It's my third morning in Mr. Disney's world, deep in the heart of cracker Eden, out on the plain of the wet palmetto, and I have seen the Mouse. I have seen the children playing with the Mouse in the speckled shade of an acacia tree. I have wandered through the silver effervescence of their squeals, peals, gurgles, and giggles and found it a pleasant place to be. I have also seen bikers and their bitches, decked out in boots and leathers, borne aloft with giddiness at having their picture made with Goofy. I have seen antiques-store queens from the serious South posing ceremoniously with Chip 'n Dale, and, seeing all these things, I could only wonder if, in this hateful moment, Disney World just might be the happiest place on earth. At this, my inner child threatened to split for Las Vegas, and, properly chastened, I set off in search of Scrooge McDuck and the ride where you swim through the money. I couldn't find it. I decided that this attraction, should it exist, was almost certainly tucked away on the corporate campus out in the San Fernando Valley.

I imagined buff Disney execs in Speedos doing dolphin rolls in cash while Minnie waited patiently at poolside, towel spread and at the ready ... but not for me. I just rode things, because at Disney World you ride. You ride to get there. You ride to relax between adventures, and you ride to crank it back up so you can ride again. For two days I have been stepping aside so children, stumbling with exhaustion, can flop themselves down onto rides, only to bounce off when the ride is over, wired up like $5 mandolins. I have ridden cars, vans, buses, trams, barges, escalators, people movers, and monorails. I rode two miniature choo-choo trains, a whirling teacup, a horse-drawn trolley, a riverboat, a tiny car, and a world-class carousel for which I had to get up my nerve because it's embarrassing to sit astride a tiny wooden horse slowly rising and falling in a dead heat with six-year-olds. I rode anyway, because I wanted to survey the hundreds of factory-gray baby strollers gathered around the whirling ponies like industrial salvage around a gaudy atoll.

I have ridden cars, vans, buses, trams, barges, escalators, people movers, and monorails.

I also rode gondolas—one through outer space, another through a geodesic sphere within which the history of all mankind is twined up like a cow's intestine. I rode one gondola through a haunted house with really cool holographic dancing ghosts, and another through a Caribbean-pirate lair that would have benefited from an animatronic Johnny Depp playing Keith Richards. I did not ride the flying Dumbos or the Magic Carpets of Aladdin, because they were down for magic upgrades. The fleeting image of my cardiologist with his wrist to his forehead dissuaded me from the Tower of Terror, within which one falls 13 floors in a giant elevator, and from Mission: Space, during which one pulls major G's while spinning in a centrifuge. I did, however, damn the doctors and board a giant log for a G-rated trip through Deliverance Land. I floated along through Southern flora and fauna, zoomed erratically through a twisting sluice, shot out over a waterfall, and plummeted five stories into a pond. I screamed (I think), got wet, got geeked up, and wished I had waited until after Splash Mountain for that cup of corn-dog nuggets.

Then, last night, having ridden well, as one does if one is truly at Disney World, I felt prepared for the high rituals of the Magic Kingdom. With a flock of fellow pilgrims, I made my way through a hot-pink tropical twilight to the nave of Main Street, U.S.A., the primal site. To my left, at the narthex, new members of the congregation poured in through a period train station. To my right, where the county courthouse would have been, if this had really been Missouri, the altar of haute Disney silliness rose in ecstasy: the soaring French Gothic extravagance of Cinderella Castle, bathed in colored light. Taken as a unit, the street, the station, and the castle constitute one of the strangest juxtapositions of cultural iconography on earth. I wondered what possible relationship might pertain between Mark Twain's quotidian hamlet and the Gothic excess of that fairy-tale castle. The answer was crowding all around me munching hot dogs. Every one of those wistful dads and disheveled moms had once, as rowdy Tom Sawyers and spoiled Princess brats, plighted their troth across the unbridgeable abyss that separates small-town dreams and castle dreams. After that, the fishing was never as good or the parties as elegant and gay.

