“There is a pandemic killing us all. It’s a pandemic of dishonesty.” — Tim Disney
In March 1965, Martin Luther King suggested that the arc of the moral universe is long, but that it bends toward justice. Sixty-one years on, we have another arc which definitely doesn’t bend toward justice. A.R.C. stands for Amazonian Recombinant Cytoneuropathy. It lies dormant and undetectable in its host, and it activates when he tells a lie, and then it kills him. Tim Disney — great-nephew of Walt, grandson of Roy — came up with Amazonian Recombinant Cytoneuropathy during the COVID lockdown. The result is The A.R.C., Disney’s satirical graphic novel about our untruthful times, co-written with JC Lacek and illustrated by Vincent J. Dubourg.
Tim Disney’s The A.R.C. opens at the Global Reinvestment For Tomorrow Conference in the Amazon, a T.E.D. festival of hypocrisy where the moral powers-that-be have assembled to announce the solution to climate change. They catch the virus instead, and carry it home on their private jets. The diagnosis associated with the joke is less funny. Disney thinks that shame and public opprobrium have been replaced by a pandemic of lies and lying.
Then there’s the explicit question that I should have asked Disney but didn’t. The company his great-uncle and grandfather built is amongst the most successful entertainment machines ever constructed for spreading lies about an idyllic America. An epidemic of cheerfulness. I asked Tim twice whether The A.R.C. was a Disney production. Both times I allowed him to dodge the question. Maybe Keen On America should be a Disney show too.
ABOUT THE GUEST
Tim Disney is a writer, filmmaker and the creator of The A.R.C., which he co-wrote with JC Lacek and which is illustrated by Vincent J. Dubourg. He directed the feature A Question of Faith and began his career in the animation department at Disney. He is the great-nephew of Walt Disney and the grandson of Roy O. Disney, and he runs Uncommon Productions.
ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.
CHAPTERS
00:00 — Intro
00:31 — Martin Luther King, Montgomery, and the arc that bends toward justice
02:50 — Watching the parade of madness during the pandemic
03:20 — A pandemic of dishonesty
04:53 — AK: is this a Disney production?
05:52 — Great-nephew of Walt, grandson of Roy
08:32 — The tacit understandings upstream of politics
10:00 — If you do not behave this way, you are a chump
10:49 — AK on Steven Rosenbaum and the fabricated quotes
12:18 — AK: can you post an honest photo on Instagram?
14:20 — Last year the only people saying something real were comedians
14:58 — AK: why the graphic novel?
18:20 — A nascent backlash: board games, vinyl, physical books
20:59 — AK: how do you satirize a world this ludicrous?
21:40 — Taking out the analogs and putting real people in
22:12 — AK: why pick on RFK Jr.?
22:54 — AK: the Kennedys and the Disneys, two branded families
27:06 — A glimpse of the post-lie world, and why it is quiet
30:05 — Back to King, and Gandalf on the ordinary folk
30:55 — Closing