Florida Dreaming

Florida is a very strange place: a nonplace place, scrubbed clean of placeness. This notherethereness is a quality as old as swampland and suckers; the first hand-tinted postcards actually had the palm trees painted in (before palm trees were planted); image coming before reality; our house was always foundationless, built on sand.

The postcards said welcome to Florida, land of the endless vacation, heaven on earth! But heaven, of course is for the dead. Somewhere behind the Rufus T. Firefly fliers, undead reality lurked. Florida, land of smuggling and crime. Florida, land of pioneer hardscrabble. A place where you could find farmers who got their hands dirty. Not to mention cowboys and Indians.

Today's Florida crackers are living fossils. These Coelacanth survivors are 20th-century vessels of the original Florida pioneer mentality — a pioneer mentality a little to the left of the usual Calvinist mania. Where the typical overachieving USofA pioneer cried out, "I WILL FORGE AN HABITATION OUT OF THE WILDERNESS IN ORDER TO GO AND FORGE AN HABITATION OUT OF THE NEXT WILDERNESS! I WILL WORK FOR MORE WORK!" (insert heroic pioneer statue here). The Florida pioneer said, "I will forge an habitation out of the wilderness and then to hell with it. The porch is sagging? Let it sag. It's too fucking hot."

Instead of More! Onward! Upward! Higher! Deeper! the goal of the pioneer Floridian was to kick back and relax. You want food? Fish. You want something else? Hunt. House needs painting? I don't hear the house complaining.

As to citified Floridians, creating the illusion of eternal vacation was work enough in itself. The effort led to a kind of creative insanity — evidence of which you see in our buildings. Some are futuristic, like the steel-and-glass latticework structures of the "Sarasota School" of architecture — or ebuillient, like the architecture of Miami's South Beach deco district. Not to mention the goofball school (similar to all the hotdogshaped hotdog stands of SoCal).

Florida's Jetsons jetsam was all mixed up with a smattering of fantastical/recreational stuff — pastimes and past times like winter baseball, the Ringling Brothers Circus — and untold myriads of cheesy but delightful roadside attractions. Gatorland! Monkey Jungle! Ross Allen's Reptile Institute! Outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual nuttiness.

And so it was funky. And so it was good. 

And the Florida Cracker rested seven days a week.

Until Satan came.

With mouse ears, not horns, poking out the sides of his head.

And it came to pass that Satan inserted his rubbery, hoselike finger into the most intimate center of our state — said digit miraculously disguised as an appendange on a giant Mouse's enormous white-gloved three-fingered hand.

Ha-ha.

The undead Disney, like some vicious Maxwell's Demon sucking entropy from everywhere else in the system of Amerika, sucked all the fun, funk and fantasy in my blackholesunshine state into its imagineered deathcamp where children's dreams from around our small world are sorted, numbered, selected, burned, and turned into soap and lampshades.

Disney's Dream Inc. killed all the lesser dreamers -- no Mom'n'Pop could compete with the Mouse, after all...

And so, step by step, inch by inch, Florida's roadside attractions failed; the fantastic pink and aquamarine hotels were painted brown or torn down entirely; the palm trees died of blight; the circus left, along with most of the baseball teams.

There was nothing left but real estate. The void.

Which all goes back to what CJ (my cynical, brainy cousin) said -- we've been malled. 

Drive through one of the instant fake towns in what used to be the Everglades. You'll see street after street of Blockbuster Video, Mobile Oil, Red Lobster, Blockbuster Video, Mobile Oil, Red Lobster. Auggggh! It's all the fucking same! As repetitive as the lamp-table-chair background of a Tom and Jerry cartoon. And all built in the last decade or so. An ersatz, history-free land of commercial sprawl. 

And it's not like we never had a history, either -- but that history has been scrubbed over, remodelled, and torn down into nothingness. Thomas Wolfe said, "You can't go home again." Boo-hoo, pal. Here in the Sunshine State, you can't go home again next fucking WEEK. Buildings go up; buildings go down -- workers zipping around like bees -- don't blink or you'll miss 'em. It's like that scene in The Time Machine where the Time Traveler sees the sun arcing in an accelerating, fibrillating blur, until it's a single band of fire across the sky like a neon tube.

