” But what’s so great about those gestures is that they can be interpreted however the Guests want them to be interpreted. Why take away that power from the Guests and their imaginations?

Zach explains his perspective in detail, also noting that since park visitors come from around the world, the voiced characters may not be able to speak their language.

In the midst of this, Zach tells a story that illustrates the power of quiet attention:

During my four months as a character performer, I had a lot of truly great Guest interactions. One day working at Animal Kingdom, Goofy was at Camp Minnie-Mickey and was met by a teary-eyed mother. The mother explained to Goofy that her father had been taken to the hospital from the Park, but he was going to be okay and just needed to recover in the hospital. He wanted her and her son, his grandson, to enjoy the rest of their day in the Park instead of the hospital. But he had one request: that they go get a picture with Goofy, because Goofy is his favorite. She held back her tears, gave Goofy a big hug, and said “Goofy, you have no idea how much I needed that hug.”

Zach has a bright future. I hope it brings him back to Disney. I hope Disney listens.

Hearing someone recite a text is equivalent to reading for some people, I guess, but it very much isn’t for me.

Verbal input, whether I see it or hear it, triggers huge cascades of mental processing. I am prone to becoming immersed in those cascades: analyzing word roots, parsing the grammar, identifying more appropriate synonyms, feeling the scansion, relating the meaning to the immediate and overall narrative context and to everything else in my experience.

Douglas Adams, in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, describes Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect’s experience of being subjected to a Vogon poetry reading, strapped into “Poetry Appreciation chairs” with electrodes stuck to their temples:

These were attached to a battery of electronic equipment—imagery intensifiers, rhythmic modulators, alliterative residulators and simile dumpers—all designed to heighten the experience of the poem and make sure that not a single nuance of the poet’s thought was lost.

That’s what reading and listening are like for me, all the time.

When (or if) that cognitive bloom finishes playing itself out and my brain settles down enough to return me to my senses, I move on and take in the next bit of text—but if the text is being read to me, then I have already missed any number of words (sentences, paragraphs) that were spoken in the interim. Normal interpersonal conversation is light enough for me to keep up with, but really good dense prose just jams up in my ears.

Verbal communication is linear, but I do not comprehend it linearly. I can’t listen to audiobooks.

One minute later:

And two minutes after that:

Yeah.

His bright young mind was poisoned by a dogmatized rejection of common human dignity. He was molded into a conduit of hate. By the time he was killed by his enemies, he had become a wellspring of that poison.

I mourn the loss of the helpful person that little boy could have become, of the profound gift his talents could have been to the world. But that loss was long ago.

My answer to this crime, this cancer of the human spirit, this turning of life against itself, is a plan I have been executing for fifteen years.

I am raising my sons to be good people.

Be always deeply grateful for your good fortune. It comes at great expense to people as real as you. They are not justly compensated.

Be kind and compassionate to others.

Customers don’t make decisions with their neocortex, an organ that is too easy to bullshit. They decide within deeper, comforting recesses, and they rationalize when the culture demands a seemingly logical, socially acceptable “post-planation.”

[Ayn] Rand’s philosophy rests on a pretense of individualism that doesn’t reflect reality. The “self-made man” is a myth; everyone’s success is built upon the labors of those who went before them and those who labor alongside them. Whatever success we may bring upon ourselves, we have done so with the assistance of those who invented our language, our culture, our monetary systems, our infrastructure, etc. Though we may hire and direct employees to do our bidding, and though that bidding may be directed entirely by our personal vision, our success is still utterly dependent upon the existence and the effectiveness of those employees. And our “personal vision,” as any psychologist can explain, is primarily a result of genetic and environmental factors which we did not create. The “individual” as Rand conceives it is largely a myth.

(His follow-up: “I frickin’ hate the ‘black box’ psychological model presented by folks who still somehow think that humans are ‘rational.’ Capable of using reason as a tool, yeah, but even so there is no ‘objective’ motivation behind the user. We’ve known better since Freud 1905 or at latest WWI, hellooooo?”)