Hey, Florida, WTF?
by Jaime O’Neill | May 17, 2022 - 7:17am
I see far too many images of Rick DeSantis, Governor of Florida, and I never see a single one of those photographs without wondering how it is possible that so many people in the "sunshine state" aren't seeing what I see in that guy's face.
It is, for me, the face of a thuggish man, the kind of guy who would be cast as a minion of a mob boss in a gangster movie. He looks like a concentration camp guard who likes his work. It is the face of cruelty. In all those hundreds of pictures I've seen of the man's face, I've never detected any hint of kindness or concern for others. It seems like the face of that kid on the edge of a schoolyard fight who would be mostly likely to kick the kid who was down.
The man wears his character so plainly on his face that it diminishes my sense of my fellow Americans to think there can be so many who don't see it. Worse yet, I suspect many people do, in fact, see what I see, but aren't much bothered by it. These coarsened times we live in have shown us that lots of Americans these days actually love a bully, love a brutish narcissist, much the way the people in Italy took to Benito Mussolini, a villain who would have been comic if his vanity and mercilessness weren't deadly serious and the consequences of electing such a man had not been so disastrous.
The same with Hitler, of course, a ridiculous figure with ridiculous notions, wearing that ridiculous little patch of a moustache as if he knew he could push the boundaries of what people would find appealing. Wasn't his madness on full display in those speeches he gave, with spittle flying and dark emotions unleashed and spewed to the multitudes like airborne contagion?
And then there were those public images crafted to look benign, but weren't. Ronald Reagan, with his actor's face projecting good-natured affability, as phony as a three-dollar bill, ruthlessly indifferent to the pain he was sowing, the lies he could tell so glibly, the consequences of the class politics he was waging in service to the very rich. Reagan, lest we forget, stripped away the Fairness Doctrine, clearing the way for Fox News and the subsequent fouling of American. So long as it looked "balanced," lots of inattentive people decided it must be fair, and they could just pick and choose which reality they preferred. But Fox was never fair, nor balanced, nor was it meant to be. That's part of Reagan's legacy to us, a "gift" that keeps on giving.
And if you see homeless encampments on the streets near you, Reagan pioneered that, too, when he removed care facilities for troubled people and encouraged us all to think that if we just all were patient, the wealthy would eventually trickle their excess cash down on us. The "Gipper" told us that a rising tide would lift all boats, but he meant yachts, and he sure as hell didn't mean people who were up the creek and up to their necks without boats, paddles, or even flotation devices.
Then there was that utterly clueless son of George H.W. Bush, a doofus who rose to power on the basis of not very much at all except what had been conferred at birth, through associations, money, and privilege. When Governor Ann Richards once said of Dubya that he'd been born on third base and thought he'd hit a home run, she could have been talking about Republican politicians too numerous to count. It shouldn't surprise us that the Supreme Court is weighed down--way down--by guys far too impressed with their own wonderfulness, people like Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, two guys who attended the same prep school for rich pricks. It was in the company of similarly entitled boys that they seemed to have picked up their marked absence of empathy or understanding of anyone not as cocooned by comfort, deference, and privilege as they had been themselves. When we puzzle over how our politics became polluted with so many such men, it shouldn't be that hard to figure out.
What is harder to figure out is how so many people have been unable to figure it out. We'd better hope that "you can fool some of the people all of the time, all of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time." But, for Christ's sake, how has it been possible to so often fool so damn many? Who can look at the rogue's gallery of America's most villainous douchebags without wondering if all those zealous supporters ever bothered to look at those men's faces? Didn't Dubya's face disclose the fact that he really wasn't very smart? And even if lots of people failed to detect that dimwittedness just by looking at him, there was all that evidence of stupidity revealed to us in the things he said and the way he said them. (In the context of the recent mass shooting in Buffalo, let's look back at just one selected Bush quote, the one in which he sagely observed: "For every fatal shooting, there were roughly three non-fatal shootings. And, folks, this is unacceptable in America. It’s just unacceptable. And we’re going to do something about it."
Was he proposing mandatory target practice for all Americans?
And even after he'd mired us in a war in a country that posed no threat to us, we elected him to a second term, choosing this draft evader over a decorated veteran who ran into the buzz saw of Republican prevarication and proved too feckless in his response to it.
After a while, though, it starts to seem like it's not "them," but "us." If we could elect a cartoonish Bond villain and blatant rich prick and con man like Trump, the guy with cotton candy hair, a bimbo third wife, a compendium of idiocies, and a long record as an amoral con man and gonif, then we're probably just as likely to put DeSantis, that dumb and heartless bastard currently presiding over Florida right now in the White House in 2024. And if we do, then we will surely deserve more of the same s**t we've endured under the stewardship of people like these, with faces that should have revealed their character from a half a block away.
And God help us all if a true majority of Americans did read those faces and admired the r****m, the misogyny, the xenophobia, the stupidity, and the heartless greed that was so plain to see.
Last Sunday's New York Times opinion section carried an op-ed piece entitled "DeSantis Is the New Republican Party," by Rich Lowry, the editor in chief of the National Review. Lowry summed up his heap o' praise for DeSantis in a closing paragraph that read: "Mr. DeSantis is the hottest thing in national Republican politics right now and he is doing everything to lay the groundwork, assuming he wins re-e******n this year, to run for president. It's impossible to know how that will go. What's clear is that his synthesis of the old and new, and the resonance it has had with the rank and file, points to the Republican future."
T***slated from Republicanese, that points us all back to a benighted American past, with more guns, more God, more r****m, more money for the wealthy, more respect for ignorance, and less regard for education. Let the bad times roll. And that damned Mickey Mouse be damned, the f*ggot rodent. Cinderella be damned, too, along with Goofy.
Trump, another resident of Florida, may face off against DeSantis in the primaries next year, and it remains to be seen which of the two candidates Rick Scott, the creepy crook and senator who is also from Florida, will support. Marco Rubio, another Florida sleazeball, will have to make a choice, too before he supports whichever of these two prime candidates prevails.
Unless, of course, someone even worse emerges. In this context, that is a distinct possibility.
Hey, Florida, WTF? br br by Jaime O’Neill | May 1... (
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