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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Of course Florida can't make up its electoral mind -- it's where America's craziness runs out of exits.
Nov 8, 2000 | I could swear they wanted to tar and feather me, but I wasn't scared. I knew I could outrun the two gas station attendants staring at me like I was a cross between a bug-eyed alien and a Yankee carpetbagger. Neither man could have been a day under 70. They looked mean, but feeble.
The scene was just outside a town called Kissimmee, a region of central Florida where retirement communities sprout as profusely as the palmetto bushes that crowd up against the edges of both rivers and interstates. The time was spring 1982, and although I had lived in the Sunshine State since 1976, I was only then realizing how fundamentally whacked out my adopted state was. In Kissimmee, just being 19 years old was a crime against nature. In this sunny, perfect land, I was an unwanted reminder that youthfulness existed. Get out of town, boy, said the stony faces of the attendants. And don't come back.
I obliged -- and an hour later, I was in Daytona Beach, along with a couple of hundred thousand other 19-year-olds coagulating together for spring break. My own people, so single-mindedly intent on partying down, you might think, would relax me. But then I found myself staring at a vaguely 30-ish local trying to hit on a couple of Midwestern college girls, and I thought, man, that guy looks old and out of place. And I realized that I had completely lost my moorings.
Florida can do that to you. Twenty years later, I'm not surprised at all that an entire national presidential election could hang on whether a couple of thousand befuddled seniors in Florida accidentally voted for Pat Buchanan instead of Al Gore. Sounds crazy, right? So what else is new? Florida is a state with multiple personality disorder -- it's the catch basin into which our national insanity drains.
What is Florida like? Drive down Interstate 75, the artery that splits Florida like the seam of a banana, and you'll begin to get an idea. Start in the north, near the Georgia border, where the Okefenokee Swamp gives birth to the Suwanee River. You're in the Deep South here, surrounded by white crackers and the descendants of slaves who speak in drawls so thick your pulse slows down just listening to them. To the west, there is the Panhandle, home to the Florida State Seminoles and some of the nastiest cases of abortion clinic bombings this great country can lay claim to. To the east you've got Jacksonville, birthplace of Lynyrd Skynyrd and Molly Hatchett. If the South does rise again, Northern Florida will help lead the charge.
Keep going south, though, and you start hitting hippieland -- the environs of Gainesville, my own personal Florida homeland. Some of the finest stoners in America have been raised here, nourished by the relative liberalism of a college town, perfect weather for marijuana cultivation and a terrain of springs and rivers and beaches that invites indolence. You're still never far from cracker territory -- a fact that sets up some glorious opportunities for the kind of culture clashes that Florida raises to an art form. My personal favorite: tribal-drumming acidheads getting up at dawn to raid cow pastures for magic mushrooms. Only problem -- the rednecks who own those pastures like to get up with the sun also, and they love nothing better than chasing scrawny hippies. Gore supporters looking for Naderites to lynch from the nearest tree could do worse than starting their search in Gainesville.
But go farther, through the horse pastures of Ocala and the orange groves of Lakeland. Breathe in the wonder of Florida as pastoral paradise, gentle rolling hills and live oak and scratch pine. But watch out for the bulldozers uprooting that last citrus tree -- because you're not in the Old South anymore, you're in the New. You've hit the Tampa-St. Petersburg-Orlando mega-suburbalopolis, a triumph of modern fast-food franchises and cookie-cutter development that makes Southern California look like amateur hour. Nowhere is entertainment more relentlessly packaged and consumed -- from Disney World to Busch Gardens to the Orlando Magic and boy bands like the Backstreet Boys and 'N Sync -- than here. Blink and you'll miss the spawning of a new chain of premium family restaurants, soon to spread like a virus across the entire world.
Hooters started here. Let's move on.
