You paid more than £8.6m in the last 10 years in taxes? Let's call that $10m and be conservative. Bravo.
Didn't even catch that ludicrous statement, sorry buddy.
The reader is obviously expected to understand a rhetorical device was employed here. So there's no need to state the obvious. Never mind in an impolite sarcastic manner.
When the writer says 'the ballet dancer moved as if she was as light as a feather', one does not reply with a biological essay explaining the ludicrous unlikelihood of a human being weighing as little as a bird feather. That's just silly.
I don't agree with them, either. If the French people like their coffee, they will go. But you do realize that they're fighting for their actual city and you're fighting for a theme park where you occasionally vacation, right?
A venture outside the realm of theme parks is always well worth the detour to better understand Disney. For example, World Expo's when discussing EPCOT. Or urbanism when discussing the MK, or EPCOT again.
There is a very fun connection between Main Street as an idealised authentic urban environment, with the preservation, and development, of authentic European urban landscapes. Montmartre is just as much a turn-of-last-century theme park as Main Street is. But one is privately owned and controlled by one party, the other is public. Yet it would seem the latter is better protected against that which these two themed environments originated are a very reaction to: the inhuman, unauthentic, ultracapitalistic, uniform modern urbanity.
I'm about to start rambling. Never mind.
Plus, I think calling pretty much anything "a cultural Fukushima" rubs me the wrong way.
It is a paraphrase. When EuroDisney was planned, the then French Minister of Culture, Jack Lang, described it as a 'Cultural Chernobyl'. A legendary remark, in Disney fandom and in the real world.
It has come to epitomise a certain reflex of French cultural narcissism, anti-capitalism. Or, judged more positively, as a call for staunch defense against cultural impoverishment, a defense of good taste, an appeal for authenticity and classical European cultural values.
