Back home!
From Chicago to Orlando: roughly 17.5 hours of bad drivers, psychopathic road dogs, big scary trucks and right-wing talk radio with the ocassional few minutes of NPR. I really need to spend more time in the South. What I most enjoyed was rolling through Tennessee to the sounds of late-night Fundamentalist broadcasting. I learned that sports controversies at Notre Dame University are further evidence of the Catholic threat to society (what an interesting distinction for religious fanatics to make!) and that evil witchcraft has blatantly penetrated at least as far up as the Senate. The most devious thing about witches, one radio host said, is that they perform certain rites without understanding why those rites work. By the same standard, Christians are also witches, prayer and sacraments are a form of witchcraft, and all religions are merely fancy superstitious routines. So you see, just a little interpretation goes a long way. It can even help one find truth in the statements of holy-rollin' wackjobs.
Oh, and NPR is just no fun. In fact, despite what certain right-wing hack commentators say, NPR is about as sleepy and pussywhipped as it gets. Someone get those people some cocaine and beef!
I will be in Orlando until March working in the Osceola County bureau of the Orlando Sentinel, where the Medill School of Journalism's Teaching Media program has shipped me.
I hesitate to go on adolescent social-commentary rants. That said, one is in order! Here we go!
Chicago/Evanston, back at the other end of this Tunnel to Hell, has spoiled me. The good bookstores, the galleries and lavishly funded museums, the great food, the variety nurtured by the success of small businesses, the slightly less depressing nature of the general environment—it just couldn't last. The Daley Plaza has that nice Picasso sculpture. Downtown Orlando has "LizArt". Chicago has Schuba's. Orlando has Will's Pub. Chicago has a fairly decent public transportation system. Orlando has short-range Lynx buses and Florida voters reliably oppose proposals for the funding of a public train system. So one has to drive nearly everywhere in Florida, which means inevitably getting stuck behind some craphead in a great big Chevy truck with a dramatic "American Flag and Bald Eagle" mural in the back cab window. That's another thing—nationalism down here is huge! People spend a lot more here than in Chicago on flag merchandise and whatnot. Perhaps that's because there's so little basis for local pride. The only solution is to be proudly and actively generic. Florida has always been a strange and precarious frontier. Its settlers have had to destroy it, conquer it and whitewash it, and now people are just beginning to make sense of it by acting on corporate market instincts. It's all a little easier to figure out once the standard malls, chain stores, highways and offices are installed.
Don't get me wrong—I'm aware that stupid people are everywhere, especially on the roads. The difference is that in Florida, more of them are likely to actually be in charge.
Central Florida is about as close to Pure Market as it gets. It's divided almost entirely into work and entertainment, grunts and hucksters. Chicago seems to be a more confident city. Orlando doesn't seem to be sure about itself at all. It has few truly entrenched institutions. Chicago has the (crappy but handy) CTA, its formidable landmarks and its notoriously corrupt city government. Orlando just hurtles into the future the only way it knows how—through pure and poorly directed commerce. I measure a town by its character, and Orlando has very little character, unless "fuckin' cheesy" counts.
And the Central Floridians are breeding like gerbils! All our local Super Wal-Marts and Super Targets are circus-tents for morons and their filthy mongrel children, both of whom are usually in "public tantrum" mode. And I don't mean "mongrel" as a racial or class distinction. Here the rich children are as misbegotten as the poor ones. Rich and poor parents make the same mistakes, grounding their parenting mostly on guilt, fear and punishment vs. reward. Their kids don't learn to enjoy life; they learn to suffer and to indulge.
Basically, I see Central Florida as the distillations of our worse social problems. The solution is not necessarily to eradicate corporations or even to put more public money into "arts and culture"; it is to take pride in building lives of our own, no matter what our surroundings look like.
Oh, and NPR is just no fun. In fact, despite what certain right-wing hack commentators say, NPR is about as sleepy and pussywhipped as it gets. Someone get those people some cocaine and beef!
I will be in Orlando until March working in the Osceola County bureau of the Orlando Sentinel, where the Medill School of Journalism's Teaching Media program has shipped me.
I hesitate to go on adolescent social-commentary rants. That said, one is in order! Here we go!
Chicago/Evanston, back at the other end of this Tunnel to Hell, has spoiled me. The good bookstores, the galleries and lavishly funded museums, the great food, the variety nurtured by the success of small businesses, the slightly less depressing nature of the general environment—it just couldn't last. The Daley Plaza has that nice Picasso sculpture. Downtown Orlando has "LizArt". Chicago has Schuba's. Orlando has Will's Pub. Chicago has a fairly decent public transportation system. Orlando has short-range Lynx buses and Florida voters reliably oppose proposals for the funding of a public train system. So one has to drive nearly everywhere in Florida, which means inevitably getting stuck behind some craphead in a great big Chevy truck with a dramatic "American Flag and Bald Eagle" mural in the back cab window. That's another thing—nationalism down here is huge! People spend a lot more here than in Chicago on flag merchandise and whatnot. Perhaps that's because there's so little basis for local pride. The only solution is to be proudly and actively generic. Florida has always been a strange and precarious frontier. Its settlers have had to destroy it, conquer it and whitewash it, and now people are just beginning to make sense of it by acting on corporate market instincts. It's all a little easier to figure out once the standard malls, chain stores, highways and offices are installed.
Don't get me wrong—I'm aware that stupid people are everywhere, especially on the roads. The difference is that in Florida, more of them are likely to actually be in charge.
Central Florida is about as close to Pure Market as it gets. It's divided almost entirely into work and entertainment, grunts and hucksters. Chicago seems to be a more confident city. Orlando doesn't seem to be sure about itself at all. It has few truly entrenched institutions. Chicago has the (crappy but handy) CTA, its formidable landmarks and its notoriously corrupt city government. Orlando just hurtles into the future the only way it knows how—through pure and poorly directed commerce. I measure a town by its character, and Orlando has very little character, unless "fuckin' cheesy" counts.
And the Central Floridians are breeding like gerbils! All our local Super Wal-Marts and Super Targets are circus-tents for morons and their filthy mongrel children, both of whom are usually in "public tantrum" mode. And I don't mean "mongrel" as a racial or class distinction. Here the rich children are as misbegotten as the poor ones. Rich and poor parents make the same mistakes, grounding their parenting mostly on guilt, fear and punishment vs. reward. Their kids don't learn to enjoy life; they learn to suffer and to indulge.
Basically, I see Central Florida as the distillations of our worse social problems. The solution is not necessarily to eradicate corporations or even to put more public money into "arts and culture"; it is to take pride in building lives of our own, no matter what our surroundings look like.
posted by Scott at 2:00 AM
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