February 25, 2007
God Bless South Florida, nut-job capital of America! Los Angeles used to hold that title, but it has now gotten conservative in its old age.
The beautiful thing about Florida is that the social libertarianism of the place allows for a free-for-all environment as long as you don’t fuck with other people’s property.
F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that in American life there are no second acts. He obviously never spent much time in “South Florida, where everybody is living a second act. And a third -, fourth -, and fifth act. There’s no point in asking people about their past lives, because they’ll only lie to you anyway.
It’s a combustible mixture: highly excitable latin people, fed-up to the teeth black people and white people with itchy trigger fingers.
Miami is the jungle, a steamy witch’s brew of latin rhythms, voo-doo drums, barely contained combustibility of black Overton, striving Jewish upper mobility, separated from the Awayyyy We Go! frenzy of Miami Beach, which got a powerful shot of megavitamins 15 years ago with the development of South Beach, by a series of causeways.
Dade County, which includes Miami and Miami Beach, is all about race, and instead of a fast ride between the two cities on Miami’s Metrorail line, which was never extended to Miami Beach for fear of an invasion by Central Miami’s underclass, it can take up to an hour on the congested causeways. For New Yorkers, who are not used to driving and must depend on buses, the trip is interminable.
The thinking behind this is the same as that used by 19th century Parisian city planner, Baron Haussemann, who tore down rabbit warren urban enclaves in favor of grand boulevards: it’s easier to control rioting masses in big spaces. Any invasion of Miami Beach by discontented urban elements is confined to five causeways, which are easily defended against urban insurrection.
Anyway, whatever floats your boat! They got a beautiful thing down there in Miami and they intend to keep it that way, with my blessing. Miami Beach has always been good luck for me. The last time I was there, in the company of my girlfriend Magpie, we were down to our last dollar, drinking in the Mango Bar on Ocean Drive, when this rich, drunken German tourist dared me to get naked and dance on the bar for $500. I told him to give the money to Magpie and cautioned her not to leg go of it for any reason. Then I got buck-naked and jumped on the bar for as long as they let me, which was all of about 15 seconds. The band stopped playing. I jumped off the bar, put my clothes back on and, from being broke a minute before, bought a round for all my new friends and left a $50 tip for the staff, no shit!
The county to the north of Miami, Broward, is White Man’s Heaven. One gets a concept of what Australia must be like, or South Africa before the collapse of apartheid. Not that it doesn’t boogie, but the boogie is more likely to dance to the rhythm of ZZ Top or Jimmy Buffett than Gloria Estefan or Celia Cruz.
With its exclusive neighborhoods, network of canals parallel to the streets that permit homeowners to park their cars in front of their houses and their cabin cruisers in back, Fort Lauderdale and Broward County is a place where white people can let their imaginations run wild undisturbed by any hint of cultural diversity. Broward is a wealthy, sun-bleached, booze-fueled Disneyland of the Senses where the chic outdoor cafes and boutiques that line Las Olas Boulevard, continental but not too continental, provide a homey, comfortable backdrop for an American psyche seeking a luxurious playground to mellow out.
Broward is a hot house unperturbed by anything resembling culture, where people enjoy their toys. It is home to some very good bars and restaurants. The people drive around and look at each other’s homes or, if they are nautically inclined, take their launches out for fishing and drinking, and that’s about it.
The problem is that an empty mind needs to find something to occupy it, out of ennui, so the citizens of Broward County develop some extremely bizarre compulsions. There are a lot of S&M boutiques there, and the weirdest news items to fill Miami television news come out of Broward – the police detective who pimps out his wife and hides in his closet to watch; the bodybuilder filmed in a parking lot paying an undercover cop to castrate his romantic rival. It’s a phantasmagoria of rich, self-indulgent white people gone mad, like a French black comedy set in colonial West Africa. The colonials are stark raving mad, but in Broward County they don’t have any natives to inflict themselves on, so they victimize each other.
Sometimes in life you have occasion to meet accomplished, sophisticated people of erudition, which embarrassingly makes evident how much capacity there is in human beings to absorb and utilize knowledge. While, admittedly, different people are endowed with various degrees of intellectual ability, meeting these high-end people can be a painful reminder of how much dormant capacity is lying fallow in the minds of typically underdeveloped garden variety hicks. All of this unused space has to be filled with something, and in a place where there is little or no stimulation of any kind, like Broward County, some rather exotic forms of nonsense can grow like fungi inside the heads of the inhabitants.
