Ownership matters. When a large company goes public and is traded among the slack-jawed loser clan, which is the vast majority, the company’s personal identity gets lost, and its value disappears most of the time. That was certainly the case when Lucasfilm was sold to Disney. George Lucas wanted all his Star Wars employees to have something to do while he retired, and the Disney people ruined the franchise, much to his frustration. But that is the cost of private ownership that goes public and is traded among thieves, losers, and short-term bandits. And that was what I was thinking at this year’s Halloween Haunt at Kings Island, which was recently bought out by Six Flags as they merged with Cedar Fair Amusement Parks. Six Flags has made Kings Island worse, not better, and its brand has pulled down the popular Cincinnati amusement park. When we talk about problems with capitalism, the flow of money, and the protection of private ownership, what has happened to some of these companies that go public is an important lesson. And in the case of Kings Island, I have watched it all my life as it was initially owned by the Taft Broadcasting Company to create a family-friendly entertainment destination near Cincinnati. Back then, its rival to the north, Cedar Point, forced the two to outdo each other constantly, and the two parks developed their identities through direct competition, which made them what they are today. But of course, when you build something good, there are always people who will want to take that value for themselves, so this concept of publicly traded companies is a real problem, because it facilitates the sale of value, and once that happens, a company loses itself once its personal identity is sold to the whims of collectivism. In 1992, Paramount Communications bought Kings Island in an attempt to turn it into more of a Universal Studios, but that didn’t work out well, so they sold it to their rival, Cedar Point, owned by Cedar Fair Entertainment, in 2006.
I thought Cedar Fair Amusements did an excellent job with Kings Island and the other parks it owned, because it understood what Midwest thrill parks were all about. The problem was that amusement parks in the northern part of the state had to close during the off-season because it was too cold. And competition from Six Flags, which operates mainly in the south and runs year-round, strains cash and makes shareholder returns challenging. So, looking to generate year-round revenue as a large company, Six Flags joined with Cedar Fair and kept Six Flags as the parent company. And Kings Island has suffered because of it. Not that I’m thinking cheap about things, but this is the first year the Halloween Haunt has charged for its haunted houses on site. I get it, it’s an expensive operation to hire all those actors and dress them up every night for full-scale haunted houses that rival everything on the open market during Halloween season. Halloween Haunts is my favorite time to visit Kings Island. I love the late-night operating hours, the cool nights, and the general atmosphere. We invest pretty heavily in Gold passes for our entire family every year so we can all go there together, and that is my favorite time to attend. So I was not happy to see that Six Flags started charging separately for all the haunted houses, and that they were taking Kings Island down the money-grab hole deeper than they had before.
Now, this is the problem with publicly traded amusement parks. During COVID, Kings Island was hit hard by ridiculous health regulations that nearly killed the company for a few years and drained it of cash. And without question, it pushed them into this merger with Six Flags, seeking all year revenue on cash flow, making them appear to the public desperate. Which then blows the whole entertainment vibe. If people are having fun, they’ll spend money. But if an amusement park starts looking desperate — which the year-round parks do, including Disney World — it becomes a drain that causes a lot of pain. And not very fun. What Six Flags has done to Kings Island is similar to what has happened to Disney World. All the parks have fallen into the Fast Pass game, where they try to make the wait lines for rides excessively long so visitors will buy a Fast Pass to skip them. They have done that at Disney World and Universal for years, and now they have adopted it at Six Flags and, ultimately, at Kings Island. And when a Gold Pass doesn’t buy you much of anything special anymore, it’s almost cheaper to get general admission when you do want to go and to go less often. Because the advantages of going all the time go away. At Kings Island this year, the ride lines were really long —several hours long for the premier rides —because people weren’t waiting in the lines for the haunted houses like they usually do, since they cost money. This forces people to buy Fast Passes to shorten the lines. And it just took the fun out of the whole experience.
For instance, we were at Disney’s Hollywood Studios not that long ago, and my grandkids wanted to ride Slinky Dog. We weren’t crazy about it because it’s not as exciting as the kinds of rides they have at Kings Island. But it was a Toy Story-themed ride, and all my kids love that movie series, so they wanted to ride it. It just so happened it had been raining heavily and had just stopped. So they reopened the ride, and we were standing right at the front of the line when they did. So we figured we’d jump right on. The ride would be worth it if we only had to wait a few minutes. We ended up waiting 45 minutes in line because they opened the fast-pass lane and let everyone ride first. The standard line was now a holdover non-premium experience, and the girl at the front, who had a chart on how to fill the lines, tried to explain it all to me, not very well. I had spent $20,000 on a vacation package to Disney World for my family, and here I was being told that wasn’t enough. Give me a break. And now, Kings Island had that same attitude, and it was a real turn-off. A money grab to make shareholders happy with short-term gains, by destroying the long-term viability of the entertainment value. And nobody cared because now everyone was doing the same thing: Six Flags, Universal, and, of course, Disney World. It was a shame to see that Kings Island was now just like everyone else. And it all started with COVID-19, another thing permanently ruined by the government’s overreach in the healthcare industry. And it was not nearly as fun as it used to be, as most things are when they lose their identity as a privately held company, now driven by public sentiment, which is often short-sighted and greedy in its narrow scope. And at Kings Island now, it shows. What made Kings Island better than other parks was that at least they were owned by a Ohio based company that understood the Midwest, and they were different from the other parks. But now, they are all the same, and none of them very good.
