Dance of the Reptiles (41 page)

October 31, 2001

The Greatest Show in Miami

The Miami mayoral race is like that famous circus act in which a midget car speeds into the tent and clowns start piling out. This year, 10 candidates have emerged from the city’s metaphorical midget car to amuse us before next week’s election.

The most colorful of the pack is incumbent Joe Carollo, fondly known as Crazy Joe. He’s ruthless, paranoid, demagogic, divisive, and unabashedly bankrupt of conscience. We love him. If journalists alone were allowed to vote, Carollo would win in a landslide because he makes our jobs so easy.

Still, it’s only fair to mention the other leading candidates, who are themselves not without entertainment value.

Among the front-runners is Maurice Ferré, an ex-mayor who promotes himself as a visionary and a healer, reaching out to all factions of the community.

While Ferré might be more polished and presentable than Carollo, he’s probably not the steadiest hand to be guiding Miami toward long-term fiscal solvency. After his family’s concrete business tanked in the 1970s, Ferré transferred all his assets to his wife. In 1983, when the State Attorney’s Office tried to collect an unpaid campaign fine of $65,000, no funds could be found in Ferré’s own name.

Ten years later, he still hadn’t paid the fine. He claimed to have no personal assets but admitted enjoying “a very nice lifestyle” supported by his wife’s holdings. Today, Ferré happily reports that his finances are under control and lists a private net worth of $3 million. Inspiring as this dramatic change of fortune might be, voters should still be wary of entrusting the city’s fragile budget to someone with Ferré’s checkered-checkbook past.

Another familiar figure trying to unseat Carollo is Xavier Suarez, fondly known as the former Mayor Loco. The last election “won” by Suarez was nullified after it was revealed that absentee ballots had been phonied to his benefit. A court removed Suarez from office after 111 bizarre days, during which he appeared to be auditioning for a dinner-theater production of
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
.

These days, Suarez campaigns on the assertion that Miami’s fiscal crisis was a hoax and that the city is actually rolling in dough, despite the contrary findings of professional auditors. As evidence of the nefarious plot, Suarez excitedly points to $148 million in unused bond and special project funds recently unearthed by city officials.

Unfortunately, most of that money was long ago marked for specific capital commitments and cannot legally be diverted to cover Miami’s operating expenses or balance its budget. Suarez, however, seldom lets hard facts stand in the way of a juicy conspiracy theory. In such twitchy ramblings, he is nearly Carollo’s equal.

One surprise among the mayoral front-runners is lawyer Manny Díaz, a first-time candidate who is not yet known by any derogatory nickname.

At first glance, Díaz would seem an unlikely pick for Miami’s top job in Miami. He doesn’t appear to be insane, dysfunctional, or arithmetically challenged.

Díaz’s civic résumé is distressingly impressive, especially his work on behalf of Haitian refugees in the 1980s. Though he has the requisite anti-Castro credentials—he was part of the legal team representing the Miami relatives of Elián González—he’s also shown an apparently sincere concern for Miami’s neglected minorities. A recent poll suggests that Díaz will be one of the top vote-getters on November 6 and would beat Carollo in a runoff. That’s unsettling indeed for
those of us who’ve been counting on another four years of slapstick at City Hall.

One hopeful note: Díaz has raised more money than all the other candidates, thus increasing the potential for trouble later on, when fat-cat donors come whining for favors.

A longtime pal and fund-raiser of Sen. Bill Nelson, Díaz prospered while Nelson was Florida’s insurance commissioner. During those years, Díaz’s law firm received more than $1 million worth of business from the state Insurance Department—merely a happy coincidence, we’re told.

Let’s hope not. We need a reed of hope for future scandal, should Díaz get elected. The prospect of having a mayor who is both uncompromised and unimpaired is too dreary for a writer to contemplate.

This is Miami, for heaven’s sake. You can’t have a circus without the clowns.

June 9, 2002

First Draft Needs Tweaks on Content, Facts, Title

An absolutely true news item: Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, now a candidate for Congress, is writing a book about her controversial role in the 2000 presidential election
.

Dear Katherine,

The first draft is terrific! All of us here at Delusional Press are thrilled to be working with such an exciting new talent.

