All The Way In The FLA

Fucking Florida. This place is a wonderful disaster. I’ve spent a lot of time here because my grandparents, as happens to all Jews from Brooklyn, received that transmission of migratory pheromones from the World Zionist Headquarters at around age 70, and so one winter they packed up their stuff from East 19th Street and moved themselves to Tamarac. My mom and youngest brother David followed, and after hop-scotching from one Broward and Palm Beach municipality to another, landed in a town called Green Acres. Not that you can tell Green Acres from any of the rest of the several hundred miles of undifferentiated housing and shopping mall developments that stretch northward from Miami. "What’s Green Acres all about?" I asked David. “Just like everywhere else,” he said, “except uglier.”

The developers down here threw this stuff up so fast, they didn’t have time to name anything. Mom lives in Waterfront Village. Next door is Riverfront Village. Across the street is Riverfront Gardens. Further down is Waterside Gardens. Those all sit on the same stretch of road — and then there’s the roads: Jog Road, Powerline Road, and Commerce Blvd are the street names they came up with. That’s if there are names; often, the streets go only by numbers, and then there will usually be two different numerical designations, for clarity’s sake.

And when you negotiate those long, wide streets to traverse Florida’s ever-reaching fingers of settlement the whole thing comes to seem like some kind of urban Winchester Mystery House — an endless, unplanned, impulsive construction project etched without mercy into the Everglades. The other day, my brother took me to his shooting range — as an aspiring rapper, David is strapped, and, I discovered has dead eye aim — and there he told me that the highest point of elevation in Florida is a landfill. I don’t doubt it. Much of the state is actually below sea level. Down here, where many millions of people live, the landmass is really just a two-hundred-mile wide, six-inch-deep river, slowly draining into the sea. That’s why, if you look close enough, at the green foliage that explodes from every unpaved square inch and the channels of dark water creeping alongside the streets and inside freeway clovers, you realize it could all be gone tomorrow.

Jungle creep

But that’s just south Florida. The rest of the state is equally . . . extraordinary, I guess is the word. And not just because Florida is the nation’s premier staging ground for all any weird shit that happens these days. Politically, it’s a nuthouse — a patchwork of immigrant demographics from inside and outside the country, each with its own pet voting issues. Like the geriatric Cubans still mad at the Kennedys for the Bay of Pigs, or my grandparents’ Yiddish club who are old-time socialists but also all own coffee table books about Masada and still talk about the raid on Entebbe. And then there’s the Dominicans, the Jamaicans, the Haitians, the Puerto Ricans, more and more Mexicans, the Midwestern retirees in trailer parks over on the Gulf Coast. Everywhere you can find the aboriginal white southern types, even in Broward and Palm Beach, where just today I saw a massive confederate flag waving from a primered, jacked-up 4&4 being driven by a shirtless guy who would have looked like Kid Rock were it not for the deep sun creases and missing teeth. He pulled into a Citgo near my mom’s house, a loitering location for some real grim characters. I was buying a map and some beef jerky. Our friend from the swamp walks in. “Can I help you?” the Indian owner asks.

“What did you call me?” the guy snaps back with his finger pointing over the counter. Behind him on the wall were three bandanas for sale. The Indian guy freezes. The diminutive Haitian filling out a lotto ticket nearby stopps his pencil mid-bubble.

“Naw man I’m just kiddin’ — two packs of Marlboro reds partner!” He smils and slapps the Haitian guy on the back, and all becomes jolly again with loud chatter, mostly from Kid Rock, about his truck and and price of gas and making change for a twenty. “Alright man thanks,” he says, turning to leave. “I gotta get out of here and vote!”

There you have it: Florida.

The other thing about the many demographics is that each one seems to be the critical pillar of victory — or failure. You hear it all the time: All Bush needs to do is get back to 65% percent of the Cuban vote. (When he “won” in 2000, Bush carried 75%, but has fallen to 60% in current polling.) If Kerry gets 70% turnout in Broward County, it’s over. If Bush can increase the margin in Central Florida by 10 %, he doesn’t need more turnout anywhere else. “The Caribbeans are the wild cards,” I heard from Joy Reid at American Coming Together, “because many more have been registered since 2000, and if they turn out … but Bush has been working on them because they’re religious.” Same thing with the Jews, who are lining up like nobody’s business so far at early voting but have a new minority leaning Bush because of terror and Israel. Even the record-breaking superfecta of hurricanes to come through represents another questionable variable in the turnout equation; as Larry Davis, an attorney with the Kerry/Edwards campaign, speculated, “the big gulf hit heavy in Republican areas, and Jeb’s disaster touring may prompt them to come out, or the physical destruction may, because of logistics, keep turnout down.”

Turning It Out On Sistrunk

To appease the turnout gods, each side is offering up all the sacrifice they can. Bush’s minions are achieving their GOTV quotas and bringing out enough people to fill 55,000-seat stadiums. Kerry’s lined up a half dozen massive events daily, with Clinton — first Hillary, then Bill — and Al Gore forming a top-notch surrogate B-team. On the Democratic side are also the myriad third-party groups. ACT, as described more here, will have spent $125 on voter mobilization by November 2nd, making it the largest such effort in history. Then there’s MoveOn PAC, ACORN, the unions, and everybody else hitting the streets. As everyone has seen on TV, they’ve created 3-hour lines at the polls. The legal observers are there, as well as in the courts, where the Republicans have been trying to get as many registrations as possible invalidated, and the Democrats’ 2,500 attorneys are sharpening the axe to behead the Republican beast. Even Puffy and 50 cent, are chiming in, trying to get out the Crunk vote. I just saw an ad with Eve urging people to vote in an ad sponsored by Burger King, adding a new civic dimension to their slogan, Have It Your Way. I myself have been canvassing, and if I have to start giving piggy-back rides to the octogenarians who didn’t receive their absentee ballots, then that's what I'll do, because: “I’m Josh Bearman, and I’m reporting for duty." As my homie LeShawn used to say before John Muir Mustangs football games: IT’S ON LIKE DONKEY KONG!

Which brings me to the Florida anecdote that may say the most. In 2000, during the recount, half the lawyers on both sides flew up to Tallahassee to argue the case in front of the Florida Supreme Court. 300 journalists camped out there too. All the rooms in town were filled. But one weekend, everyone got booted from their rooms because twice as many journalists were coming in to watch Florida play Florida State game, and they’d had the rooms booked for months. “Everyone got kicked out,” one of the Democratic attorneys told me over a beer pulled from a draft in his own backyard. “I was sleeping on the floor of a friends place. The attorneys fighting and the journalists watching the country’s biggest political crisis in a century – everything stopped for the game. Even the Supreme Court scheduled it so that all the briefs were due before the weekend.” Florida v. Florida State trumped Bush v. Gore. “But,” the attorney said, “they were evenly matched that year. That’s why everyone wanted to watch.”

Comments

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[zephyr]

You go josh! nice story