WHEN I LIVED in America I would drive from New Orleans through the night to Florida. In those days, the Deep South could be menacing to a nosey outsider; and reaching Florida, just as a flamingo-pink sky burst over ragged silhouettes of telegraph poles and palms, was a joy.
I have an affection for Florida, partly because of the weather, but also because Florida is the state that doesn’t quite fit. It is not Dixie; if anything, it is an extension of Bolivar’s America, certainly of Cuba. It also has remarkable tribes: poor whites who missed the turning to California, including those from New York’s huddled mass who live as if Ellis Island was yesterday, in faded art deco hotels converted to nursing homes.
The most opulent ghetto on the east coast of America is also here, at Palm Beach. But Palm Beach, dripping with diamonds and scandal, is in the same county as Belle Glade, the heart of the sugar-cane fields where the newest, mostly illegal immigrants do arguably the dirtiest and hardest job in America. They live in compounds run by the American Sugar Corporation, and little has changed since Edward Murrow’s documentary, Harvest of Shame, exposed ‘the middle of hell’. Many of the workers suffer from a disease spread by rats that breed in the cane; and if they complain they are likely to be packed off back to the West Indies. The State Department used to send its fresh-out-of-college diplomats down to Belle Glade to get a taste of the underdeveloped world, though anywhere within a few blocks of the White House would have sufficed.
I would drive down the Gulf of Mexico road which, in the Sixties, was barely two lanes. A seam of ash-white sand and gentle breakers was interrupted by tackle kiosks and fishing villages: from Pensacola to Indian Rocks. A town called St Petersburg was motels and white clapboard houses, a Rotary and a square dance club. That’s where Zoë and I are now; she’s my six-year-old, who is also a swimmer and a beachcomber, though she can’t wait to get to Disneyworld.
There are still fishermen on the beach, but now they compete for space with lobster-red Brummies and massive couples from Middle America under sail in puce shellsuits. ‘Where you all from?’ almost everyone says; the answer is unimportant. I was once asked this on a Florida beach, having just emerged from the surf where a hovering police helicopter had teargassed me: part of the festivities to celebrate the renomination in Miami of President Nixon. For me, America has always been a blend of the lovable and the lethal.
The Knights of Lithuania arrived this week. They are poolside and Sam, the guitarist at the bar, says to them: ‘You people are the Now Generation. You did it over there: you showed the world what freedom is.’ He adds, ‘Say, any of you knights been to Lithuania? . . . no? . . . Any of you know where it is?’ Giggles poolside, though the question is not unreasonable.
On the large screen in the Activities Room, a television commentator announces the first anniversary of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait with the suggestion that, a year ago, the Now Generation did not know where in the world Iraq and Kuwait were. ‘Eggsactly one year ago today,’ says the television man in his regulation voice-of-history baritone, ‘the world’s status quo took a direct hit . . . America was poised for war, but praying for a diplomatic breakthrough. But it was not to be . . . Sure, it wasn’t much of a contest, but America found itself.’
Cue on the big screen Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, speaking for the Now Generation. ‘Mr Secretary,’ says Mr Baritone. ‘I’d like to ask you a personal reflection. What’s going through your heart on this anniversary day?’
‘Thank you so much, Mr Secretary.’ Now back to Barbie in the studio.
The victory parades have been run again, in between the Alka Seltzer ads and the child abuse hot lines. ‘We could have easily done it without the British and French,’ wrote the foreign editor of the St Petersburg Times. ‘ . . . You can call this America assuming its God-given role as leader of the forces of light and right. You can even call it America as Head Honcho. Big Kahuna. Numero Uno . . .’1
The fluent inanities are now virtually unopposed. Power is unabashed, and celebrated with all the ignorant certainties that echo the totalitarianism over which the Now Generation claims to have triumphed.
Forty million Americans have no medical care; yet power triumphant has been reason enough for the Congress to approve $2 billion for a weapon called a Superconducting Supercollider. And the Pentagon confidently expects much more: $500 billion for weapons for which an enemy is still pending, including $24 billion for Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars fantasy.
The Now Generation’s very own will be a C17 military transport aircraft, so huge, wrote Tom Wicker of the New York Times, that it will make ‘it easier to carry US troops here and there, to police up those little wars that may be part of the new world order’.2 Ironically, although this is a society whose economy is based largely on war industry, there is no concept of war on its own soil; the consciousness of war remains the preserve of Hollywood.
The continuing obsession with soldiers ‘missing in action’ in South-east Asia is a variant of this. In striking, silent contrast, there is nothing about the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese who are ‘missing’ and the devastation done to their country, both during the American war and the current American-led embargo.
Here on the beach, at St Petersburg, the lovable side is exemplified in the boundless grace and enthusiasm of the college youngsters who look after Zoë and her friends in the hotel’s ‘kids’ club’. The lethal side is, as ever, on the omnipresent news. So far this year, more than 23,000 people have been murdered in America, the highest number ever.
In the St Petersburg Times, Jacquin Sanders writes a column called ‘Faces’. ‘All right,’ he tells us, ‘maybe I’d never fired a trendy assault weapon before. But Clearwater Firearms and Indoor Gun Range was making an offer I couldn’t refuse: rent an Uzi and fire two clips for $19.75 . . .
I took off my bifocals. Terminators don’t wear bifocals . . . I fired a few single shots [and] shifted to automatic and cut loose three or four barrages. They were noisy and jerky and satisfied the soul . . . ‘Killed him dead,’ I said with satisfaction.
Tom Falone, the former police officer who has owned the place for 15 years, is a big man with a belly and untrusting eyes. His son and daughter are in college. Each has a handgun and a rifle. ‘They aren’t flag-waving nuts,’ said Tom, ‘but neither would hesitate to use their weapons if they had to.’ The rent-an-Uzi special is advertised on a board across the street from Clearwater High School . . . but this is Florida in the 1990s.3
August 9, 1991