How bad is it out there? Well, it’s pretty ugly. We have a pornography culture that some of these kids have never otherwise known, and now they have been taught in their public schools that all kinds of alternative sex practices are perfectly healthy and encouraged. They are taught that self-expression sexually is a good thing, so of course, we now see a society reflect those traits. And it was never more evident to me than in a recent trip to Kings Island, the big amusement park near my home in Northern Cincinnati. I was there with my family to see the re-opening of the Adventure Express, a ride that has been around for a while, but they have updated the theming in that part of the park and given everything a fresh paint job. I’ve always loved the ride, and as I often do at the end of a hard week of work in the summer, I like to meet my family there to ride a few roller coasters and have some dinner around the Eiffel Tower. I have been to Paris with my family and honestly prefer the Eiffel Tower at Kings Island to the one in Paris any day. So that is where I like to blow off the stress of a hard week at Kings Island. So I’m there at the park with my two daughters, their kids, my wife, and one of my sons-in-law, and we wanted to check out all the cool new things at the Adventure Express. It was a very nice day, the park had low attendance, so most of the rides were walk-ons. What could go wrong?
Well, all my grandkids wanted to take turns riding with me. They had already been there all day, and when they think of adventure, they think of me, so they all wanted time to ride together with me, but each wanted a turn to ride with me on this epic ride that reminded them so much of Indiana Jones. That is after all the ride’s history back when Paramount Studios owned the park. That Adventure Express was designed to be an Indiana Jones ride reflective of the mine car chase from the movie Temple of Doom. And in the ride queue, they used to play music from the Indiana Jones movie The Last Crusade. So the kids wanted to ride it multiple times, and we ended up riding it 12 times. But it started off very uncomfortably.
I had been wearing an expensive business suit that day, and when I got to the park, I took off the jacket and my tie. I unbuttoned my shirt because it was hot out; I figured people were walking around half-undressed from the water park anyway, so why not. As we were going through the line at Adventure Express to get to the usher who tells people which car to get into, a very small young man was having a hard time speaking to us. I told the kid that we had six at our party, my three grandchildren, myself, one of my daughters, and my wife. He was openly gushing in a sexual way and staring at my chest with my shirt unbuttoned, and fanning himself flamboyantly. He said, “Oh my gosh, oh my, that is just too much, oh my, your shirt. It’s so breathtaking,. I repeated that we had six people. I was trying to contain the incident because it was strange for the little ones. They just wanted to ride this ride with their grandpa; they weren’t prepared for some kid trying to pick him up in a sexual way. He couldn’t have been much older than 16, so there were all kinds of things wrong with this exchange.
After several uncomfortable moments, the train was looking for passengers, so he pointed us where to go while still fanning himself, holding that stick they use to measure kids’ height before riding. My daughter noticed all this and laughed about it as we sat because it was entirely too obvious. But this wasn’t the only time this had happened recently. On a family trip to the Mellow Mushroom in West Chester, which is a fancy pizza place, they have really good Hawaiian Pizza; our waiter was a drag queen and was significantly over the top gay, and made his intentions toward me very obvious. He kept talking about how he loved my hat and how strong and sexy I looked, and my family was sitting right there. It was bizarre and uncomfortable. I downplayed it, we had our pizza, and we left as soon as possible. The waiter acted like he wanted to be sexually pleasured right there at our table; he had no reservations about openly expressing himself. I felt bad for the management, as I did for the Kings Island crew too. If they tried to correct the behavior, they would be called discriminatory toward alternative sexual deviants. So they were being forced to pick their poison, which was just another reminder of how bad this modern social system was.
I hate to say I’m used to that kind of thing, but I handled it all so my kids and grandkids would not be damaged for life. I will do something regardless of who is in the way if I want to do something. And if I want to have fun with my family, I will, even if some perverted people try to wreck the experience. But it’s becoming much more common. I remember when you had to be 18 to experience any kind of sexual material, and now, it’s out in the open with an almost gleeful disregard for family values. Desecration is on their minds, and they have been trained to be activists for that cause. The kid at Kings Island, at any other time, would have either been fired for sexually harassing the guests, or he would have contained his attraction to older males, obvious father figure issues that many young people have these days due to the failures in the social network, not enough good dads in the homes and kids lost as to how to behave as pending adults properly. I felt a little sorry for the kid, to be honest. And since we rode the ride another 11 times, I had to see him a lot. And I tried to keep things light and lofty and overlook the obvious sexual tension. But he was visibly shaken by the presence of masculinity for many reasons. And it would have otherwise ruined our visit to the park. Yet we see this kind of thing everywhere these days, and much more often because our culture has encouraged it much to the desecration of civility. It would have been wrong even if the kid was a girl. Nobody in that age group should be hitting on men over 50. They really shouldn’t be thinking about sex of any kind. They should be learning something, doing something, and working hard to earn money to build a good life. But the failure of our times is our public education system, media culture, and politics that have encouraged kids like that to behave that way. And the cost of it all is yet to come.
