Sunshine: Florida’s Fraught Relationship With the Truth
While Florida keeps blowing sunshine, its dark past keeps opening up and swallowing up the present, writes Jim DeFede.
Florida killed Jeffrey Bush. And when I say Florida killed him,
I don't mean he was a death row inmate sentenced to die by the Florida
court system, which sent more people to death row last year than any
other state in the country, including Texas. Nor do I mean he succumbed
to a medical condition that went untreated because the state Legislature
refuses to expand Medicaid for the poor even though nearly one out of
every five Floridians is without health insurance. Nor was he the victim
of gun violence in a state that boasts not only the Stand Your Ground
Law but also recently celebrated issuing its one millionth concealed
weapons permit.
In
this particular case, the actual land mass known as Florida killed the
37-year-old Bush. One minute he was sleeping and the next a giant crater
opened underneath his house in Seffner, Florida, just outside of Tampa,
and devoured him and his entire bedroom. The only thing rescuers found
was a corner of his mattress peeking out of the earth. Officials
abandoned their search for Bush after just 48 hours, afraid that they
too might fall victim to its voracious appetite.
As
the media descended on this "Florida Swallows Man" story, the owner of
the house expressed shock and dismay at the thirty-foot wide crater. His
insurance company had just inspected his house and declared that he was
sinkhole free, he noted, telling local reporters: "They said everything
looked good."
Had
this tragic incident occurred a year earlier it would have certainly
been the type of metaphor writer T.D. Allman would have used in his
wonderful new book, Finding Florida: The True History of the Sunshine State.
Allman includes the word "True" in the title because he found the state's official history replete with lies and deceptions. According to Allman:
Ponce de Leon did not discover Florida in 1513. Other Europeans had arrived years earlier.
Nor
was Ponce de Leon looking for any mythical Fountain of Youth. That was a
lie invented more than 300 years later by Washington Irving, author of
other fanciful tales including Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy
Hallow.
Allman
brings the same skepticism in researching the state's past as he did to
covering the wars in Southeast Asia in the Sixties and Seventies. In
fact, in one of the truly remarkable sections of the book, Allman is
actually able to tie the creation of Disneyworld outside Orlando to the
CIA and its tactics in Indo China. With the help of former CIA
operatives and attorneys, Disney secretly acquired land through dummy
corporations, mounted a disinformation campaign to hide Disney's
interest in Florida, and quietly created two new towns outside Oralndo
complete with puppet governments in those unpopulated towns to control
land and zoning decisions in advance of Disney announcing its move to
the state.
There is a reason why every Ponzi scheme for the last decade -- Madoff, Stanford, Rothstein – has had strong Florida ties.
A
native Floridian who maintains residences in New York, France and Miami
Beach, Allman has had a long fascination with the Sunshine State—which
he notes is actually the second rainiest state in the county after
Louisiana. His book Miami: City of the Future was published in
1988 and was the first book I read on Miami when I moved here as a
reporter in 1991. Twenty-five years later it remains a must-read to
anyone's critical understanding of Miami, painting it as a laboratory
for issues the rest of the country would eventually have to take on:
racism, poverty, drugs, violence, and a massive influx of immigrants.
In Finding Florida,
Allman extends that critical treatment to the state and its real
history. an ugly series of degradations. He meticulously charts the
massacres of Indians and blacks by Andrew Jackson; introduces us to the
Florida governor, John Milton, who preferred to commit suicide than
accept the South's loss in the Civil War; then works his way through
Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Era, exposing endemic racism with
both glee and righteous anger. Given this backdrop, he maintains, the
2000 Florida recount and the attempts at voter suppression in 2012 in
Florida are not unexpected.
Until
that past is acknowledged, he argues, its sins will continue to be
revisited upon the state's inhabitants. "People were constantly ruining
Florida; Florida ruined them right back," Allman writes.
Sunshine: Florida’s Fraught Relationship With the Truth
(Page 2 of 2)
And
although he started this book long before the events a year ago in
Sanford, Florida, he concludes it with the shooting of unarmed
17-year-old Trayvon Martin.
Allman
writes: "According to the killer, George Zimmerman, it was the victim's
fault. His presence had made him feel threatened. That was why he had
followed the boy, and ultimately killed him, so the police said what
they would have in 1980, 1935, 1920 — or 1876 or 1818. It had been okay
to kill him. They told Zimmerman he could go home."
But
whether true knowledge of our state’s sordid history would free us from
repeating our mistakes is a question even Allman cannot answer.
Floridians are expert at deluding themselves.
Allman
uses people in cars versus people in boats as an illustration. Traffic
is a nightmare in Florida. Yet a man in a yacht is given preference over
the poor slob in his car. Whenever a yacht approaches a draw bridge,
the bridge tender stops traffic and raises the bridge so the man on the
yacht is not inconvenienced. Amazingly, the public accepts this.
"They
wait patiently," Allman wrote, "because whatever their real life
experience tells them, they prefer to believe that life for them, too,
tends toward a yacht. They believe someday it will be their boat, and
then the drawbridge, rising in salute, will open wide for them."
We
cling to the lies because Florida in general, and South Florida in
particular, is a place where people–most, but not all, with good
intentions–go looking for a second chance at life.
You
can be the leader of a Salvadoran death squad, and then manage a Jiffy
Lube in North Miami. You can lose everything you own in Chicago or New
York and then come to Florida and convince folks to invest their money
in your business plan. There is a reason why every Ponzi scheme for the
last decade -- Madoff, Stanford, Rothstein – has had strong Florida
ties.
Floridians
don't ask a lot of questions about the past of others because we don't
want to answer questions about our own. In Florida, history is something
to be forgotten.
One
of the first stories I covered here involved a West African millionaire
named Foutanga Dit Babani Sissoko, who was brought to Miami in shackles
by U.S. Marshals after he was arrested in Switzerland on a warrant
accusing him of bribing customs officials in Miami so he could illegally
transport military helicopters to Africa.
Normally
you would think someone who made their entrance wearing an orange
prison jump suit would be looked upon with suspicion. But not here.
Sissoko posted the largest cash bond in the history of Miami's federal
court and while awaiting trial booked two floors of a posh hotel for him
and his entourage that had followed him to Miami. He hired the best
lawyers, as well as a PR firm. He donated to local charities. Gave
thousands of dollars to the valets and doormen at the hotel. He even
wrote a check for $300,000 so a local high school's marching band could
travel to the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.
Reporters
and politicians fawned over him. One Florida Congresswoman wrote a
letter to then Attorney General Janet Reno demanding the case be
reviewed since surely this generous man couldn't be a criminal. (The
Congresswoman's daughter just happened to get a new Mercedes from
Sissoko.)
The
federal judge in the case — in what later was learned to be a closed
door meeting — struck a deal in which Sissoko made a large donation to a
local homeless shelter and in exchange was allowed to the country with a
slap on the wrist. Sissoko complied and off he went.
Nobody
asked the one question that seemed obvious: Where did Sissoko get all
his millions? What was his history and background? The answer would be
uncovered a few months later. It turned out Sissoko had allegedly
embezzled the money from a Dubai bank. It was all stolen.
For those of us living in Florida, the seas are rising and the ground below are feet is not nearly as stable as we may think.
Yet who could sleep at night wondering if a sink hole might swallow them whole?
We prefer the lie.
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