We do have a few minor editing suggestions, however, that might better serve to underscore your diligence and objectivity during this turbulent episode in American politics.

To begin with, we’re not entirely comfortable with any of your proposed titles, which I will discuss in order of stated preference.

Tell Al Gore to Kiss My Smokin’ Hot Chad
is too wordy to fit on the book’s cover. Also, the tone is a bit brash for our conservative readership.

While your second choice,
Recount, Shmecount!
has a nice wry ring to it, the title struck some of us as flippant, considering the heavy historic event about which you’re writing.

Of all the titles you suggested, by far the catchiest is
How I Saved America
. Unfortunately, the folks in marketing feel that it could scare off potential readers who might mistake the book for a gloating and self-aggrandizing political tract, which of course it isn’t!

So, we all put our noggins together and came up with what we believe is a positive, inspiring title:
Center of the Storm: Practicing Principled Leadership in Times of Crisis
.

What do you say, Katherine, does that reach out and grab you by the tonsils or what? Think Churchill during the blitzkrieg. Or maybe Reagan during Grenada.

Now, let’s move on to your manuscript, which needs only a little tweaking: Our copy editors have noted that you refer to former Vice President Gore as “a drip” (pp. 13, 27, 88, 92, 107, 185, 310–76), “a dweeb” (pp. 14, 44, 98–107, 224, 288, 410), and “a whiny Ivy League wimp” (pp. 1, 5, 9, 55, 67, 71, 123, 144, 233, and throughout the epilogue).

For consistency, we should settle on a single pejorative name for Gore. Personally, I’d say that “drip” covers a lot of territory and still gets your point across. No more than half a dozen references are probably sufficient.

Similarly, some of us remain uneasy with your frequent characterizations of the Bush brothers as “godlike” (pp. 46, 75, 221, 388), “heroic” (pp. 1, 32, 113, 150, 244), and “saintly” (pp. 28, 67, 183, 209–14). Let’s consider toning down those sections. Same goes for the dream sequence in
which Jeb appears as a golden unicorn, “his rippled flanks glistening in the moonlight.” There’s some interesting writing there, to be sure, but it’s best saved for a different book.

Look, we’re not trying to be sticks in the mud. Nor would we ever seek to dilute your deeply felt convictions about what happened during the presidential election.

Still, we are in the business of selling books. Thus, you can understand our disquiet to see the term “left-leaning Metamucil heads” (p. 169) applied to the Palm Beach County retirees who mistakenly cast ballots for Pat Buchanan instead of Gore. That group, according to our calculations, represents 6,000 to 10,000 voters who won’t likely be lining up to purchase your opus, no matter what the title.

So, exactly who is your potential audience? Good question, Katherine, and one we’ve been asking ourselves daily here at the publishing house.

Market surveys tell us that most people would rather undergo amateur liposuction than read another word about the 2000 presidential election. This aversion seems to cut broadly across party lines.

Our target customer base seems further limited because Gore actually outpolled your candidate by more than 500,000 votes nationwide—a fact only recently unearthed by our crack research department.

But don’t fret for even a moment. Our sales force loves a challenge!

You recently inquired about advance orders, and I do have some figures to report. So far, 537 customers have prepurchased your book online—coincidentally, the exact number that was George W.’s disputed margin of victory in your home state.

While that doesn’t seem like many sales, we suspect that
thousands of readers got you confused with another famous Harris (Thomas, in this case) and accidentally ordered
Hannibal
instead.

We are confident that we’ll get this sorted out soon. Amazon, unlike the bureaucracy of Florida, is quite amenable to recounts.

Meanwhile, take a look at the manuscript changes we’ve suggested, and try not to worry about the bestseller lists. As you know better than anyone, Katherine, numbers never tell the whole story.

January 11, 2004

Rush’s “Fans” Say Loyalty Has Limits

Dear Mr. Limbaugh,

As president-elect of our local Rush Limbaugh Fan Club, I’ve been deputized to write this letter regarding your recent legal problems.

Here in Gopher County, some of your loyal followers are upset about what they’ve been reading and hearing in the media, which (as we all know) is run by a bunch of liberal pansies (except for your radio show, of course!).

