This morning I peer over the horizon to the south, to the place too small to be a country, and too large to be an insane asylum (to paraphrase a southern governor on the eve of the Civil War), our home state of Florida. We've been the butt of jokes for a while now. "Florida man" is a meme for a mixture of madness and sometimes destructive ignorance--not the sort of thing you put in a marketing brochure from the local chamber of commerce, although people keep moving to Florida because the weather is warm and there's no state income tax.
Our latest entry in the ledger of statewide insanity comes with our governor's decision a few days ago to lower flags to half-staff. In case you were wondering what Senator or Supreme Court Justice expired over the last few days, you didn't miss anything. Rather, we are lowering our flags to honor that paragon of American virtue, and winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom from the man who did more than any other to debase the coin of the executive branch, Rush Limbaugh.
I first heard of Rush Limbaugh around 1989, when an Air Force colleague suggested I give his syndicated show a listen. We all understood at the time, or thought we understood, that this was comedy. Rush made his living mocking the excesses of the new political correctness; and excesses there were, to be sure. He railed at campus speech codes, race baiting from the left, and what was perceived as a general vilification of old white men, including those who founded the country. But at the time, it was all closer to Howard Stern, an extended, crude joke delivered by a provocateur who made his living as a sort of malignant court jester, calling out the absurdities of the moment.
Then, to transpose Marx, farce became tragedy. People started taking him seriously. As always with shock humor, his words became sharper, crueler (maybe they were always so, and I just got more sensitive to it), ever trying to find a way to maintain relevance with something a little more over the top than the last show. Women seeking birth control were "sluts." Native Americans should be grateful for our national genocide, because they ended up with casinos. The least culpable group of people with regard to our history of chattel slavery were whites. I could go on.
And the laughter stopped. On one side, Americans found his words so repellant and hateful that they tuned him out completely. On the other, a large group of mostly white men proclaimed themselves "Ditto-heads", and his commercial breaks ended with the proclamation "Rush is always right." In the beginning of the grand unraveling we are living still, families fell apart in all but the legal sense over the "ideas" he spewed.
One of my favorite among our extended family in the 1990s was Uncle Mike, a former fire department helicopter pilot who retired on the next bayou down from me. Mike was the guy who swung my boys, giggling with delight, in the air in the family room on his frequent dinner visits; the guy who bought me fried shrimp and a beer at Schooners when I was clerking for $250 a week with a two-year-old son at home.
In his ample spare time, Mike built hot rods, amazing machines that looked like something out of a magazine. I cringed at seeing these antique vehicles chopped and modified, but his work was art, a true thing of beauty. While he worked those long days in his huge garage shop, Mike liked to listen to talk radio, and from 11 to 2 each weekday that meant Rush Limbaugh.
Soon Mike wasn't coming over for supper anymore, because his thoughts obsessed on Rush's looniness. He cut himself off from all but those who also listened to Rush every day, generally older, not very well educated, white, and ironically on some sort of government pension. I quit stopping by his shop altogether around that point.
When Mike's final illness came, I tried to go see him once but was greeted with another big dollop of whatever Rush was peddling on his Orwellian-sounding Excellence in Broadcasting network. It had been months since my last visit when word came that Mike was gone.
That sort of story has played out a million times over in this country since Rush Limbaugh tapped into a rich vein of grievance and used his microphone to divide us for gain. The ultimate manifestation of that "them vs. us" attitude in our political life was our recently evicted president, and his minion in the Governor's Mansion in Tallahassee.
So, if one is the chief executive of only the 40-45% who are on the team, why not lower Old Glory to half-staff, a finger in the eye of women and people of color and the LGBTQ community?
Well, for starters, the United States Code doesn't seem to allow it. I'll let you read it for yourself:
Rush doesn't seem to fall into any of the categories, limited by law, of folks whose demise grants a governor the discretion to lower the national flag. A Harvard educated lawyer like the governor is no doubt fully aware of this, and no doubt could not care less.
And when one governs as the head of a tribe, rather than the chief executive of a diverse state, it seems inevitable that other elected officials, including within one's own cabinet, may decide not to play along.
So chaos reigns in the Sunshine State, which plays smartly into a political strategy that is all about riling up the base, rather than actually governing. It is demagoguery at its very worst, a sign that Florida sprints arms outstretched past Texas as the frontrunner in our political race to the bottom.
But that's obviously what our citizens want, or at least the ones who are allowed to vote in a state whose legislative and executive branches have made it a priority to prevent a large swath of the population from participating in political life.
What a mess. Can I just practice law via Zoom from the Azores?
Meanwhile a heat wave grips Corning, with temperatures hurtling up to around 40 today, and *gasp* 49 or 50 by tomorrow. I'm watching yesterday's snow melt from a neighbor's black roof as I write this. But before we get too excited, and start planning a weekend trip someplace warm, like maybe Buffalo, I note that a frozen mix is forecast for Saturday. It's a good thing Peg and I enjoy each other's company so much, or I enjoy hers (not my place to speak for her, a sign all that chortling misogyny of my fighter pilot youth has effaced). We'll make our own fun here in the Solarium Apartment, if nature traps us inside. It's all very good.
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