Mom, Apple Pie and Mickey

There are some things Southern Californians just don’t dwell on, and one of them is Disneyland. It’s big, it’s fun, it has the Matterhorn, and you want to avoid it on Labor Day weekend. Beyond that, after a certain age, you don’t give it much thought unless you’re a hard-core fan.

It’s interesting, this strain of nonchalance, a breed apart from the fond contempt locals usually display for hometown tourist spots. Southern Californians don’t view the Magic Kingdom in the sour way, say, San Franciscans view Fisherman’s Wharf. On the contrary, we hang out there, wallets happily a-flapping. And yet, no matter how big it gets or how much we spend, something down deep resists thinking about its backstage particulars.

It’s been a week and a half since a fatal accident raised those particulars with a vengeance: On Christmas Eve, a mooring rope on the sailing ship Columbia accidentally tightened, tearing an 8-pound metal cleat from the ship’s bow and whipping it into the crowd. The blunt force of the projectile killed a man and maimed his wife. A park employee was badly injured. You’d think it would scare folks silly, but the local reaction has been resolutely muted, except among reporters and Disneyphiles.

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In my suburb, where a fatality at, say, a ski resort, will consume parents for weeks, the Disneyland death has barely created a blip. Down the freeway, the park is jammed. The only political fallout has come from an Antioch assemblyman who has been up in arms since 1997, when a teenager died at a water park in his end of the state.

“Well, the victims weren’t from California,” a fellow parent theorized, “and they weren’t kids.” Another noted that when you think too hard, the magic evaporates.

“Just a freak accident,” a third concluded sadly--though, to be perfectly accurate, no one but Disney knows for sure whether the park might have prevented it.

In fact, it’s been mildly disturbing, how frequently the aftermath of this accident has featured information that no one but Disney knows. An Orange County deputy coroner, for instance, reported that in the park’s zeal for order, it tidied the accident scene and handled the evidence before investigators could take a thorough look.

Signs on the ride told patrons it was closed for “river construction.” Park employees began to confide that there had been maintenance problems and staffing cutbacks on the ride and that the worker involved was an untrained supervisor filling in. Disney could easily have cleared up these questions. But instead it told workers to shut up and issued a “no comment” as the company line.

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In short, Disney’s penchant for spin--a kind of neurotic compulsion even under the best of conditions--managed to blossom under stress into something approaching full-blown creepiness. And yet its PR hard line didn’t make locals any more demanding than usual about the facts.

Why not? Not to say the Disney people aren’t decent and hard-working, but you’d have to be Goofy not to notice how little scrutiny they get, beyond what they impose on themselves. Local police bowed out when it became clear that there’d been no foul play. Cal/OSHA is investigating, but only because a worker was hurt.

There are no state laws in California that would mandate, say, park staffing and inspection levels because California is one of only 12 states where the politicians have chosen not to regulate theme parks. Aside from local building codes and a few laws covering aerial tramways, industry lobbyists for places like Disney--and Universal Studios and Knott’s Berry Farm and Magic Mountain--have beaten back virtually every attempt at oversight.

Accidents happen, and they aren’t the sort of fantasies your average theme-park visitor wants to dwell on. But aren’t we a little old for this fantasy that everything will be “Hakuna Matata” as long as we don’t ask and they don’t tell?

Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is [email protected].