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But even Walt, ambitious social engineer that he was, might have been taken aback by the adoption of his commercial vision as Orlando's urban-planning model. Many new arrivals value the place because it offers the virtues of an escape: it is a suburban sprawl that strives to eliminate every kind of vexatious complexity. "People come here because they know it's going to be safe," says Thomas Williams, head of Universal Studios Florida. "They don't have to worry about the weather. They don't have to worry about the car getting broken into. They don't even have to worry about whether they are going to be entertained." Says William F. Duane, a lawyer who moved there in 1974: "It's like a voluntary conformity. You kind of feel seduced away from reality. But maybe I'm wrong; maybe this is reality." Charles Givens, an Orlando resident whose book Wealth Without Risk has been on the best-seller list for more than two years, puts it another way: "The best place to live is where everybody wants to vacation."
But about 20 miles away at Disney World, many tourists hold just the opposite: the best place to vacation is the place where you can only dream of living. "It brings you back to a moral, clean time that today we've lost," says Shirley Schwartz, 44, of Wayne, N.J. Praise of Disney World by its patrons often turns into condemnation of the disorder and unsightliness in the rest of America. "Do you see anybody here lying on the street or begging for money? Do you see anyone jumping on your car and wanting to clean your windshield -- and when you say no, they get abusive?" asks Linda Staretz, 48, of Livingston, N.J. "Look at the quality of the people. Doesn't that say anything?"
What it says is that Disney World is predominantly white and middle class -- and so is Orlando. The city, like Disney World, offers relief not just from the pressures of geography (it is flat and still undeveloped) and of history (more than half the area's population arrived during the past 20 years) but, most of all, from contending ethnicity. In that sense, Orlando is a new psychological frontier, a jumping-off place for a society that revels in the surface of things, even if deeper problems remain unaddressed.