Anyhow, we were all real sorry to learn about you being a dope addict. Naturally, we didn’t believe a word of the story until it came from your own lips.

Seeing how you’ve been so hard-core against drug users on your radio show—saying that they ought to be locked up with murderers and rapists—it must’ve been hard on you to sneak around all those years, pretending like you were some straight-up, sober citizen.

According to Palm Beach prosecutors, in only six months you got about 2,000 painkiller pills from pharmacies in your neighborhood (and that’s not including what you scored
on the sly from your maid). When you do the arithmetic, that works out to at least 11 hits of opiate-based analgesics a day—enough to put any lily-livered liberal in the emergency room—yet it didn’t even slow you down! Speaking on behalf of your devoted radio listeners, most of us never suspected that you were ripped to the gills. You always made perfect sense to us.

Still, we were sympathetic when you explained that you’d been popping pills because your back was hurting and then your eardrums were hurting, and I forget what else was hurting. Hey, it’s a hard job, sitting in front of that microphone. You don’t get much exercise, except for the jaw muscles.

Admittedly, we got worried when you went into rehab, since the concept was pretty much invented by mushy-hearted liberals who wanted to help drug users instead of punish them. Thank goodness you were still a die-hard conservative when you came out!

But that, Mr. Limbaugh, is when the trouble began.

The authorities in Palm Beach have been investigating a drug ring that allegedly supplied some of your pain pills. However, instead of cooperating with law-enforcement officials, you’ve recently instructed your attorney to stonewall.

To those who have followed you faithfully, it’s mighty confusing. You’ve always said that you were pro-law-and-order, ranting about criminal suspects who complained that their constitutional rights were being violated. Yet that’s exactly what you’re doing now, and you haven’t even been charged with anything.

Prosecutors want your medical records in order to make sure you didn’t scam overlapping prescriptions from different doctors, which is illegal. You say the state attorney’s request is an invasion of privacy, and you want the medical files sealed permanently. It sure is strange to hear you talk about privacy
as something so important. Remember all the laughs you got out of Monica Lewinsky’s situation? Imagine what would’ve happened if the special prosecutors had listened to her pleas for privacy. There would have been no impeachment of Bill Clinton, and America would have been deprived of hours of your laser wit and acid commentary.

Speaking of Ken Starr, why didn’t you hire him to be your defense lawyer? A solidly upright, uptight ultraconservative. This Roy Black fellow might be one of the country’s best trial attorneys, but are you aware that he has represented murderers, thieves, drug kingpins, and—worst of all—one of the Kennedys! You can’t get more liberal than that. Now you and Mr. Black claim that the authorities in Palm Beach are persecuting you because of your political beliefs.

“The Democrats still cannot defeat me in the arena of political ideas,” you said on your radio show. “And so now they are trying to do so in the court of public opinion and the legal system.”

Whoa.

Even for the most dedicated Limbaugh listeners (and here in Gopher County, we’ve been steadfast), this is too much to swallow.

All of a sudden you’re the innocent victim of a vast, nefarious political conspiracy—for God’s sake, you sound just like Hillary!

Next thing we know, you’ll be telling us that Dick Gephardt spiked your Lipitors with Xanax. Or that Howard Dean got you hooked on those OxyContins (he is a doctor, right?).

Please, Rush, don’t go down this slippery slope. With every passing day, you act more like the “whiny wimps” you’ve been ridiculing all these years. Here in the land of the right-wing and the righteous, we’re loyal, but we have our limits.

We can forgive you for being a pillhead—but never for being a liberal.

April 18, 2004

Might as Well Call It the Manuel Yip Bill

Long live Manuel Yip!

The legacy of Miami’s most famous dead voter is being revived—and just in time for the presidential election.

Determined to keep Florida in the national spotlight, legislators are poised to pass a law that will make it infinitely easier to corrupt the voting process again. The proposed measure would do away with the meager requirement that absentee voters have their ballots signed by a witness.

Finding a witness doesn’t seem like such a hardship—a relative can do it, and the signature doesn’t even have to be notarized. Yet apparently, many Floridians are so lonely and cloistered that they can’t dredge up a single soul to watch them seal their ballots.