As a kid, living my Huck Finn childhood amid Princess-crazed young women, I often wondered where one might possibly go to become a Prince—knowing in my heart there was no such place. Now I wanted the courthouse back where it belonged, and right away. Better laws than magic, I thought, and better taxes than sorcery, too. But here I was. The air was balmy, the castle was pretty cool to look at, and my fellow visitors, though damned to their marriages, were uniformly benign. Like all the crowds at Disney World, this one was hyper but nice. If Lourdes were a theme park, the crowd would be like this, because all the pilgrims were doing their part and were on their best behavior. Adults wore Disney caps and T-shirts. They carried Disney bags. Little boys wore mouse ears, some, clearly, souvenirs of previous visits. Little girls came dressed as Princesses in sea-green taffeta and net. One little Princess even wore a hennin and wimple, fetchingly askew.

I could only wonder if Disney World just might be the happiest place on earth.

So I stood there in this aura of provisional togetherness and, just for a moment, glimpsed the outlines of Michael Eisner's folly. He must have thought he had been hired to run a money machine, a public corporation straightforwardly dedicated to seducing children and manipulating even-tempered crowds. On his first visit to Disney World, he probably noticed what I noticed, that details and amenities are not nearly as critical when you can depend on the genial complicity of your customers. After three days in Disney World, however, it was clear to me that the crowds did not regard Disney as a public corporation. They regarded it as a civic corporation, and they were willing to entertain themselves only because they had come for something more than entertainment—for some cultural affirmation, some flickering sparklet of residual optimism, some dazzling generosity of spirit. And how do you imagine that? Walt Disney knew how, but lacking his clairvoyant simpatico, Eisner must have lived each day with the terrible certainty that, whatever he was selling, his customers were buying something else. They were buying Walt's something more, his sweet, techno-snazzy future, and that future was vanishing like the dew.

Out on Main Street, U.S.A., however, we were still buying it all. We smiled our stupid smiles and waited for our something more. Then, when the sky had darkened to a luminous bruise, the amplified strains of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor rose up like a great tsunami. The parade appeared and began its slow procession down Main Street. Hundreds of thousands of tiny lights twinkled. Miles of fiber-optic strands glowed mysteriously. Floats glided past, right in our faces—big, bright, and noisy—each more impossibly ornate than the one before. The Mouse came first, in his purple sorcerer's cape, poised before a dazzling half-shell, suspended in a sparkling atmosphere of high-tech confetti lights. Then the genie from Aladdin floated by, conducting an orchestra that played brightly colored musical notes. Then the Three Good Fairies from Sleeping Beauty's garden turned night into day. Then Chernabog, the gargoyle from Fantasia, flexed his 38-foot wingspan and frightened the kids into helpless giggles. Then Practical Pig (of the Three Little) made his grand appearance on a 100-foot-plus island replete with its own castle, its own carousel, and a fancy jeweled coach.

Herr Pig stood contrapposto before a large crowd of Disney characters with a paintbrush in his trotter. He flicked his brush. The characters changed colors. Then, and then, and, ultimately, they all were there: Alice and Ariel, Bacchus and Bashful, the Big Bad Wolf and Of Br'er Bear, Pinocchio and Geppetto, Captain Hook and Peter Pan, Goofy, Grumpy, Jiminy, King Triton, and the famous Ostrich Dancers. All these and more, and the whole scene—the brilliant floats wending through the darkened crowd—was very beautiful. It was also exquisitely poignant watching the parade arise out of darkness to light up people's faces and then dissolve back into infinite night. It was an American moment, like Gatsby sharing his beautiful shirts with Nick and Daisy, like Jack Kerouac going "Aaah!" at the fireworks, and, somehow, the spectacle partook of everything like it. It was a Roman triumph without the chained captives, a masque at Versailles but more jovial and robust, a miniMardi Gras with more lights, fewer wardrobe malfunctions, and no puking at all, a saint's-day parade in some futuristic Italian principality with vast technological resources.

