8/23/2023 0 Comments People on key west beachesThe very serious man behind the desk had clocked my teeth (British), accent (Hermione Granger), and sex (female), and expressed skepticism that I would want to fire an AR‑15 assault rifle too. Then I went to a gun range, where I began by firing two pistols. When I first arrived in Orlando, in late October, I rented what to me was a comically large Ford SUV and drove to McDonald’s for hash browns and a cup of breakfast tea (zombie-gray, error). “Do you remember the story about the woman who got in trouble in New Jersey for trying to board a plane with her emotional-support peacock?” “The thing about being the ‘punch-line state’ is that it’s all true,” the writer Craig Pittman told me over Zoom, his tropical-print shirt gleaming in the sun. Ronald Brownstein: The contradictions of Ron DeSantis You couldn’t get away with that in Massachusetts. In his speeches, the governor likes to boast that “Florida is where ‘woke’ goes to die.” In his 2022 campaign videos, he styled himself as a Top Gun pilot and possibly even Jesus himself. In the other corner stands the state’s current governor, Ron DeSantis, raised in the Gulf Coast town of Dunedin, a man desperately trying to conceal his attendance at the elite institutions of Harvard and Yale under lashings of bronzer and highly choreographed outrages. (When Trump entered the 2024 presidential race, the formerly supportive New York Post jeered at him with the front-page headline “Florida Man Makes Announcement” before relegating the news story to page 26.) In one corner, you have Donald Trump, who retired, sulking, from the presidency to his “Winter White House” at Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach. It is no coincidence that the two leading contenders for the Republican nomination both have their base in Florida. “The general Republican mindset now is about grievances against condescending elites,” Michael Grunwald, the Miami-based author of The Swamp, told me, “and it fits with the sense that ‘we’re Florida Man everyone makes fun of us.’ ” But criticism doesn’t faze Florida men it emboldens them. What was once the narrowest swing state has come to embody an emotional new strain of conservatism. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. This is clear even from Britain, a place characterized by drizzle and self-deprecation, the anti-Florida. “Whatever you’re doing dishonestly up north, you can do it in a much warmer climate with less regulation down here,” said the novelist Carl Hiaasen, who wrote about the weirder side of Florida for the Miami Herald from 1976 until his retirement in 2021.īut under the memes and jokes, the state is also making an argument to the rest of the world about what freedom looks like, how life should be organized, and how politics should be done. Chroniclers talk about its seasonless strangeness the public meltdowns of its oddest residents how retired CIA operatives, Mafia informants, and Jair Bolsonaro can be reborn there. Florida’s place in the national mythology is as America’s pulsing id, a vision of life without the necessary restriction of shame. Internet memes sometimes refer to Florida as “the America of America,” but to a Brit like me, it’s more like the Australia of America: The wildlife is trying to kill you, the weather is trying to kill you, and the people retain a pioneer spirit, even when their roughest expedition is to the 18th hole. “Florida Man Known as ‘Sedition Panda’ Arrested for Allegedly Storming Capitol,” a recent news story declared, because why merely rebel against the government when you could dress up in a bear suit while doing it? In headlines, all of these exploits were attributed to a single character, one first popularized in 2013 by a Twitter account of the same name: “Florida Man,” also known as “the world’s worst superhero,” a creature of eccentric rule-breaking, rugged defiance, and unhinged minor atrocities. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.
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