"You wanna go
to war OK, say hello to my little
friend." - Tony Montana (Al Pacino) in
Scarface, 1983
MIAMI - This is not your
average US city. This is a city where almost everybody
seems to be an expat - always ready to tell a harrowing
story involving dangerous escape to freedom, political
exile, starvation or all of the above. Political
volcanoes in any part of the world reverberate in Miami
- as trauma or as a new beginning. And so we have
children of Haitian political prisoners studying at
Miami Dade College, Sandinistas going capitalist in
Hialeah, former Peruvian victims of the Shining Path
playing their version of "El Condor Pasa", survivors of
torture in Honduras opening shops on Biscayne Boulevard.
Miami has also the highest rate of violent crime
in the United States. But most of the victims are not
expats: they are black Americans.
Ten years ago,
in Bill Clinton times, Miami was the epitome of fashion.
The cocaine cowboys were gone, replaced by every model
this side of Bratislava and every Italian playboy this
side of the Via Veneto. It was a designer - Calvin Klein
- who had put Miami back in the map, shooting an
underwear ad on the roof of an art-deco hotel. It was a
designer - Gianni Versace - who elevated Miami to
fashion Valhalla, when he bought a fabulously kitschy
house on Ocean Drive (today the house is a must backdrop
for the digital-camera hordes).
For a time, New
York and Los Angeles wanted to be Miami - so Miami
became the epitome of cool. But now supermodels have
been replaced by super-masses. Compounding the
Disneyland effect, South Beach - celebrated in countless
TV series - priced itself out and the fashion industry
left to other sunnier pastures. Not trendy anymore,
Miami had to come up with an ad campaign last year to
tell the world how trendy it is.
But fashion is
a vortex. Profiting from its fabulous 1930s South Beach
art deco - a whole neighborhood of sleek, deserted
hotels dripping with style - Miami had used its
architecture to rebrand itself as a worldwide cultural
destination. Then it rebranded itself again as a
post-modernist festival. And now it is rebranding itself
again via Mimo - Miami modernism, a style that
flourished between the end of World War II and the
beginning of the Vietnam War, when the US was truly the
benign superpower.
Mimo is pure sun, sea, sand,
sex and lots of money. Mimo shines best on the
pedestrian mall of Lincoln Road - not by accident the
most popular place in contemporary Miami. Unlike almost
everywhere in America, here the pedestrian is king. And
this was built in the early 1960s, when the ultimate car
and full air conditioning were the answer to all of
humanity's problems. Florida architect Morris Lapidus,
the king of Mimo, knew what he was doing. He used to say
that "a car never bought anything". Today, Floridians
park their air-conditioned US$40,000-plus sport-utility
vehicles (SUVs) to come to Mimoland and ... walk.
It's kosher The cocaine cowboys may be
gone - replaced by memorabilia shops in South Beach
selling framed photos-cum-Tony Montana's immortal lines
in Scarface. Jewish-Americans, on the other hand,
keep coming. As in New York or California, they are
certified members of the US elite, huge political
campaign contributors, their wealth and influence
straddling politics and the media. One might suspect
that the interests of the top end of the Jewish diaspora
might be well defended by the Washington neo-cons and
their association with the Likudniks in Israel. That's
not exactly the case. An extremely wealthy,
politically active but professionally retired Jewish
population is installed all over South Florida - from
Coconut Grove to the mansions in Coral Gables, from
Biscayne Bay to Fort Lauderdale and up north on the US 1
toward West Palm Beach. Many come from New York: unlike
Ratso (Dustin Hoffman) in Midnight Cowboy, they
have managed to live the full (retired) American dream,
complete with mega-yachts and endless rounds of golf.
Some are former Marines. Some voted for George W Bush in
2000 - even though they were not exactly fond of the
faux Texan. It's fair to say the majority votes
Democrat. Among these are the Democrat majority in West
Palm Beach, who in 2000 didn't know whether they were
voting for Al Gore or for arch-right-winger Pat
Buchanan. Bush, as everyone knows, won Florida by 537
votes.
