1hundredsixty8

Several years ago, the Princess of Passion & Pain and I purchased a condo on the Gulf Coast of Florida and have been spending winters here. As a part-time resident, I have tried to familiarize myself with my new environment. The Sunshine State is a unique place in many ways.

• It is flat, the highest point above sea level being 345 feet, making it the lowest in the nation.
• The state has about 1300 miles of coastline, second only to Alaska.
• It extends to Key West, the southernmost point in the United States.
• With nearly 19 million inhabitants, it is the fourth most populous state.
• Florida ranks 49th out of the fifty states in government spending per capita.
• With a per-student expenditure of about $8,900 annually, Florida is in the bottom 25% when it comes to the funding of public education.
• It is 8th in the nation in violent crimes per 100,000 people.
• The median age of the state's population is over 40 years, making Florida the 47^th oldest state in the Union.*  
• Florida ranks 12th-worst in the income gap between the rich and poor.**
• In the 1990’s, the current governor, Rick Scott, was the CEO of what was, at the time, the largest healthcare company in the US. He resigned in 1997 sortly before the company admitted to Medicare billing fraud and paid the largest financial settlement in U.S. history.

Florida's demography is a heterogeneous cocktail. There are the local whites, blacks, Seminoles, Cubans, Mexicans and other Latinos, Hatians, Europeans, and retirees from the Northeast, the Upper Midwest, and Canada. It is the Land of Bad Drivers, with inattentive seniors and reckless locals (who exchew, for example, the use of turn signals when changing lanes) turning streets and highways into an auto-collision Adventureland. It is one of the states where "Stand Your Ground" laws essentially allow a person to get away with murder. It is the state which gave us the 2000 Bush-Gore election clusterfuck, from which we learned the term "hanging chad." It is the place where shorts, tee-shirts and flip-flops are standard garb.

It is the state where powerful real estate interests have traditionally influenced public policy, the result being high density development along the coasts. It is also home to magnificent natural beauty. Despite pressure to develop, there has been pushback in the form of efforts to preserve the Everglades, and via the Florida Forever program through which the state committed to purchase lands for the purposes of preservation.

The climate and coastline means tourism plays a large role in state’s economy. South Florida’s tropical savanna climate makes it popular with those escaping the winter cold of the northern states and Canada. Orlando, home to Walt Disney World, Universal Studios, Sea World and Legoland, is theme-park central, a favorite family vacation spot. The Keys, the Gulf beaches and the throbbing cosmopolis of Miami are favorite destinations for the pale-skinned from the North and from Europe. Fishing and golf attract the sporting types.

Florida boasts a number of major-college football programs, several of them more notable for the number of criminal indictments they have accrued rather than the number of players who have earned a degree. There are three NFL franchises and two teams each in the NBA, Major League Baseball and even the National Hockey League.

Florida is truly a state not lacking for distraction.

For all this, my favorite thing about Florida is not a place or an activity…. Unless that activity is reading a Carl Hiassen novel. In his scathing satires of Florida life, Hiassen manages to combine laugh-out-loud humor and zany characters with pointed social criticism, all the while keeping the reader in page-turning mode. Political corruption and threats to the enviroment are recurring themes in the thirteen novels he has penned since the late 80’s, but his writing is never preachy. He adroitly captures the blue-sky, palm tree Florida in the same net with flawed heroes, bumbling criminals, over-sexed bimbos and other sleezoids. He marinates them in a mixture of greed and lust and serves it as a dish for us to savor.

I just finished Hiassen’s last two novels, “Star Island” and “Bad Monkey”. They both suffered from the same flaw I’ve noticed before in his books: When you reach the end, you wish there were more.

For anyone who wants a feel for life in the Sunshine State that is deeper than the artificial happiness sold at Disneyworld or South Beach, reading Hiassen is a good place to begin.  

*Based on the 2010 census

**From a 2012 study by The Center on Budget and Policy Priorites