As if anybody needed a reminder about just how terrible Mike DeWine has been as governor. Apparently, there are people out there with the memory of a goldfish, so they need the reminder. Just remember on election day of May 3rd, 2022, that Kings Island, one of the greatest amusement parks in the country, in the world for that matter, is currently under a big lawsuit from season pass holders from the 2020 season who wanted a refund, and are now taking the Cincinnati treasure to court over how the parent company, Cedar Fair Amusements handled the government imposed business shutdowns during the fake Covid pandemic. Now for those who aren’t regular readers, you probably know people who were sick over Covid, who may have died. Remember about Covid, which Governor DeWine was one of the first in the country to be suckered into the Bill Gates power grab for which Covid was created. Covid-19 was made in a lab in Wuhan, China. Dr. Fauci knew about it. He and Bill Gates knew some medicines could have stopped the virus, such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. Still, they deliberately suppressed that information from the public with donations made by Bill Gates to manipulate the media coverage and steer the public toward government-mandated vaccines, a multi-decade project that Bill Gates personally has funded so to usher the world toward a one-world government run by the United Nations steered by the Desecrators of Davos party. The same minds have now brought us the crises in Ukraine. And regarding Covid, the government reaction to the virus caused trillions of dollars of damage, ruined many lives, destroyed jobs, and broke the laws of our constitutions in gross ways that many thought was impossible before 2020. Kings Island in northern Cincinnati is an example of how government can ruin lives when it is unchecked and has too much power, for which Governor DeWine is guilty.
I was on several conference calls with Ceder Fair Amusements and Governor DeWine during the spring of 2020 when the entertainment giant was making its plea to get some visibility to schedule when they could reopen operations. At that time, it was May. Being a seasonal company operating two very large amusement parks in Ohio, which Mike DeWine had prevented from opening by abusing his emergency powers as governor, Cedar Fair Amusements needed answers from the government-created travesty. They had no idea when they could open Kings Island or Cedar Point, and being a seasonal company, they were already hurt in acquiring employees for the season. On that conference call, Mike DeWine was strutting his authority under emergency powers, and it was apparent that he never planned to give up those powers. Now two years later, we still have the pandemic going. The Democrats want desperately to use Covid emergencies to shield them from election results they don’t like. That was certainly the case in 2020 when they wanted Donald Trump out of office. And it’s the case now in 2022, with midterms shaping up to be really devastating for Democrats and the terrible job they have done at the national level possessing all three houses of government, Blue state governors are still looking for Covid to shield them from poor performances. And out of all the governors in the country, Mike DeWine has governed as a blue state governor, certainly not a Republican. And on that phone call, he could not tell Cedar Fair Amusements when they could open or the plan for them ever to do so. DeWine was utterly unsympathetic to the business community’s needs and showed everyone just how dangerous government could be when it was out of control.
That year Kings Island finally was able to open with horrendous restrictions to the public by July, after half the season was over. That year also, Kings Island had to shut down their Halloween Haunt weekend schedule and their Winterfest activities. So Kings Island was open from July 4th essentially to Labor Day. And before DeWine would let them do that, they had to agree to all kinds of unscientific social distancing rules and mask mandates after having to scramble to find enough employees even to open the park, let alone to give the customers the amusement park experience that they were craving. Kings Island was trying to open one of their big multi-million dollar Giga coasters, and the steam of the whole event was completely destroyed by what DeWine himself had done. Under emergency powers, he cut out the legislature. He took complete command of Ohio’s economy, which he didn’t have the right to do. He took hundreds of millions of dollars from Kings Island in opportunity cost. For Cedar Fair Amusements, it was a devastating summer, just as it was for many hundreds of thousands of other companies, large and small, who struggled to survive the ominous behavior of government exerting powers it didn’t have for the destruction of the people they were supposed to serve. If Covid was a virus that was built by our own Defense Department, funded by Dr. Fauci, and released by China as a bioweapon, and it robbed us of our taste buds, our health, and happiness, the government reaction to it with all the rules and regulations was far more dangerous. People might say that Cedar Fair Amusements is a wealthy company with all the money to absorb the costs. Those would be people who have no idea how much money it takes to run an amusement park.