Now, among the palm trees, manicured
gardens and swimming pools, the Bush-Cheney re-election
campaign may be in deep trouble. The anger of the
Jewish-American Democrat vote in South Florida has
reached "mad as hell, can't take it anymore"
proportions. In West Palm Beach, they are going to the
polling stations in November with clickers to count
every voter in and out. Democratic candidate John Kerry
has already been to a rally in Palm Beach, and will be
back soon.
Karl Rove, the Republican acting
Machiavelli, bets the current Bush administration's
Israel policy is enough to attract the Jewish-American
swing vote. "Not really," says a wealthy retiree in
Biscayne Bay. "Of course Israel's security is paramount,
but the most important thing is to come up with a viable
peace process, and stick to it." He believes Kerry's
Israel policy will be "very sound". Karl Rove,
meanwhile, may expect that straddling the seashore,
Republicans will keep gaining ground in South Florida in
the form of the new residents: increasingly affluent
Cuban-Americans.
Many Jewish-Americans in South
Florida are worried that they don't seem to be able to
notice any significant difference between Bush and
Kerry. Gaza massacres notwithstanding, and now even with
a condemnation by the United Nations Security Council,
the perennial Bush line is that Israel "has every right
to defend itself from terror", as the president
confirmed on Tuesday in Washington to 4,500 supporters
of the pro-Zionist lobby AIPAC (American Israel Public
Affairs Committee).
Kerry has been mum regarding
the appalling recent rampage in Gaza and the West Bank -
where the UN has estimated that more than 1,100
Palestinians have been left homeless thanks to Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon's tanks. Both Kerry and Bush
ignored the UN in all of their recent speeches. Kerry's
ads play incessantly all over South Florida TV. "But he
still does not know how dangerous is Sharon's idea of a
Greater Israel in the Middle East," says a prominent
Jewish-American in Hollywood (Florida, not California),
Democrat and definitely not Zionist.
Hardcore While its electoral prospects
in South Florida may be dicey, the Bush administration
at least has found one more way to seduce older, more
conservative voters everywhere by attacking pornography
- a thriving $10-billion-a-year industry. A "summer of
censorship" is coming, courtesy of the Bush
administration, and with Florida as a sex-for-cash
paradise, controversy will abound.
According to
the trade association Adult Video News, more than 11,000
porn videos hit the US market every year. There are no
fewer than 800 million porn video and DVD (digital video
disc) rentals every year. Porn is the ultimate Internet
virus. According to Websense, an Internet software
management company, there are more than 1.6 million porn
webpages on its database (18 times as many as in a 2000
census). A recent Nielsen/Net Ratings study said one in
every four Internet surfers in the US - something like
34 million people - uses the Net to check out porn.
Bruce Taylor, a high-profile anti-porn lawyer,
was recently reappointed to the Justice Department, and
he's coming with all guns blazing. Everybody will be
investigated - from cable TV to big hotel chains with
pay-per-view "adult" movies. A CBS News investigation
showed that 50 percent of guests at the Hilton,
Marriott, Hyatt, Sheraton and Holiday Inn hotel chains
across the US buy porn videos: this is 70 percent of
in-room profits. Porn videos last year made a $50
million profit for Comcast, one of the big cable-TV
providers in the US. Satellite-only DirecTV made much
more.
But the greatest pornography of all is the
pornography of war - which finally hit the US in the
face directly from Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. Jean
Baudrillard, philosopher extraordinaire, revered by the
best and the brightest at major US universities, has
written a devastating text in the French daily
Liberation. When read in the US, in the News Cafe in
South Beach where Gianni Versace - before being killed
by a deranged American fan - used to take his breakfast,
the impact is even stronger. Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld does not read Baudrillard. He should: "All this
masquerade which crowns the ignominy of war - up to this
travesty, this most ferocious of images (the most
ferocious towards America) because the most
phantasmagoric, and the most 'reversible', of this
prisoner threatened by electrocution who became a whole
mask, a member of Ku Klux Klan, crucified by his
counterparts. Here, it's really America that has
electrocuted itself."
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times
Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
May 22, 2004
No
material from Asia Times Online may be republished in any form without written
permission.
Copyright
2003, Asia Times Online, 4305 Far East Finance Centre, 16 Harcourt Rd,
Central, Hong Kong
Miami vice and
virtue
