Florida Sublime

 For most of my life, there has been little to celebrate in the fact of coming from the Sunshine State. Arriving in Florida at the turn of millennium, after spending the first ten years of my life in Texas, I was confronted by a sudden vacuum of "state pride." It was a shocking contrast. 

The Texas school authorities had made the indoctrination of us elementary schoolers in the ideology of "Texas pride" a core—if not exclusive—goal of our primary education. Right after the pledge of allegiance to the United States, we recited the "Texas pledge." And we had to read The Boy in the Alamo—a book conveniently leaving to one side the fact that the whole conflict was fought over slavery and (alas) Texas was not on the side of freedom—multiple years in a row. 

Florida, by contrast, seemed to have an appalling lack of esprit de corps. There was no civil religion of Florida-ness drilled into us—perhaps because the state is really five or six separate entities in one—each having little to do with the others. There is the Panhandle, the Gulf Coast of northeastern snowbirds and retirees, Miami-Dade, Disney country, etc. Each region may have its own separate sources of pride. But none was particularly pleased at the mere fact of being part of some larger Florida project. 

Into this vacuum of identifying and distinguishing characteristics strode "Florida man." When I was growing up we had never heard of him. As I say, the concept of Florida was distinguished above all at that time by not existing. It was impossible to say what it was. We had no mascot of any kind, no matter how embarrassing. It was only in adulthood that Florida began to acquire a conscious reputation, and we quickly realized it wasn't pretty. We became known as the land of nuts. 

Worse still, as the generally demented reputation of its inhabitants came to be further established, it acquired a political valence too. Now, Florida seems to be known above all for being the headquarters for a particularly deranged brand of right-wing cultural politics. It is the kind of state where the governor might suddenly misappropriate funds originally designated for COVID relief and use it to kidnap migrants from another state as a political stunt. Or where the inhabitants of a retirement community might take up the chant "Boomers for Loomer" to signify their loyalty to a QAnon-believing Congressional candidate. 

Despite all these reasons to feel some sense of dismay about growing up in this state, I nonetheless feel a need to vindicate it, particularly as its people are now struggling mightily in the wake of a devastating hurricane. I wish it to be known that, even if I would not go quite so far as to experience pride in coming from Florida, I nevertheless—as Bart Simpson would put it—feel "less shame" at that fact than might be supposed. 

What I want to give credit to above all is the promise of Florida—the Florida dream, if you will, which is sort of like the American Dream on crack. The reason the state has become home to so many kooks and crooks and weirdos, after all—including the two disgraceful and disgraced current frontrunners for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination—is the same reason it has attracted writers and poets. Florida represents the idea of a completely fresh start. It doesn't matter who you were before you came. In Florida, you get to start over. 

This is what I mean by saying that Florida is like America, except more so. The pulpy madness of the country writ large is squeezed (freshly) into a drinkable glass in my home state. Both the good and bad of the United States—its deranged populism, its antisocial binges of appetitive individualism, but also the genuine hope it provides of a chance for a new beginning, free from Old World baggage and social restrictions—all are present in the character of the country as a whole, but can be found in concentrated form in the Sunshine State. 

More writers than one might expect have sensed this in the tropical air of the state, and invoked it in their writings. To be sure, the Florida literary legacy is not as storied as that of New York or Boston. You are not as certain to stumble upon references to Tampa in the annals of American letters as you are to the Charles River. But it has drawn to its pulpy atmosphere the likes of Hemingway, Wallace Stevens, and Russell Banks, has it not? And each found in its setting the same idea of starting over. 

Wallace Stevens, for one, compares the promise of Florida to a snake shedding its skin. "Go on, high ship, since now, upon the shore,/The snake has left its skin upon the floor," he wrote. Richard Ford, in the concluding section of his The Sportswriter, resorts to a similar image to describe the Florida effect. His protagonist, Frank Bascombe, has made the journey from New Jersey to Florida, and finds himself wading into the Gulf waters one morning for a swim. He imagines that "a film," "a skin or residue of all the things you've done and been and said and erred at" is slipping off him as he does so. 

This is the Florida promise. A secular baptism. It doesn't matter who you were or what you did before. Here is a place where you can begin anew, be born again, without the dead weight of the past—a feeling, as Ford writes, "of being released, let loose, of being the light-floater." 

It's a promise, of course, that is closely tied to Florida's role as an entry-point for immigrants—who tend to be people by definition looking for a fresh start. There is a reason two of the major Florida-themed novels I can think of—Hemingway's To Have and Have Not and Russell Banks's Continental Drift—both prominently feature the seaborne smuggling of undocumented immigrants in their plots. Migration is central to the Florida story, even as the state's right-wing culture warriors would like to freeze this aspect of its identity from proceeding any further. 

With the good aspects of Florida's heritage though comes also the bad. In the same way and probably for the same reasons that the state has always offered a chance for people to reinvent themselves and pursue a new life under the aegis of the American Dream, it also offers a refuge for scoundrels, crooks, and despots. Some of them are currently running the state. Others used to run other countries. 

I think of the segment late in Louis Malle's unforgettable documentary about immigration to the United States, ... And the Pursuit of Happiness, when the French director finds and interviews the Somoza family—former dictators of Nicaragua—living out a peaceful and prosperous existence in a suburb of Miami. But even here, where Malle has seen the Florida promise enabling a former tyrant to escape justice, he nonetheless discovers a kind of innocence in the scene. Filming the former dictator's nephew flying a kite with his young son, Malle muses: "perhaps [he] is becoming just another suburban American." He then adds: "I'll drink to that."

The implication seems to be that even if the Florida promise enables scumbags to flee from the consequences of their actions, it also enables those same bad actors a chance to become better people. It gives even the dictator's family a second chance—one in which they will do less harm and more good to their fellow beings. And is there anyone in the world so depraved that they do not deserve a second chance? 

This, I submit, accounts for all the besetting ills of Florida that have been so much in the news of late as well as its great fund of optimism and hope. In the course of every life, however nobly lived or otherwise, there is an accumulation over time of regrets and defeats. There must be some place in this world where it is permitted to slough off this skin of failures, in Ford-like, Stevens-like fashion. 

For this purpose, no place better serves than the land of sunshine, tropical greenery, global warming, and prehistoric reptiles—unchanged in so many ways from the hothouse Earth of Pangea where our first mammal ancestors carved out a precarious existence. A place where we now can restore ourselves to a primordial innocence, as when the Earth was new. That is the Florida sublime.