Saturday, December 4, 2010

Disney's Really Unreal Town.

This is uber creepy as 21st century Americans continue to scare the bejeebus out of me. Could adults really believe this would come to pass? Are Americans really stoopid enough to buy into a seemingly perfect community, like those imagined by Uncle Walt, or the Christianists building a full size Ark - to include dinosaurs- (where are the plans?) and believe that all the country's warts, underbelly, and realities would not intrude?  Really?

Yep, I guess they are. When I first read about this "American Small Town" I thought it more a gimmick than anything serious.  But now, Jeez, real adults bought into this and believed everything would be like a week at Disney World (except 24/7) and all problems of the real world would not intrude on their lives.  It just boggles the mind. NYT:
RARELY has a town been conceived and constructed in the glare of publicity and aura of hope that greeted Disney’s master-planned, picture-perfect village of Celebration in central Florida. Expectations were so high that, in November 1995, 4,000 people entered into a lottery for the chance to win the right to pay 25 percent over the market price to move into one of the first 500 or so homes.
Many of those pioneers expected Celebration to recreate the ideal of Disney World just a few miles away, not for a weeklong holiday, but for 52 weeks of the year. They thought their children would get straight A’s at the model school and that there would never be a weed in their lawns. For the solidly middle-class, overwhelmingly white population, this was the adventure of a lifetime, the chance to start over in a town paved with great expectations.
Reality seemed to catch up with the Utopian village, which Disney gave up control of a few years ago, when residents awoke on Monday morning to find that one of their neighbors, a 58-year-old retired schoolteacher, had been murdered. The yellow crime-scene tape surrounding his condo contrasted with the nearby town square, which was decorated for Christmas and awash in holiday music from speakers hidden in the foliage. Then, on Thursday, another resident fatally shot himself after a standoff with sheriff’s deputies. The apparently unrelated deaths showed the world what people in Celebration already knew: life behind the town’s white picket fences wasn’t perfect after all.
It's a small, ugly world, after all.  And, there is no escaping it.  You must work to change it without running away. No matter how much you spend to try to gloss over everything that disturbs you, it will always be waiting where ever you go.  You cannot outrun what you helped create.

The rest is HERE.

And so it goes.
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4 comments:

  1. Ahhh, they even had a stairway to heaven... [photo].

    They should have known that communities like that don't work. I visited last year New Harmony in Indiana on the Wabash River. Founded by the Harmonist community.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Harmony,_Indiana

    ReplyDelete
  2. Disney's world is perfect in one respect; no matter where you look in Disneyworld or Epcot, there are absolutely no religious buildings anywhere. None.
    Ol' Walt knew nonsense and idiotic fantasies when he saw them.

    ReplyDelete
  3. @Anonymous: Uncle Walt's world is only perfect for as long as your money holds out. It as always been so, and we seem to be willing to buy into that BS if only to make us feel better for a few days.

    Your nonsense is only a few notches lower.

    Thanks for commenting, anyway.

    ReplyDelete
  4. When I read your post, I recalled that such attempts were not new and were never successful. Ephrata, Hancock, Oneida, New Harmony, Amana - these were attempts in the 1700's and 1800's. As they exist today they are examples of how the community learned the truth of life and morphed to accept it.
    Even in our day pre-Celebration we have know secular attempts. Columbia, MD comes to mind. These communities, too, are morphing from "perfect" to "reality".

    ReplyDelete

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If they are simply a tirade or opinionated bullshit, they will be removed, so don't waste your time, or mine.

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