When the parade had passed, I dodged in for more corn-dog nuggets and returned to watch the tangled train of lights and music wind its way through the black trees at the foot of Main Street. I thought about everything it was and wasn't, the cornucopia of image, illusion, and icon, and realized, very much to my delight, that Disney is a freaking pagan cult, that this goody-two-shoes American institution is promoting a primitive, animist religion dedicated to investing everything with life, to animating everything from teacups to trees, from carpets to houses, from ducks to mice, with the pulse of human aspiration. In my innocence, I had always thought of Disney as the "bright side"—of Mickey and Donald spreading light, as opposed to Bugs and Daffy sowing darkness and chaos. I thought of them paired and opposed like that, like the Beatles and the Stones, like Berry Gordy and George Clinton, the Colts and the Raiders. Now I had a better, somewhat darker, mildly revolutionary package.

I had roistering Mickey, Donald, Bugs, and Daffy flourishing in gaudy pagan opposition to the ideals of Puritan America. Admittedly, Disney paganism isn't quite your old-school, sacrifice-the-pony-and-pour-the-blood paganism. It's more about paganism and the longing for it, less like the cult of Moloch and more like those Melanesian cargo cults that flourished in the Pacific after World War II. The members of those cults believed that the future would wash up on the beach or parachute from the sky in the form of shipping crates stuffed with magically wrought clothing, weapons, and canned goods. The islanders had seen such cargo in the control of Westerners, and when the Westerners departed, the islanders devised idols and rituals of sympathetic magic to tease the cargo back from the air and sea—to create the new age. They carved headphones of wood and wore them while sitting in control towers. They stitched up uniforms and stood on abandoned runways waving landing signals. They built life-size mock-ups of airplanes out of straw, wished upon stars, and waited.

Everything I had just seen resonated with these cargo rituals. Every chunk of arcane cargo, ardent magic, and pantheistic bric-a-brac that ever washed up on the shores of the New World from the Old had been evoked that night. Every dazzling, idolatrous image that had ever been smuggled ashore, only to be suppressed by Puritan iconoclasts, had been invited back to adorn a new cosmos, to celebrate the restoration of a lost magical world presently in the sole possession of children. That was the idea. The kids already knew. The adults, with kids as their passports, could be born again into the cult, and Disney was getting away with this outrageous activity, I decided, because, if you suppress explicit sexuality, you can get away with anything in America, even if the sexuality is only suppressed, even if every luminous, skintight, cuddly, curvy, shiny surface is redolent of eros. This romantic conceit— that I was witnessing a pagan ritual in a Florida swamp—sexed up my assignment a lot. I felt like Boy in one of those Tarzan movies, creeping into a torchlit cave full of spear-waving Africans chanting crazily at some Mesoamerican idol overseen by a wild-eyed swami in a turban.

So I was up for the second half of my "evening of enchantment." I had been promised that it would "sparkle with faith, hope and pixie dust," and no sooner had the parade disappeared than another musical fanfare erupted. An amplified child intoned:

Star light, star bright,

First star I see tonight,

I wish I may, I wish I might,

Have the wish I wish tonight.

We'll make a wish and do as dreamers do

And all our wishes will come true.

On the words "will come true" the orchestra burst into "When You Wish upon a Star," leaving us no time to contemplate this dubious "wishing" proposition. Instead, a massive starburst exploded over our heads with a shuddering crunch. It hit a musical accent, and the recorded chorus went "Aaah!" just like Jack Kerouac, and we were off into an extravagant son et lumière, with fireworks providing a lot of the son and most of the lumière. Jiminy Cricket (that Sammy Davis Jr. of the insect world) was our master of ceremonies. The Blue Fairy did color. Tinkerbell slid on a wire from the top spire of Cinderella Castle. Music played, things exploded, and the ground shook, all in a passionate, 12-minute defense of wishing on stars and putting your heart into your dreams—or augury and shamanistic trance, if you want to be technical.