I thought what Kings Island did that year was good; they essentially gave all season pass holders for the 2020 season a free renewal of the 2021 pass. Even that following year, Covid was still a problem, and DeWine had just reopened the state against his will. The Senate passed a bill to take those emergency powers away from DeWine, and it finally went into effect in June of 2021, and then and only then did DeWine step away from the lockdowns. The government had spent over a year terrifying people over Covid, which certainly hurt Kings Island’s business model. It will likely take them a decade to recover what was lost in just that one year. The current lawsuit is over how Cedar Fair Amusements managed Covid, which was entirely out of their control. Some people wanted a refund of their 2020 passes because they couldn’t use them. My wife and I went one time to ride the new Orian ride but didn’t go the rest of the year because the mask mandate was impossible to deal with in the hot summer sun, and it wasn’t worth it to us. We thought it was nice that Kings Island honored our passes for the following year. In 2021 we went often but noticed that many of the normal crowd had not returned. Some people were still worried about Covid, and they might never feel comfortable going out in public again. Those are the people suing Kings Island because they wanted a complete refund of their passes for 2020. The government had so terrified those people that they were permanently damaged. So now, with the summer of 2022 coming, Mike DeWine is running for a second term. And Kings Island is in court trying to defend itself from actions that Governor DeWine caused by his horrible mismanagement of Covid in the summer of 2020. Anybody who votes for him after that terrible performance is an idiot and an enabler of abuse.
Communist China is Leading Kings Island into going Cashless
I understand why Kings Island, as a company, would want to go cashless. Forget about the conspiracy theories for a minute of a global cashless system run by a communist regime. They have many people under 22 years old that they employ, and cash is messy. Everywhere there is something to buy at Kings Island, at the beginning of the day and the end of the day, Kings Island must act as a major bank and carry a lot of cash on hand to operate. It is a tricky problem to put all that money in and out of a safe. Then there are all the mistakes that the employees make during a typical business day, and they lose a lot of money at each station where goods are purchased. Then, of course, money is dirty, all kinds of people touch it, it never gets washed, and it becomes a cesspool in the pocket of someone’s dirty, sweaty pants. For the convenience of Kings Island, one of the biggest amusement parks in America located in Northern Cincinnati, getting away from cash and moving to credit cards makes their job a lot easier. That is part of the big global plan to push for a cashless system. Companies like Kings Island have tremendous overhead just in dealing with employees who handle cash on any particular business day, and it’s a real pain, especially if there are options. I understand why Kings Island wants to be cashless. I know why global communists wish to be cashless, which we’ll talk about in a minute. But what nobody was asking is, what do the customers want?”
Well, I can tell you my thoughts, I was infuriated when I was stuck in the Festhaus of Kings Island with all my grandchildren, and my wife couldn’t buy any food because we just had found out while paying for that food in line that they were only taking credit cards. No cash allowed. We were all hungry and tired. We had been swimming, so we didn’t bring anything that might be easy to lose into the park. We put a hundred bucks in our pockets for food but otherwise kept all our valuables in the car. Now we couldn’t use that money to pay for food, and we were highly inconvenienced. The guy at the checkout apologized and explained that Kings Island had made the switch due to Covid restrictions, which infuriated me. Because I knew it wasn’t Governor DeWine who was pushing a cashless system. It was Cedar Fair Amusements who were using Covid as an excuse to go cashless. An advantage to them that I explained above. That’s when we left the park to get food somewhere else, which became a nightmare all its own for similar reasons. But needless to say, that was the end of our day at Kings Island, and it will likely be my last time going for a while. Going cashless for me is a breaking point, a take it or leave it a moment, and I’d just soon leave it.
The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business
The push for a cashless society comes from communist China. They are already doing much of what Kings Island is working to do, so why not do it. Why are they doing it? Well, it gives them control over their people. It allows for the concept of a social score to accept or deny financial transactions. For instance, if you speak out against the communist government in China on social media or some other traceable way, they can lower your social score, which might prevent you from riding a bus or going to see a movie. Just think of the censorship of Twitter and YouTube but apply it to things you need to do in life, like go to the grocery store. If you have a terrible social score, you may not be able to buy food. That is how China plans to control its population of over a billion people, and it’s why many American corporations are leaning toward a cashless society. Having that kind of consumer control is very attractive to some of the variability in any financial transaction. I have seen this cashless thing attempted at several tradeshows and other venues around the country, and so far, it hasn’t been working very well. There are still many people who still want to use cash, so vendors have to make accommodations. What it always comes down to is whether or not someone wants a customer. The consumer desire drives the behavior, not the other way around. It is for that reason that cash will always be king in America. Cash is freedom.
