When You Wish Upon a Scar

So, Ron DeSantis (hoping to save face after being out-maneuvered by Disney) threatens to build a prison next to Disney World, the state's biggest private employer.

Putting aside that the Florida residents who actually live in the area might, oh, object -- and that he's saying to tourists (Florida's major industry, driven by Disney World), "If my plan works and you all hate this prison so much that you end up staying away from visiting the state, well, who cares?" -- and that ultimately it's really only a bad problem (other than an unsightly annoyance) if prison security is so awful that inmates always keep escaping on a regular basis --

This is hilarious. Because Walt Disney planned for this sort of thing 58 years ago -- when he bought a 43 SQUARE MILES of property in 1965 to surround and intentionally insulate from the outside world what would be the actual park!  That's 27,443 acres!  (Just for comparison's sake, the original Disneyland -- which itself is pretty massive -- is...500 acres.  And no, that's not a typo.  No zeros were left out.)  That's how much Disney World, EPCOT, Animal Kingdom and the "Hollywood Studios" are all isolated from the rest of the state encroaching on them.  The Disney property isn't just big enough to completely protect Disney World -- but the company has four standalone parks on the grounds.  And there's so much land that each of them is totally isolated.

Walt Disney saw how so many local businesses (some of them shoddy and cheap) grew up around Disneyland, taking advantage of their proximity to the park, which he felt hurt the "entry experience" he wanted to the Magic Kingdom.  As a result of what he saw had happened, when it came time to plan for EPCOT (which was the original plan for the area -- the Environmental Prototype Community of Tomorrow), the company quietly bought up massive tracts of land in Florida under different names and developed it with forests, wilderness and campgrounds, all of it beautiful nature that people would have to drive through to reach what are now all the various, actual parks themselves.

It's not that Ron DeSantis is playing checkers, while Disney is playing chess.  It's that DeSantis is playing marbles, while Disney played 20 games of chess against simultaneous opponents half a century ago, won all 20, and now has grown up and is using computers, technology and the Internet to build a monumental international empire.