Rants on another topic...

I got a phone call from my mother the other day. She has been staying in her Jacksonville, FL house for the past 3 months. The call was some routine question about her house here in Maryland then ended. Shortly thereafter she called again. This time it was to vent about something or everything. I am not sure which but the conversation started with something like, “I am really upset about these markets.” Then some spouting about “This $700 billion bail out is ridiculous. Using taxpayer money like this really pisses me off. I am really pissed off about these markets. I mean I worked very hard for my money and now it is nearly gone. That xyz mutual fund I have is down to nothing (she was gleaming when it was going up during the unwarranted record reached in the Dow about a year ago). And what about this damn election… I don’t understand why all these black people are voting for Obama. I mean they are all excited to vote just because he is black. That really makes me mad. They are even registering “homeless” people here. Some guy was given an address like “pillar #4 under freeway…”

OK, this is when I have to just cut off the conversation and hang up (with a few short words expressing my extreme displeasure of her “TV induced Talking Head view of the world”, most likely from the antithesis of intelligent reporting, FOX news).

So what is it about Florida that once my mother has been there for more than 60 days she becomes some kind of extreme right wing racist? After she had been there 5 months or so she usually gets fed up with Florida herself and can’t wait to get back to Maryland. That is when I breath a sigh of relief and realize she is only truly 30 percent right of center and not 70 percent as she becomes after a couple of months in that dreadful state.

Occasionally I get questioned about when I am going to come down and visit. Mind you, my mother’s snowbird home is in Jacksonville. She might as well be in Alabama or Georgia cause everything north of Orlando is not worth a wintertime visit. It gets cold there. The beaches are lacking, the economy non-existent, culture does not exist and it is not perpetually warm. What in the hell would I want to go to Jacksonville Florida for? Anything north of Orlando is just not worth the trip.

My impression of the northern ½ of Florida is that it’s heavily settled by blue-collar northerners who just wanted to be in Florida when they retired and found the cheap real estate enticing. The economy there is like that of a Central American nation where all the “currency” that supports the local economy comes from the pension funds and 401k’s built up while people worked in states with productive economies. Go south of Orlando and you get the better off northerners who can afford the more pristine locations and 365-day warm weather offered by the tropical southern part of the state. Here, for example, is where you get the New Jersey and New York Jews who buy up “nice” condos on the beach in Miami and elsewhere they can use to bribe their reluctant children down for a visit. I mean even their kids cannot resist a free condo on the beach in Southern Florida. In fact, I might even visit my mom if she were down there. But no, she had to be where her siblings settled in the northern part of the state.

Initially there was hope. My mom first purchased a condo on a golf course just outside of St. Augustine, still not far enough south but it was a start. I figured maybe she would find it to cold and move closer to her ½ Jewish cousin who lives just west of Miami. I actually went to her condo for about 4 days in November 2007. It was cold. There was some kind of costal storm that had wiped out the beaches. Everything was deserted. I was told the “season” did not start till December. Huge multi story condo buildings rested on the deserted beaches south of St. Augustine. There were no restaurants, no grocery stores, bars, nothing, just rows of condos on the beach nearly deserted. It was surreal to say the least.

One day the little bridge we drove over from my mother’s misplaced “condo on golf course development” was closed and I had to take a detour to get to town where I would go the 5 Star St. Augustine hotel and borrow their network for a few hours for about $10. I was amazed at what I saw. On this detour only minutes from downtown and my mothers condo was a road bordered by double wide trailers on cinderblocks, tiny bungalows and houses that looked like servant quarters from some long lost Georgia plantation that were dragged down to Florida and had survived for 100 years only because of the hardiness of their tin roofs. I mean, the place was downright poor, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana poor. Yep, we were in Florida, home of stolen elections, inbred politicians and God fearing racists.