At one point, toward the end, the Cricket assured us that our wishes could come true if we believed in them with all our hearts. "And the best part is," he announced, pausing for effect, "you'll NEVER run out of wishes!" Clearly, Jiminy and I had known some of the same women ... and when it was over? Well, what can I say, we all just stood there in shock and awe, absolutely convinced that if any of this crap were true it shouldn't need to be defended so vigorously. Then the kids started shuffling and yawning. Their folks took them off somewhere to pee. I buttoned my jacket against the chill and set off through the darkness, heading over to Shula's for a steak.

This morning, I'm lounging on the boardwalk in back of my ersatz Nantucket hotel, watching the mist burn off the artificial lake. Gulls are skimming lines across its placid surface. In about 20 minutes, a barge will arrive from Epcot and chug me across the water to indulge my new jones for animatronics—this time with Ben Franklin and Mark Twain—but for now I am happy to be alone, smoking a surreptitious cigarette. My reverie, of course, is immediately interrupted by thudding footsteps on the boardwalk. I turn to see a blonde girl running toward me, as slim as a reed, maybe 10 or 11, wearing a blue-striped cotton pullover, white clamdigger pants, and Top-Siders. At first, I think she's running for the barge, but there is no barge in sight, and, having flown by me in a blur, the girl pulls up short at the head of the dock.

She extracts a quarter from her pocket and inserts it into a tastefully camouflaged dispenser. She turns the crank and the machine dispenses a handful of brown pellets. Clutching them in her fist, the girl takes three running strides out onto the dock and throws a pellet into the air. A swooping gull whips past her head and snatches it. She throws another pellet and then another, and in a blink the girl is engulfed in a swirling cloud of seagulls, like Saint Teresa among the angels. The gulls dip and wheel, their white wings flashing in the sun. As the girl twirls happily, her hair flies out. The scene is amazing and very American, exciting and a little touching, with the girl bouncing and smiling and the gulls' wings exploding around her like brushstrokes in a summer painting by Alex Katz.

When the pellets are gone, the gulls hover for a moment, then quickly disperse. The girl dashes off again, back past me, down the boardwalk, to cadge another quarter from her dad. I would have gladly given the kid a quarter, if we could still give quarters to other people's children, but we can't, so I take the image of the girl and the gulls as a little gift that is no less authentic (and even a little more resonant) for having been enacted on this bogus New England movie set. I wonder, though, if there is a food chain of ecstasy in Disney theology. I wonder if tonight in Los Angeles, at an outside table at the Ivy, some perfumed executive on a totally heterosexual man date will feel commensurate rapture at having suckered a 10-year-old into paying a quarter for a penny's worth of pet food that the corporation is writing off anyway against an E.P.A. reg about the proper feeding of seagulls.

I hope this is true, that the magic rises up through the culture, but the thought is just diversion. The issue at hand is that, once again, I have been looking at someone else's child, and how do you do that these days? I have never looked at children much, but I am at Disney World, surrounded by children, in the midst of folks who pump them out like gumballs, so I should look, right? Two days before, I had no sooner stepped into the Magic Kingdom than a kid scampered past my knee and fell flat on his face in front of me. I scooped him up, set him back on his feet, and said something red-state like "There ya go, soldier." His parents were instantaneously there, eyes blazing. The kid's little sister looked terrified. Her eyes widened. She thrust her hand in her mouth. There was a terrible moment of glaring, a pause, then Dad grabbed the kid by the arm, and the family stalked off like angry zombies. I knew that I could easily be marching away in plastic cuffs to the Disney pokey, so I promised myself that, henceforth, I would interact only with svelte soccer moms. Unfortunately, there was only one. We complained to each other about where in the hell are the goddamn Starbucks, and that was it, so to avoid looking at the children I looked at people looking at the children.

I noticed grannies on benches smiling their looking-at-the-grandkids smiles. I practiced that smile as I wandered over to Toontown, where I noticed a guy leaning against a stanchion between Minnie's house and Mickey's. He was dressed like a dad in a ball cap and a Mickey sweatshirt, but this guy was nobody's daddy. Dad's eyes would have been glazed over by the time he reached Toontown. This guy, feigning nonchalance, was hyper-vigilant, cruising, like a goombah in a South Beach disco, holding his head steady and tracking kids with his eyes. It took him 30 seconds to sense me watching him. He pushed off from his pole, and I tried to follow, but he disappeared like smoke, and now the little creep had ruined my day. I felt guilty. Children were nifty little creatures that I had casually ignored my whole life because I had not enjoyed being one. Now nobody was paying any attention to them but Mom, Dad, Granny, Disney, and the circling chicken hawks.