The history we had was actually interesting, but the people from Someplace Else don't come here for any history -- anymore than YOU want to see somebody else's turds floating in the toilet bowl in a strange motel room. Nah. What they want is a nice, clean, gleaming, sterile bowl of porcelain, a strip of paper in its toity-bowl smile proclaiming SANITIZED FOR YOUR PROTECTION.

And they sure as hell don't give a rat's ass about John Ringling, Jose Marti or Billy Bowlegs.

What they wanted was that perfect, virginal, sanitized toity bowl motel room...

A place to go where nobody knows your name. A place where you (a small fish in the big pond someplace else) are now a big fish in Florida's small pond. God, you hate Florida! It's such a nothing state. But that nothingness is why you came.

You wanted a place without soul, history or character. It's a lie. But that's what you paid for.

That's how Florida sells and whores itself.

We're a place for young people with money to have an endless vacation.

A place for old people with money to die.

A place that isn't, above all, New York City or Kansas City or Detroit or Columbus or Chicago.

We're none of the above. We're nothing!

Welcome to Florida!

The perfect Nowhere Land. For Nowhere Men. (And Women!)

That's the pitch. And a lot of folks bought it.

A good chunk of the people who've moved to Florida made a deliberate decision to leave their history behind — with the kind of hooting satisfaction that some people get cleaning out their attic and throwing away all of grandpa's old photographs and tossing his war medals in a trash compactor. All that history is a large part of what they're running away from. The last thing they want to run to is a place with a history of its own ...

What they wanted was Utopia — a place that's noplace. A nonplace place, scrubbed clean of placeness. And that's exactly what they got! Florida — or the fakeass Florida the developers built. Heaven on earth...

As close to being dead as you're ever going to get without actually being dead.

* * *

And so, in post-Mouse Florida, the developers' dream of a noplace place has been built and, goddamnit anyway, it's just like that cornfield movie: "If you built it, they will come." Around these parts, at any rate, it works. They came, all right. Millions of 'em.

All of which leaves the native Floridian in the position of being a despised, second-class citizen living in a colonized, dishonored, conquered territory — a dirty foreigner, in the state he was born and raised in! Ah, the constant contempt, the endless insults. How lazy and stupid we are. (You can't get good bread in Florida! You can't get good service! Yeah — we needed a new arts writer. We flew one in from LA.) How it's so much better up north or in Ohio or California.

Florida is sort of the Third World of America — within America! A low-wage, two-tier economic colony, right smack in the continental United States — yes!

Yeah, yeah. I can imagine the Seminole sitting next to me at the bar saying, "Fuck you, white boy." But you get my point.

Gnash! Snarl!

The People from Someplace Else have a habit of hiring Other People from Someplace Else — as they think anyone from Florida (especially if you've got even a lingering Southern accent) is some kinda gap-toothed, drooling, inbred, banjo-picking, worm-ridden "Squeal piggy!" degenerate out of Deliverance.

Folks from Around Here, who tend (at least with regards to fools like me who didn't leave) to slip below the stations proper to their natural abilities — and also tend to get into that twisted, passive-aggressive, love-to-hate mentality you see in many colonized countries. (Ah, it's the goddamn Brits, you see, lad. Perfideous Albion! They stole our birthright, they did. If not for them, ah, the greatness that could've been ours, me boyo. The greatness that could've been ours...pass us another pint wouldja now?)

Because — instead of inventing things, producing things, building things, making something happen — it's so much easier for native Floridians to wait tables or lift block or sell drugs or cook up some congame or, in general, feed off of somebody else's money, devour the scraps that fall from their table, and then bitch about it.

The People From Someplace Else get to feel superior. We get to feel victimized. What a deal!

And that's the sickness I see. Florida is corrupt (which is what's so damn interesting about it). So far, the best contemporary writing I've seen about it is Carl Hiassen's stuff.

My own idea is to (A) Write a group of short stories patterned after Joyce's Dubliners. (B) Write a parable of sick, cancerous growth patterned after Frazier's The Golden Bough. Big, big ideas as usual. I've got lots of 'em, yep. And I'll get around to writing this stuff, I really will....

Right after I down this pint.