My trip to downtown St. Augustine with friends from the Netherlands and Germany who happened to be in Florida at the same time, hence my reason for trekking down there, were to find places to hang out and enjoy some bourgeois time in town. Unfortunately since we were there in November (once again before the prime season) the place was perpetually deserted except for an occasional day tripper bus tour, a few off season tourists and some students from the tiny collage in town. What was worse than the desertedness of the place was the lack of places where I would want to spend more than 10 minutes hanging out in. I mean poor towns are quite depressing to hang out in. We found one lively bar at the end of a pretty extensive strip of mostly deserted and closed bars (due to the off season time I presume) where they had live music and some people actually in the place. I met a few locals and one nice girl explained how the majority of the strip of bars I asked her about had migrated into the hands of one or two owners over the years. Yep, this is a reality in many towns in America that have seen they’re past glory come and go. The stately houses become 8 one or two bedroom tenement style housing units owned by one or two old school families and the commercial district follows suit, often by the same clan. That is when the rest of society drags down along with the town. If you have an outspoken attitude you are run out of town and if you are black or lacking in education you get exploited to the n’th degree and if you speak out, your destined for the food stamp line for life.

This is an area where the right wing politicians push for school vouchers (an idea pushed by the right wing that a family can obtain a “voucher” they can take to a school that is “achieving” positive test scores and get out of the cycle of sending their children to failed schools in their home district). The reason they push for the vouchers is these pieces of paper allow the families with the means (i.e.; transportation, income/job, freedom of movement and connections) to get a government issued pay out where they can “self bus” their kids to the one school in the entire county that may be able to have test scores that pass the national standardized tests. What the right wing does not bother to say is that in most school districts in poor states (and even in entire districts in most American cities) there is not one public school that is capable of passing national standardized tests. Thus the damn voucher is a worthless piece of paper unless you have the means to trek your kid to some other far school or district or ability to get them into a “limited access” charter school. The people with these means are going to benefit and they of course are the last people who need it. Hence, the voucher program is nothing but another subsidy for the wealthy conservatives who rake the most “rents” from poorer parts of the nation and want some kind of government handout to get their kids to better schools on the broader taxpayer’s dime. Yea, you got it, Banana Republic, I mean America, well the US anyway.

Let’s not mistake my attitude here. I had only been to Florida once, when I was 15 years old and my mother took us down to visit my right wing religious aunt and her family and to see Disney world (or land or whatever they call it there). I think that trip was also to Jacksonville where my aunt and uncle and cousins had recently moved from Tampa. My uncle was from a big farm family in Georgia and all I remember from the trip were new churches with lots of people, a different way of talking and trying to water ski (Disney whatever is a kind of blur). That trip left no lasting impression. I always made an effort to see my aunt and uncle when they came up north to visit the family though. My cousins were great when we were kids and as an adult I always enjoyed the cultural experience of talking at length with my aunt and uncle about everything. I may trash macro cultural realities but I love communicating with individual people of all stripes.
I don’t however like Florida.

I suppose if I were a CEO of a Fortune 500 company and could use the corporate jet to fly down to my waterside house in Palm Beach or Boca Raton for the weekends like about 60% of them do there might be some reason to visit the place. But even then I wince at the idea of finding any kind of cultural entertainment or other stimulating leisure experience to recharge before heading back to the office in some productive economy state. (Well other than having a rolodex of other Fortune 500 company CEO’s and good social calendar where I could always find the hottest place to hang out and flirt with hordes of beautiful borderline professional women who haunt the place looking to land their sugar daddy CEO. Needless to say, this is not happening any time soon.)

So to my loving mother I politely asked again in a follow up email full of apologies and other niceties both ways about the short heated conversation on everything that is wrong with our lovely country simply to avoid political issues in our conversations. We are days from an election and even though many of her siblings up north that moved right of center during the waning years of the Clinton administration have, after being completely disenfranchised by the doorknob running our country for the last few years, decided also to vote for Obama (even though they are not black) my loving mom who has spent the last 90 days surrounded by the many God fearing racist in the poor state of Florida, has not had the opportunity to change her mind.