I give an example in the video above about me wanting to buy a beer at Kings Island. Typically, I enjoy going there to look around and think. If I pay ten bucks for a beer, I pull the money out of my pocket and pay whoever is selling the beer. The transaction is between the seller and me. No bank in New York even knows about it. They might understand that Kings Island sold a beer, but to whom and for how long someone like me took to drink it, nobody knows. And I like it that way. So do a lot of other Americans. Part of drinking the beer is a minor rebellion in it that is specific to American culture. Just drinking a beer to be drinking one is pretty dull. Also, using anything but cash means you must trust the system and all the employees who handle the transaction. While traveling around, it’s happened to me that my wife might go to buy something, and she gets to the counter to pay with a credit card, and the company has shut down the card. That happened to us while I was traveling in Japan, I had made a suspicious purchase, a tiny one, and the credit card company thought it was a stolen card testing it out on something less risky before making a more significant purchase. My wife in the states was the one who got stuck without a way of paying until we could resolve the issue with several phone calls and a lot of embarrassment. Carrying around cash as a secondary or primary way of paying is an obvious solution. But if we have a cashless society, you must trust the entire system to get everything right, and we all have stories we could tell. The burden shifts to the consumer while the corporations and governments of the world get the ease of control they so much desire.
I expected a lot more out of Kings Island, and for them to blame the decision on Covid was just too low of a blow to accept. I generally love Kings Island and Cedar Fair Amusements. All I could think of was when they announced that they were not leading in the world but was only copying what the communists in China have already been doing. It diminished them significantly to my mind. It felt like a betrayal. My family was out of that park within 10 minutes of that attempted food exchange. They do have cash conversion machines that can put a value on a card, but then your cash becomes like a gift card, and you must start figuring out how much money you put on it for all your transactions, and the whole thing becomes a significant pain in the neck. Not that a few hot dogs and a hamburger cost $40, but they were making people stand around and use all these cashless systems was too much. So, we left, and I can’t say I’ll be going back any time soon. I go to Kings Island to enjoy myself, not to go to communist China. Because that’s essentially what it has become—too many rules, too much control, and way too rigid. And lazy.
For most of the recent December I spent it on vacation in one form or another, primarily going to Disney World and visiting all four of the parks that they have enjoying them immensely. During that span also I spent at least two visits to Kings Island to enjoy their Winterfest which I had said compared very well to the Disney Park experiences. I continue to be impressed with the way Cedar Fair Amusements has managed Kings Island since buying it over a decade ago now. For all the well-deserved hype that the Disney Parks get for their high quality experiences, the amusement parks in Ohio are some of the best in the world, between Cedar Point and Kings Island and those of us who live in the area of those places should consider ourselves very lucky. I do, I spend much of the spring, summer and fall—especially on Friday evenings at Kings Island meeting my wife after a hard day of work to relieve stress, which I do by riding roller coasters. Part of the reason I went to Disney World in December was due to the cold temperatures shutting down most of the rides at Kings Island, and riding roller coasters is part of the way I manage stress throughout the year.
Of course, I am ecstatic for the opportunity to ride the new giga coaster Orion at Kings Island in just a few short months. I watch the progress of its construction eagerly, once a day if possible, just for the prospect of seeing some new bit of news. I can’t wait to ride it and once it opens, it likely will join Diamondback and Mystic Timbers as my wife and my new Friday night ritual through the summer months to meet at Kings Island, have food under the Eiffel Tower and enjoy the fountain mist after a long hard day then ride those rides before going home and going to bed. Roller coasters and their extremes for me are like a shower that washes away the stress and anxiety that rolls off human interaction under intense conditions, and they are very therapeutic. Roller coasters are for the human imagination a huge middle finger to the impositions of existence which otherwise try to carve you into a blocky loser of anxiety due to the nature of reality. And utilizing the creativity of human thought to rebel against that tendency in the form of a roller coaster is really a tremendous psychological statement for the human race and I simply could never get enough of them, especially when they are built with the fabulous engineering that is going into Orion.
Yet recently neighbors in and around the Kings Island Amusement Park complex have been complaining about the noise of these coasters. During Winterfest the park has been running Mystic Timbers which was great fun. And during October the park stayed open until 1 AM during the Haunt weekends running all the roller coasters. It was great to ride the Diamondback at 12:30 AM on a Friday night in October with my kids and to enjoy doing those kinds of things at the small hours of the morning, yet neighbors who built their homes near the park have been complaining about the noise and are seeking to crack down on the Mason ordinance against those types of creative exploits, which I find reprehensible. I really don’t care how long someone has lived in the Kings Mills area. For what Kings Island does for Mason, Kings Mills and Cincinnati in general, I would expect the people of the area to appreciate it and to get on board with what Kings Island needs to do to be one of the best parks in the world.