Combine with this the fact that, Broward County not being exactly a major center of culture and subject to a lot of outside attention, the natives can pretty well run wild without having to adhere to narrow parameters of conformity. It’s no surprise that its judges, who are issued from the same general population as its cops, insurance executives or bakers, are going to manifest the same defects of intellect and culture as the general public at large.
I know some people from Broward, and they are charming if you accept them for what they are: rich hicks. Nothing wrong with that. America is not a civilization of worldly people. The presidents and Supreme Court justices we elect are testimony to that. One writer described us perfectly, to my mind, as a “lively peasant culture.”
Anna Nicole Smith’s passing away in Broward County had to be the biggest news to hit the place, ever. The Anna Nicole Smith story is one that the average dimwit can really wrap his mind around: pole dancer and Playboy Playmate marries rich old geezer, inherits a $500 million estate; one kid dies right after another, of uncertain paternity, is born; then she dies, leaving the new baby a very rich orphan with a comet’s tail of paternal pretenders. The media circus, the mystery, all the goofy characters – it’s a tabloid dream! And now the wacky judge, the incomparable Larry Seidlin. Oy vey, what a nut! This guy’s a perfect screwball!
Judging people in a court of law is at best a nasty business. The judge has statutes and precedents to help him arrive at an equitable decision, and adversarial attorneys to guide him through the facts of a case, but ultimately he must use whatever wisdom he has at his disposal to arrive at a determination and, unfortunately for people from outside his community who happen to land under his jurisdiction, he reflects the attitudes and biases of his community. In the case of Broward County, Florida, a lot of wing-nut baggage can enter into the atmospherics of the proceedings.
The New York Post, which sent correspondents to breathlessly cover every scintillating detail of the court procedure, declared itself highly outraged at Judge Seidlin’s personal demeanor during the hearings, as though The Post were any kind of qualified arbiter of judicial decorum.
Whether it’s the personal comportment of Britney Spears or the judicial meltdown in Brooklyn, where it seems as though the whole system of justice, from the D.A.’s office to the Democratic party system for judicial nominations, is on the verge of collapse, The Post attempts to adopt the moralistic posture of Defender of Middle-Class Rectitude when in reality its writers and columnists are barely more than alcoholic, semi-literate sycophants whose talent in life, beside that of invoking nausea, is to be able to crawl under the low-hanging abdominal protuberance of Rupert Murdoch (not that I have anything against Murdoch personally – he is a great Australian-American, but his concept of right-wing family entertainment is a laugh, and he’s not likely to hire any talented writers that don’t fit into the narrowly-conceived profile of a tabloid hack, which naturally excludes anybody betraying even a soupçon of talent. You want to read writing, go to the library. You want to waste a half-hour reading about the latest projectile to get shot up Paris Hilton’s ass? Roll out a quarter for The Post).
The New York Post’s moral outrage at his behavior notwithstanding, if you examine Judge Seidlin’s actual rulings, they were correct. He appointed an impartial trustee to protect the rights of the orphaned infant; he directed the Anna Nicole Smith be interred beside her son in the Bahamas; he directed the contesting fathers to submit to DNA testing to establish the baby’s paternity. These were not the considerations of a lunatic, but of a considerate and concerned judge.
Sure the judge cried. Who would not be moved by the tragedy of the situation? A few weeks ago she was rich, with a grown son and a new baby. Then the son died. Then she died, leaving the baby an orphan. The people and judges of Broward County are only flesh and blood. They were moved to tears by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. The judge was right to cry because he was expressing the emotions of his community, and of the rest of us too!
I don’t pretend to be enthralled by the life and untimely demise of Anna Nicole Smith. Maybe if I had had the impulse to be more connected with the popular stream of consciousness I would have had more success in life as a writer. I didn’t care about her in life, and I don’t really care about her in passing. I’d prefer to write about the mysterious disappearance of the great German mystery writer B. Traven, author of “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” and “Ghost Ship,” who went into Mexico and disappeared without a trace. Obviously, the guy got too close to something hot.
Unless somebody is able to arrive at a mystery angle to the death of Anna Nicole Smith, like those that developed around that of Princess Diana, then the story ends here, a pointless tragedy brought about by the inability of human beings to handle the power of modern pharmacology. We are only a million years removed from the apes of the African savannah, and though we have mastered fast cars and space travel, modern drugs seem to be a frontier that we have yet to tame.
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Posted on 2/25/2007
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