So I willfully paid attention to the kids because I thought that someone disinterested should and because they were really kind of super, like brave little Disney characters on their way to being people. But it never stopped being scary. That night, riding back to the hotel on a dark bus, I sat across from a family. Dad sat up straight, staring into the gloom with his arms around his two sleeping daughters. The girls were snuggled up and leaning into him. Their little brother, with his feet pulled up onto the seat, was resting his head in his older sister's lap. They formed a delicate, grisaille tableau in the half-light, a human group in repose of the sort made famous in Victorian paintings by Lord Leighton, Burne-Jones, and Alma-Tadema. It wasn't Guernica, of course, but it was the sort of thing one is always happy to see, so I looked while the darkness hid my gaze.

George W. Bush was the best. The audience at the morning show in the Hall of Presidents all agreed. So, it wasn't just me. It was also the two Latino dudes in yellow do-rags and Buccaneer jerseys. We were the audience. I had come for the educational uplift. The Buccaneers had come because they were getting their freaking money's worth—Disney security is so great, they had had to pay to get in. A music video about the Constitution opened the show. Its broad generational appeal was followed by a softly lit tete-a-tete with a coterie of animatronic American presidents arranged before us, standing and seated, like a corporate management team. Each "president" was introduced to us. Each favored us with a few animatronic words. Then the avatar of our current president stepped up to the plate and delivered a short homily that, I swear, the man might have written himself. One of the Buccaneers said, "That's the dude," and we all nodded in agreement. Of all the animatronic presidents, statesmen, heroes, and ordinary Joes we had seen, Dubya was the best. The oft cited defects of animatronic technology, the fact that it makes characters seem stiff and only intermittently lifelike, were no problem. Dubya was born to the medium, and I was bewitched by the idea that presidents might evolve into animatrons rather than the other way around.

Much earlier that morning, the barge was late, so when I got to Epcot, I had to run to the Georgian building that houses "The American Adventure." I arrived puffing just as they were closing the doors. Between gasps, I told the girl that I was a journalist on deadline. She let me in on the chance that Ben Franklin or Mark Twain might say something newsworthy that morning. I crept into the dim hall and found a seat just as Ben and Mark began their conversation. They provided us with avuncular deep background but no hard news, so I relaxed and looked around. With the exception of Ben and Mark, I was the only white person in the room. Everyone else was black and nicely dressed, and even I could divine a hook in this. Latino Buccaneers in the Hall of Presidents. Middle-class black people in "The American Adventure." It could be happenstance, but I had two ideas. Either these Latinos and blacks were the only people in the park who felt a vested interest in the principles of the waning Republic, or, less optimistically, they were the only folks at Disney for whom a bunch of robotic white guys in corporate clothing qualified as an exotic attraction. I left the jury out on this. Ben and Mark chatted while seeming to buzz, whine, and whir.

I fell in love with animatronics on my first day in the Magic Kingdom, over in Tomorrowland, at the Carousel of Progress, which was my favorite thing in the park. It reminded me of my grandmother who, having ridden from Georgia to Texas in a covered wagon, regarded herself as a major beneficiary of "progress" in the area of cooking things, carrying things, and getting places. The carousel is housed in a white drum-shaped building adorned with a retro logo of three large overlapping pastel gears. (That's right: gears!) Within the drum, a large circular platform is divided like a pie into six theatrical stages facing outward. The platform rotates inside the drum with a lot of whining and grinding, and the stages present themselves in sequence to the audience in a small auditorium, each stage with its own animatronic American family. The idea was Walt's. According to the narrator, "He thought it would be fun to watch the American family go through the 20th century experiencing all the new wonders as they came." So we do. The carousel turns from a family home in the 1900s to one in the 20s, to one in the 40s, and, finally, to a family room in something like the present, which is really just the 60s, upgraded to digital.