I noticed it this time more than others, the Disney Parks are so wonderful because they are built on property that is so far removed from the outside world. You don’t see massive housing complexes near any of them for miles around and that is how they are able to produce such a wonderful customer experience. People need amusement parks. Maybe not to the degree that I use them to manage stress, but people in general absorb the pressures of reality to a point where they are toxic and generally complain about everything. That is part of the reason that such places were invented, to fill a market need. When a customer parks their car at an amusement park, they are husks of what they started out in the day as usually and they are looking for happiness. The people complaining about the noise of Kings Island late at night are people who will complain about their food at a fast food restaurant, or about the traffic on a highway, or even the color of a car they bought. They complain about their families, they complain about movies that are out at the multiplex, and they complain when a quarterback doesn’t do what they want in the NFL playoffs. They complain about everything all the time. That is why they need amusement parks, to throw off their worries and to enjoy a little bit of life. And staying open until 1 AM in October is part of the fun. People will complain, but its up to wiser heads to understand the nature of their antics. They need more fun in their lives, not less, and their precious sleep isn’t more valuable than the screams and cheers of a captive audience fresh off a roller coaster eating a funnel cake at 1 AM on a crisp autumn night under a well-lit moon. The experience that Kings Island offers to the community is far more valuable than some mundane sleep schedule or routine life within the four walls of a house. For most of its life, Kings Island was alone at that Kings Mills exit. Now there are lots of homes, they don’t have a right to complain now, because they moved there to be near Kings Island, and to reap the benefits. Now is not the time to turn against it.
For all the reasons mention, and a whole lot more, I want Kings Island to have the ability to make so much money that they can continue to give us great roller coasters like Orion well into the future. I would love again to have at Kings Island record breakers that last for decades with the unused land they have at the park, and they shouldn’t have to worry about a bunch of complaining neighbors. And to afford that, Kings Island needs more of the kinds of advantages that Disney has, where they can operate through as much of the year as possible instead of just during the summer, and for as much of the clock as possible, such as to 1 AM. People complain about Disney too, they are too crowded, they are too hot, they are too expensive, they are too much like a corporate empire, the complaints go on and on and on. But those complaints are not valuable customer feedback, they are really just people who need to shut up and go ride a roller coaster and to enjoy a funnel cake. People need to do a lot less complaining and let themselves enjoy the great things that Kings Island is offering consumers. Because those things are a lot more valuable than some sleep at 1 AM for some routine, drab life. Roller coasters are good for happiness, and the world needs a lot more of it, far longer in the day, more times a year and Kings Island needs to give us a lot more happiness. Not less.
As I’ve spoken about on many occasions, the amusement park of Kings Island is near my home and it’s not at all unusual for me to go there during the day, or after a hard day at the office to ride a few roller coasters to relax. I consider the place a considerable asset to my life to have something like it in my neighborhood. So it was, I spent the past Friday night sort of celebrating the recent announcement of their 20/20 roller coaster, Orion—which will be a tremendous asset to the park, and I couldn’t help but arrive at a few conclusions about the nature of amusement parks in general and what role they play in our economy. Kings Island under the management of Cedar Fair Amusements has actually improved over the years, as opposed to a gradual slide into decline which seems to be the case with most other businesses, and it is now very much on par with the amusement parks that are so popular in Orlando, Florida. The roller coasters alone in Ohio between Kings Island and Cedar Point are just fantastic and the perfect complement to a personality like mine that runs off adrenaline and intensity.
My favorite rides at Kings Island is Mystic Timbers and Diamondback so it’s not unusual to find me in that part of the park on a Friday night. My wife and I enjoy eating in the new Brewhouse or in line for one of those rides thinking about things. I was feeling particularly reminiscent on the night of Friday August 16th while in line at Mystic Timbers thinking about the new coaster Orion and the general construction of the entire amusement park. All summer long I was able to go with my family to Kings Island and get away from the stuffy world outside enjoying many long days at the waterpark. Just to think of Orion which will have a 300-foot drop traveling at 91 miles per hour it was certainly something to look forward to, but I couldn’t help but consider the meaning of it all.
Everything at Kings Island, or any amusement park for that matter is there for the creation of intellectual enjoyment. Whether or not it was the thrill of a new ride, or the joy of the many food options, or even the relaxing travel through the woods on the stream driven train that is so popular at that park, everything is geared purely for the enjoyment of the human mind to think and conceive of some form of leisure that is specific to our species. And that so many millions and millions of dollars of investment into that leisure time activity could be gathered in one place. Particularly while in line at Mystic Timbers is so much of that joy on display. The Diamondback is very prominent on the skyline, the Miami Valley Railroad, the log ride, parts of the kid land, the Eiffel Tower, there is a lot on display. After visiting Paris recently and wanting to see the Eiffel Tower there I was quite amazed that there wasn’t more to the real Paris monument. I was used to Kings Island that had the tower there surrounded by so many exciting rides. To have such a collection anywhere in the world is amazing and it is something I appreciate every time I visit the place, no matter how many times in a season I do. It’s not that Kings Island is there to make anything useful in the world other than entertaining its guests and that we have a society that can afford to do such a thing is simply something to behold.
