The Paradise Program: Travels Through Muzak, Hilton, Coca-Cola, Texaco, Wal t Disney, and Other World Empires

US: William Morrow & Company, 1973. First Edition. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. A copy that has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged. The emblem of the Walt Disney World, that ample terrain if the Florida scru blands, portrays the planet Earth with Mickey Mouse ears. A telling enough device, and I had thought of beginning with my account of that magic (and n ow entirely computerised) kingdom. But, no. It is a journal, and should begin at the beginning. Not quite at t he beginning perhaps because it began on the periphery, and with details. M arshal Tito's Diner's Club card. A Playboy centre-fold tacked up among the oleographs of Krishna in a Malaysian kampong. A girl in Leningrad, whose We stern collection included two volumes of the Reader's Digest Condensed Book s. A Paramount Chief in Sierra Leone, one of whose ceremonial robes anticip ated a couture motif of 1972, by featuring a design of Coca-Cola bottles on a poly-chrome ground. It has been a journey through an occasionally unnerving terrain, but fertile in spots of dark fun. Monkeys imported for Tarzan movies infest Florida, and super-computers are built half in positive, half in negative. The Muzak satellite is to wing through the heavens no doubt in convenient proximity to the Orbital Hilton. The surreal becomes banal. The chances are that if the world grows Mickey Mouse ears, nobody will notice.