Nobody in my crowd seemed to notice the half-century interval between the 40s and yesterday. The animatronic family of white folks with their brown dog (with the animatronic tail) seemed pretty damned happy with the way things were going. I was happy, too, because long ago, in response to my adolescent sneering at decadent progress, my grandmother had explained to me the downside of stepping furrows behind a mule, the mitigated pleasures of hand-baling hay, and the drudgery of hauling things. "Progress don't make us better," she said, ever the Methodist, "but it gives us time to contemplate what sorry creatures we are." Henceforth, I shut up about progress around my grandmother. Now I envied her easy presumption that the time progress bought us would be spent considering our moral equipoise. I walked out of the carousel feeling that this time had pretty much run out.

Everything was where it should be in Disney World except Walt's imagined future. The animatrons, like human dinosaurs, marked the moment when it died, when Disney stopped imagining a real future with real people and devoted itself exclusively to shilling fantasy. Tomorrowland now is Yesterday's Tomorrowland, since, in this moment, even a fancifully imagined future would involve the ayatollah of Indianapolis and high-rise hospices. Today, Tomorrowland is just another future that never happened, where the Jetsons live, where the Yellow Submarine plows the deep, and where we all have automatic butlers. The wacky aspiration of the animatrons and the residue of optimistic innocence make the place a dog whistle for Schadenfreude, and you can't blame Walt for this. Walt thought he was building the City of Tomorrow. His descendants built a prissy, pasty, retro slum called Celebration, which, if Kool & the Gang hadn't written the city song, would have naught to recommend it. Walt thought we were going off to the planets and the stars. It turned out we were only going offshore, off the books, and off the balance sheet. Walt thought it was one small world. It turned out to be an ever expanding, ever tightening grid of morally isolating niche markets. So Walt was wrong. So we got perp walks in lieu of moonwalks. So sue him.

The dance clubs at Disney World are all on Pleasure Island, where every night is New Year's Eve for wayward Pinocchios and Pinocchiettes. On Thursday nights, Disney "cast members" get in free to Pleasure Island, and this Thursday night, my last at Disney World, they all seem to have gotten in. In a dance club called Mannequins, I thought I saw Alice, from Wonderland, who earlier that day, wearing her blue pinafore, had waved as I passed on the choo-choo. Tonight, she was a Goth hottie, trailing scarves and swooning on the arm of a blackheaded woman in very tight jeans. In the crowd at the bar, I recognized one of the bellmen from the hotel. I gave him a look that said, Wow, what a relief to be here, and, shouting over the music, he assured me that Pleasure Island was the safety valve that kept "the world" from exploding, and that Mannequins was the safety valve that kept Pleasure Island from exploding. I nodded toward the rotating dance floor and said "Neato!" The bellman cupped one hand around his mouth, shouted, "Lazy Susan for lazy cruisin'," and was swept away into the crowd.

Bob and Doris, carrying Disney bags and wearing floral patterns, struggled past me with blurry looks on their faces. I wondered if they knew they were in a techno-chick gay bar? I doubted it. They seemed so stunned by the lights and noise that the same-sex smooching didn't make a dent, nor did the fabulosity, which was a little dated, a little Mudd Club, and a little more desperate than your standard disco desperation. I, at least, for once, knew what was going on. People were dancing and trying to get laid, so I drifted around with a tonic water sorting out constituencies. There were the tourists, of course, with bags on their laps. There were the dancers and actors from New York and Los Angeles, who, years ago, in a moment of abject insanity had taken a gig in Orlando, only to discover that once in "the world," down in the swamp, a million miles from everything, it was almost impossible to get out. Then there were the gay kids from the haunted boondocks, escapees from wide places in the road with a Circle K and a video store, and they were in heaven, the happiest people in Mr. Disney's world. When the New Year struck and the sirens went off and the confetti flew, they all kissed one another. The tourists smiled as if it were part of the show.