3/16/2023 0 Comments Writefull books![]() Meanwhile, the world grew curious about “How to Read Donald Duck.” The book was translated into nearly a dozen languages, including English, and sold half a million copies. He wouldn’t go back for nearly two decades. In the fifties, Dorfman’s family had fled to Chile to escape an America gripped by McCarthyism now he would return to the U.S. A motorist tried to plow him down in the street, shouting “ Viva el Pato Donald!” Families of protesters swarmed his home, deploring his attack on their innocence while, less than innocently, they hurled rocks through the windows. Dorfman watched on TV as soldiers cast his book into a bonfire the Navy confiscated some ten thousand copies and dumped them into the bay of Valparaíso. One official pasted their faces on the walls of his office, where, under his predecessor, socialist slogans had once hung. Donald and Mickey Mouse became champions of the counter-revolution. But, in 1973, Augusto Pinochet seized power from Allende, in a violent military coup under Pinochet’s rule, the book was banned, as an emblem of a fallen way of thought. “How to Read Donald Duck,” published in 1971, was an instant best-seller in Chile. What kind of a role model was he, this eunuch duck, who sought only fame and fortune, who ignored the plight of the working class, who accepted endless suffering as his lot? “Reading Disney,” they wrote, “is like having one’s own exploited condition rammed with honey down one’s throat.” ![]() But Dorfman and Mattelart argued that Donald was a conservative mouthpiece, dampening the revolutionary spirit, fostering complacency, and softening the sins of colonialism. In Chile, Donald Duck was by far the most popular Disney character. Among North American audiences, Disney was most famous for its films and theme parks, but, abroad, Disney comics had a robust readership, and legions of freelance artists tailored them-or rewrote them-to international tastes. ![]() There was revolutionary fervor in the air, and Dorfman, as he wrote in his 1998 memoir, “ Heading South, Looking North,” “felt the giddiness of those few great moments in your existence when you know that everything is possible.” He produced everything from poems and policy reports to children’s comics and radio jingles, “letting Spanish flow out of me as if I were a river.” His most enduring work from these years is a volume titled “ How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic,” co-authored with the Belgian sociologist Armand Mattelart. In Santiago, Chile, in the early nineteen-seventies, the writer Ariel Dorfman served as a cultural adviser to the Chilean President, Salvador Allende. ![]()
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