The newest thrill ride at Kings Island is a giga coaster than features a drop of 300 feet. Orion will be ready by next spring and will cost more to build than it cost to build the entire park in 1972. Wanna take a ride in the front seat? pic.twitter.com/npIZDxnOM9
Amusement parks are quite common in America. Ohio and Florida have an above average representation. It’s not like they are on every street corner, but compared to other places around the world, they are common. But you can go for thousands and thousands of miles anywhere else in the world and never see anything so dedicated to the human imagination and entertainment as we find in the United States, an entire park dedicated to the indulgence of human beings specifically—purely for entertainment. There is a little amusement park outside of London and there is a pier in Brighton that is similar to the Santa Monica pier in California, but those places don’t come anywhere close to Kings Island which has become an international destination over the years, and it certainly deserves the recognition.
I think it is worth noting that a place like Kings Island is the byproduct of capitalism, and that is such a wonderful thing. Most people attending probably don’t think about it much, because as human beings they are used to life at the top of the food chain. It is their minds that put them there, not their sheer physical strength or any other factor. The ability to think makes humans the dominate life form on planet earth, and it is to relax and entertain those minds that these amusement parks serve. To be able to take so much acreage and power resources just for the entertainment of people could only happen in a culture where capitalist excesses are generated is amazing. And for the continuance of such an enjoyment to always be expanding, as things are at Kings Island says a lot about the success of our culture. I think about it every time I visit the park and as I am reminded that there are others around the country it goes a long way to making the positive argument for the success of American culture.
To think that the new Orion roller coaster will cost more than the entire Kings Island park cost in 1972 when it opened is to say that the market for human recreation is so high that it can justify such an investment. You won’t see economies in Peru or Brazil making such leaps just for the heck of it, or anywhere in Europe for that matter, unless the Disney company is putting up the money. It’s just not something that is done, because the excess money and need for the product couldn’t be enjoyed any other place. In that context I still enjoy the indulgence of Mystic Timbers which essentially is a wild rollicking bronco ride through the woods and back. The ride itself and its theming are almost showing off. It is such a casual ride that not even the many attractions in Vegas or Gatlinburg, Tennessee can compete with it. Yet in Mason, Ohio which was essentially a community that exploded into its present-day form because of Kings Island, Mystic Timber is just one of over 100 attractions that are there just for the enjoyment of them, and nothing else. And that’s what does it for me, to step out of the real world and to just spend time in the enthusiastic world of Kings Island for a few hours or an entire day is something that is very special to me, and it’s not lost to me how special it is. I’m very happy that Kings Island can still be enjoyed throughout Halloween and into the Christmas season with Winterfest. But every year for me the end of summer happens when Kings Island is no longer open daily, and I await each year when it starts opening on weekends once again in April. Because I love having it open to me when I need it, and all the many evenings I have spent there by myself and with my family just being entertained. For minds with a lot going on, an amusement park is the perfect thing, and I never tire of it.
I ride roller coasters so much in fact that when my publisher accepted the manuscript to my latest novel, they commented on how intense the action was, and wondered how I could write such a thing. I explained that much of the original manuscript had been sketched out on my hand while riding The Stunt Track at Kings Island, which I road again will thinking about the Hume story at Lakota East. There is something soothing in that catapult launch, and the run through the police cars that gets my blood boiling in a positive direction and organizes my thoughts. The faster the roller coasters, the more clear things become for me.And as for settings, strange creatures, gothic music, and smoke machines actually provide context for the metaphors they represent in the real world. My wife and I grabbed some steak fries from Rivertown and I pondered more of the perplexing quagmires percolating in my mind from the week. I think I like this time of year at Kings Island best simply because they don’t play all the pop music throughout the park. I prefer symphonic pieces most of the time as a musical choice, especially playful pieces themed around horror films.
A reporter called me, “Rich, not too many people like you do they?”
“No, and I like it that way,” I replied.
“You like it that way?”
“Yes, because if you are good and fair to people, yet they still don’t like you just because you are asking legitimate questions, it’s because they have something to hide. So the more people who hate me means we’re uncovering things they want to hide and their anger is the mask for which they use to hide it,” I said. “Did you call to tell me that?”
“I received a strange message from someone who didn’t leave their name or number. They were furious that I spoke to you about the school board story.”
I thought about the story that had broken earlier in the week, along with everything else mentioned. You can see the article that started the rift on the Lakota School Board at this ink:
“They said you weren’t qualified to speak about school board matters and that we shouldn’t talk to you.”
“Well, there’s your answer, it’s one of the school board members themselves. What do you think?”
“You’re the one who gave us the flyer,” the reporter said. “If you hadn’t done that there wouldn’t be a story.”
“So because I’m not a school board member I’m not qualified to look at a flyer from a school board president and see what she’s up to, trying to stack the board in her favor, and therefore the position of the union? So because you interviewed me, they are trying to put pressure on you to not speak to me in the future. Is that how you take it?”
“Sounds that way to me,” the reporter said.
“Well, do you regret talking to me?”
“Hell, no!” the reporter said. “You are a fun guy to talk to. I just thought it was funny is all.”
I laughed. “Well, if they are pissed off, it means I’m doing something right. And before I’m done, there will be a lot more pissed off people, you can count on that. Sounds like mafia tactics to me. What do you think?”
