 Life
is a beach.
Or is
it?
Also
in this series:
Bush against Bush (Apr 30, '04)
Kerry, the Yankee
muchacho (May 7, '04)
You have the right to be
misinformed
(May 8, '04)
An American tragedy (May 11, 04)
In the heart of
Bushland (May 12, 04)
The war of the snuff videos (May 13, '04)
The Iraq gold rush (May 14, '04)
The new beat generation (May 15,
'04)
Taliban in Texas: Big Oil hankers
for old pals (May
18, '04)
FORT LAUDERDALE, Florida - Early
on Sunday, a 10-story building was imploded in this
aspiring, subtropical Venice. Call it Ground Zero by the
beach.
It was a drill: the building had been
bombed by "terrorists" and people were still trapped
inside, so 200 specialists including a federal tactical
response team, firefighters and paramedics from all over
South Florida had to rescue 30 mannequins by all means
available. Members of the tactical response team had
working experience on the Oklahoma City bombing and on
the attacks of September 11, 2001. This mini-September
11 did indeed look like September 11, not only because
of the symphony of beeps that go off after a firefighter
is motionless for more than 30 seconds, but because the
controlled implosion looked eerily similar to the
collapse of both Word Trade Center towers. Locals didn't
- or preferred not to - make the connection. They opted
for having their photos taken beside this South Florida
heap of concrete, steel and glass that soon will be
replaced by a supermarket.
There will be no
hanging chads in 2004. And no suspicious Supreme Court
ruling. But Florida remains a key swing state. The
re-election campaign of President George W Bush counts
on the formidable regimenting machine of brother Jeb,
the state governor. The campaign of Democratic
challenger John Kerry will pull out all stops to capture
the absolute majority of the key Latino,
African-American and Jewish votes.
With more
than 3,000 hours of sunshine a year and myriad
opportunities for deep sea fishing, speed-boating,
sailing, windsurfing, Jet-Skiing, water-skiing,
parasailing and diving their way into instant
gratification, one might assume residents of this
mouth-watering paradise rescued from the swamps in the
early 20th century would have no time for politics.
Wrong. When asked who is their favorite Bush in office,
the answer is not W or Jeb. It's Delsa. Delsa Bush is a
single mother born in Mississippi who recently became
the first black woman to be appointed chief of police in
neighboring West Palm Beach.
It's true that the
major local attraction is the wonderfully tacky
International Swimming Hall of Fame (the pool is great,
though). It's true that some fabulous Art Deco heritage
is drowned in a swamp of man-made "exotic landscapes".
Its true mausoleums to the fine art of lap dancing break
new barriers in the swank-meets-sleaze department. It's
true that an avalanche of Botox specialists ("10 years
to get it ... 10 minutes to get rid of it"),
micro-dermabrasion, breast implants, invisible hair
surgery, mesotherapy, face lifts, eye lifts, tummy
tucks, nasal surgery and labia minora reduction can only
be summarized by this slogan of a cosmetic surgery
boutique: "Transform your body or your money back."
But politics is high on the collective agenda.
Here's a sample of local public opinion.
On Abu Ghraib: "That soldier who released the
pictures of Iraqi prisoners being abused should be held
responsible for the death of Nick Berg. He is a traitor"
(a Floridian Latino). "We should not have had female
soldiers in Abu Ghraib in the first place. This offends
Muslim religious beliefs as much as the humiliation did"
(a Floridian WASP).
On jobs: "The president's re-election is not the
most important issue. Education, health care, jobs and
the economy all pale in importance to this crisis of the
armed forces. If he were to apply all his energies to
helping the military crisis, he would gain far more
votes than by campaigning" (a black unemployed
Floridian).
On the state of the union: "Borders closing, steady
censorship of ideas and greedy motives for siege
operations lead me to believe that George Orwell's
fantastic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is soon to
become a reality. Perhaps if we think about the laws we
allow to pass, the US can continue to boast that it is a
free nation" (a Jewish Floridian).
In the
not-subdued glamour of Seven Isles Drive, or Lauderdale
as Little Venice, inside a Mediterranean mansion with
all the trappings and a 75-foot (23-meter) mega-yacht
parked outside (there are 40,000 resident yachts, more
per capita than anywhere in the United States; 100
marinas; and a labyrinth of almost 500 kilometers of
inland waterways), a retired multimillionaire says the
whole Iraq thing is "a non-issue. We should get our
troops out and stop this mess. We're running huge
deficits. Our credibility is in tatters. This is very
bad for business. Wanna go for a boat ride?"
