The Paradise Program: Travels Through Muzak, Hilton, Coca-Cola, Texaco, Wal t Disney, and Other World Empires [first edition]

From the Introduction:The emblem of the Walt Disney World, that ample terrain if the Florida scrublands, portrays the planet Earth with Mickey Mouse ears. A telling enough device, and I had thought of beginning with my account of that magic (and now entirely computerised) kingdom.But, no. It is a journal, and should begin at the beginning. Not quite at the beginning perhaps because it began on the periphery, and with details. Marshal Tito's Diner's Club card. A Playboy centre-fold tacked up among the oleographs of Krishna in a Malaysian kampong. A girl in Leningrad, whose Western collection included two volumes of the Reader's Digest Condensed Books. A Paramount Chief in Sierra Leone, one of whose ceremonial robes anticipated a couture motif of 1972, by featuring a design of Coca-Cola bottles on a poly-chrome ground.It has been a journey through an occasionally unnerving terrain, but fertile in spots of dark fun. Monkeys imported for Tarzan movies infest Florida, and super-computers are built half in positive, half in negative. The Muzak satellite is to wing through the heavens no doubt in convenient proximity to the Orbital Hilton. The surreal becomes banal. The chances are that if the world grows Mickey Mouse ears, nobody will notice.