“That’s the first thing I thought of,” the reporter added before we went into another interview for a story being prepared for another article.
In Ohio the NEA (NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION) contributed $1 million to defeating Issue 2 and they are a radical organization. Look at their reading list, shown on their website. These are the books that the NEA wants the teachers you pay for to read. The NEA is the parent union to the OEA (Ohio Education Association) and specific to Lakota the OEA is the parent organization to the LEA (Lakota Education Association.) These books are listed as they appear on the NEA website.
Rules for Radicals
Saul Alinsky, Vintage Books, 1989
The classic book about organizing people, written by one of America’s foremost organizers.
Organize for Social Change
Midwest Academy Manual for Activists
Third Edition, Kim Bobo et al, Seven Locks Press, 2001
This is one of the best books about collective action and putting the screws to decision-makers. It’s about winning battles.
Building More Effective Unions
Paul Clark, Cornell University Press, 2000
Penn State Professor of Labor Studies Paul Clark applies the latest in behavioral sciences research to creating more effective unions. His insights are both astute and highly practical.
The Trajectory of Change: Activist Strategies for Social Change
Michael Albert, SouThend Press, 2002
Z Magazine’s Michael Albert has assembled a collection of thoughtful articles on ways to overcome various obstacles to social change.
Roots to Power: A Manual for Grassroots Organizing
Lee Staples, Praeger, 1984
This is a good nuts and bolts guide to organizing. It is especially good on recruiting, developing action plans, executing them, and dealing with counterattacks.
Taking Action: Working Together for Positive Change in Your Community
Elizabeth Amer, Self Counsel Press, 1992
Written by a Toronto community activist, this book is easy to read, full of examples, and sprinkled with how-to-advice.
Organizing: A Guide for Grassroots Leaders
Si Kahn, McGraw Hill, 1981, Revised 1991
This book is well organized. You can find relevant material for your situation without reading the whole book.
Ethical Ambition: Living a Life of Meaning and Worth
Derrick Bell, Bloomsbury, 2002
A gem of a book that delves into the question of “Why become an activist?” It is both thought-provoking and energizing.
Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in a Cynical Time
Paul Rogat Loeb, St. Martins Press, 1999
Provides solace for the activist‘s soul and juice for the activist’s battery
What’s happening is through radical union activity and small little rewards like higher wage compensation and benefits, grants and other perks, the radical unions are nudging their teachers to embrace radical ideas camouflaged behind carefully planted smiles and a public image. School boards are constructed to maintain that façade to the public, as the direction of the school boards is then controlled by the OSBA, the Ohio School Board Association who also reads the same types of books. School board members who don’t play nicely are pushed off the board, because the aim of a school board is to achieve public consensus. The game is a very subtle one, and for people who are more interested in watching Dancing with the Stars or picking up a magazine which features Jennifer Aniston’s newest love interest, they probably will think what I’m saying is a bunch of crazy talk. In fact, many school board members and even some superintendents might think so because their thinking is so specialized and focused on a specific task that they fail to see static patterns outside of their own experience. (TO UNDERSTAND STATIC PATTERNS AND WHAT THEY MEAN TO YOU CLICK THE LINK FOR REFERENCE.)
As I looked at all the costumes around Kings Island on the Haunt night I saw that it is the masks that the unions show us. The education institutions themselves are all wearing them and they want you to buy into the product they are selling, care and education for your children with service and smile. But what the larger organizations of union control want are teachers to pay them dues so they can use that money to inflict social change. READ THIS ARTICLE TO UNDERSTAND WHAT THEY ARE AFTER.
On nice days like what today is shaping up to be, Kings Island comes to my mind. In fact, aside from going to the book store and getting a new book, riding roller coasters at Kings Island after a hard day of working is the best way to unwind.
And today, March 17, 2011 Kings Island announced with some very cleaver marketing that I admire greatly, that they are putting in a Dinosaur Walk which excites me greatly.
One of my many nicknames given to me by friends and enemies alike is the Hoffmanator. Of course the overmanwarrior, or just warrior for short. But my favorite is T-Rex, because I love dinosaurs and among them my favorite is Tyrannosaurus Rex. The reason for that is because my behavior sometimes brings that creature to mind, because I have such a volatile temper.
So it is with that in mind that I experienced great excitement upon seeing this video.
I don’t care if it is fake. I don’t care if it’s intended for kids. I love, and I mean love the sight of a dinosaur!
So what’s this all about? Well, here Don Helbick public relations director of Kings Island to explain it.
Doesn’t say much, and this teaser says even less.
But that’s part of the fun in what proves to be another fun and exciting attraction. I’m sure it will prove to be one of my favorite hang outs at Kings Island.
Here’s some more footage of more changes at Kings Island. A lot of this we take for granted during the summer when the heat of the day pushes memories of winter deep in our minds.
The Overmanwarrior 