Further north, far away from the maze of
waterfront inns rented for the day or for the season at
modicum prizes, on Cap's Place, a quintessential Florida
hangout in business since 1929 that drew Franklin
Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in their time, it's
quite something to find a daiquiri faithful in a somber
mood: "I'd say that the myth that America is exceptional
in moral terms, high above the rest of the world,
something backed by the economic and military might of
the US, that is gone, buddy."
The beautiful
and the damned
South Florida, like the rest of
America, is still feeling the shock waves of what
Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker - once again - has
exposed (Newsweek is following the same path): how an
ultra-secret unit of 200 Pentagon insiders conducted a
black operation against high-value al-Qaeda targets that
then ran amok when transferred against the Iraqi
resistance. General Geoffrey Miller himself - the former
head of Guantanamo - recently said on the record that
the counter-insurgency process in Iraq was "Gitmoized".
The statement by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's
spokesman Larry Di Rita that the "assertions ... are
outlandish, conspiratorial, and filled with error and
anonymous conjecture" is being described as "a classic
non-denial denial".
There's widespread
speculation among the chattering classes that this may
become the nail in Rumsfeld's coffin - and as each day
Iraq becomes an increasingly major factor in the
presidential election, it may play all the way to
November. At this past weekend's meeting of the American
Association for Public Opinion research, Douglas Strand,
a political scientist at the University of California at
Berkeley, said that "Iraq is sucking the life out of
other issue deliberations". Bush's approval on Iraq is
now down at 35 percent: it was 44 percent in April. His
overall job approval is now down to 42 percent.
How could Bush not have suspected something was
rotten at Abu Ghraib? Part of the answer may lie in an
insider account published by the Washington Times on
Bush's reading habits. Bush says: "My antennae are
finely attuned. I can figure out what so-called 'news'
pieces are going to be full of opinion, as opposed to
news. So I'm keenly aware of what's in the papers, kind
of the issue du jour. But I'm also aware of the
facts." The problem is that the "facts" come from the
newspapers themselves, delivered every day to the
president in ultra-digested - and edited - form. Andrew
Card, the White House chief of staff, the first person
to see Bush in the morning, gives him "a quick overview
and [gets] a little reaction from him. Frequently, I
find that his reaction kind of reflects Laura Bush's
take."
So First Lady Laura Bush apparently reads
most of each newspaper, while Bush only reads the sports
pages - every day. Bush, in his own words, likes to
"have a clear outlook. It can be a frustrating
experience to pay attention to somebody's false opinion
or somebody's characterization, which simply isn't
true." A conclusion is inevitable: Bush sees reading as
an exercise on finding bias by the so-called "liberal
media". So he reads practically nothing, as a way of
preserving his "clear outlook" and not having to
confront it with a critical point of view. In other
words: by denying any form of criticism, his view
remains the Absolute Truth.
South Florida is
flocking in droves to watch Troy, in which Brad
Pitt as a mask-sword-and-sandals Terminator makes a
mockery of legendary Greek hero Achilles, if not Homer
himself, in their tombs. Pitt strikes endless poses as
if he's playing for an audience at a South Florida
Muscle Beach. There's no pathos, except in the plight of
Trojan Prince Hector (Eric Bana) and Trojan King Priam
(Peter O'Toole, chewing up everybody on screen with his
Shakespearean gravitas).
A comparison with Iraq
is inevitable. Troy - like Baghdad - was invaded because
of power, not a flimsy excuse (Prince Paris escaping
with Helen of Sparta; weapons of mass destruction). The
Trojans fight to their death, as the Iraqi resistance
will. But unlike Homer's account of the Trojan tragedy,
there's nothing larger than life in Iraq, only
sordidness: Saddam Hussein running away, the Pentagon
buying the Republican Guards, Bush declaring the war
"over", Abu Ghraib, and now F-16s bombing holy Karbala,
which for any Shi'ite in the world is worse than any
Terminator nightmare from hell. There's no sense of
sacrifice (Hector), no sense of tragedy (Priam), no
sense of hubris (Achilles). And most of all no one seems
to merit the line Achilles delivers to Priam as he drags
home the slain body of his son Prince Hector: "You're a
much better king than the one I'm fighting this war
for."
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