Florida Man Sees Himself as President
Mark Twain once claimed that America is built on a tilt and everything loose slides to California. Those were the good old days - when California was considered America’s most laughable state. But let’s face reality: Florida has now replaced California as America’s laughingstock. And unfortunately, while California in Mark Twain’s day was seen as wacky in a charming way, today’s Florida is viewed as nutty with a twist of creepy.
Florida’s unlovely reputation has been an established fact for a while as evidenced by the Twitter phenomenon of “Florida Man” a stock figure of idiocy often portrayed as doing outrageous things often involving alligators. But now Governor DeSantis has made Florida’s uniquely hare-brained qualities internationally infamous by banning books and encouraging hostility toward anyone who doesn’t share his prejudices. He shut down a Florida high school course on the African-American experience and attacked the Disney Corporation for resisting his anti-gay laws.
His attack on Disney was supposed to show voters that he is a tough guy. “There’s a new sheriff in town” as he put it. This was supposed to be a boast that would let him swagger out on the campaign trail as a Trump-like bully, but the ploy failed when the anti-Disney deputies appointed by Sheriff DeSantis turned out to be a gaggle of Barney Fifes. Florida under DeSantis has become the state where the ridiculous comes to thrive.
For most of us Floridians, those of us who don’t want to be tarred with the Creepy/Ridiculous label, our options are limited. We can claim to be from somewhere else somewhere that is known for being sensible, like Canada maybe. Or we can just make up a plausible sounding state and claim it is our real home: “I’ll always fondly recall the lush green fields of my West Dakota childhood…”
Or we could look for encouragement about Florida by remembering that DeSantis won’t be governor forever. But that might be interpreted as implying that he could (God forbid) become president. However, after Trump, most Americans are not likely to support another cheesy, self-absorbed, and incompetent bigot for president.
We are just going to have to hope for the best for a while and look forward to another term for Joe Biden. In the meantime, we can take some comfort from the work of sympathetic artists like Barry Blitt whose March 6 New Yorker cover portrayed DeSantis as sharpening a hefty knife and threatening a stack of book. The title: “Florida’s Book of the Month Club.”
Alas, what a state we’re in.
