Great Sentences: P.J. O'Rourke on Disneyland's HOF II

I'm going to start posting some of the great sentences I come across from time to time. Sometimes sentences are so perfect they're like poems. I'll start off this new trend with a couple of lines from P.J. O'Rourke's story in the December 2008 Atlantic, called "Future Schlock," about the disappointing corporate assault on Disney's creative output, as evidenced by the product- and brand-placement priorities in Disneyland's new House of the Future II.

O'Rourke begins by waxing nostalgic about the original House of the Future, which he visited in the fifties as a kid, and which left him spellbound and ready to race "to infinity and beyond." Unfortunately, Disney boxed up HOF I in 1967, much to O'Rourke's dismay. Here we find great sentence #1:

"Reports have it that a wrecking ball merely bounced on the sturdy polymer seed cases, and the prematurely postmodernist structure had to be sawed apart by hand. (As many a timorous would-be suicide has discovered—with viselike grip on a bridge railing—the future is harder to get rid of than you'd think)."

I for one did not see that parenthetic sledge hammer coming. And I'm still wondering where it came from.

Mr. O'Rourke is clearly a family man — appropriate since much of the essay's import has to do with the myth of the perfect family that permeated and inspired so much of pop culture from the post-war period all the way into the 1970s. O'Rourke admits that his family isn't perfect, but he never stops talking about his kids, which I find very reassuring. He also writes with a self-deprecating sense of humor that gives birth to great sentence #2, in the middle of a paragraph about "smart houses" that do all of your housework for you, like the Jetsons' house, and even pick out your wardrobe and suggest recipes based on what you place on the counter:

"And have you watched the clever manner in which convertible car tops operate? . . . If a house must be smart (and, as a man who is continually outwitted by his wife, children, and dogs, I'd really prefer that it just dummy up and mind its own beeswax), why can't it be as smart as a Pontiac Solstice?"

More great sentences soon.