In the Land of Good Living

by Kent Russell

  Noah ducked his head back into the Sentra. “I’m just gonna float it again: the car con. We drive, we film like we’re walking, no one’s the wiser.”

  “We have to see this through,” Glenn said. “We have to. For my sanity’s sake.”

  To capture election night, we set up shop in an Applebee’s that was squatting in the shadow of an I-4 interchange. No one around the square-shaped bar much cared that we were filming. A DJ—some balding schlub in jorts—scored the returns while other balding schlubs in jorts shrugged. I made eye contact with one across the bar as the combustive drum intro to Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher” started up. He saluted me with his glass, shouted: “Yeah! ‘Runnin’ with the Devil!’ Hoo woo!”

  Noah inhaled his tequila. “If these nitwits can’t even keep their Van Halen straight,” he said, “what the fuck are we doing entrusting our republic to them?”

  According to the news, voter turnout in Florida was fairly high: 9.5 million votes cast, or about 74.2 percent of registered voters. Florida came to play—and the early results showed Trump building a sizable lead.

  Glenn looked green. “Wait till South Florida gets counted,” I encouraged. I was sure there’d be enough blue wrung out of Miami-Dade and Broward counties to quench the red engulfing the map. Trump dominated the Panhandle, as Noah had predicted. He also did better than expected in the medium-sized counties—Lee, Brevard, Pasco, Clay—scattered throughout the state. Hillary snagged Orlando, we saw. But it was looking like she’d win only nine of sixty-seven counties. Every place that wasn’t a conurbation was falling to the Donald. This appeared to be the nationwide trend writ small.

  The DJ played “Say It Ain’t So” and “It Wasn’t Me” and “The Final Countdown.” I kept looking to see if he was trolling us, but he was always on his phone, never once checking the televisions. The other schlubs were collapsing into their full-back stools, no longer bothering to wipe their damp faces. Like almost-bankrupt gamblers who had risked their remaining fortunes on the turn of a card—and gotten their card—a hilarity was rising among them.

  “The blue ones are where you go for when you wanna catch AIDS!” one balding schlub announced when the electoral map of Florida was broadcast.

  With more and more whiskey I tried to dissolve the bolus of terror that was hardening in my stomach. I turned to appraise the rest of the establishment. The dining areas were operating more or less business as usual, with very few paying heed to the screens. I was overcome by paranoiac incredulity: What is wrong with you people that you aren’t freaking out right now? The middle-aged couples, the youngish families around us—unperturbed.

  “At least the crew of the Cracker Style isn’t here to laugh in our faces,” Noah pointed out.

  Employees began to dismantle the decorative bunting before Florida had even been called for Trump. The DJ stopped spinning records. People filed out.

  By this point, Glenn was nattering incessantly to himself. He swung from panic to mirth like a moviegoer at a horror flick. Behind him, a black family seated at a four-top traded I-told-you-sos. Noah read some of his uncle’s triumphant Facebook posts to the camera. Disillusionment climbed from the well of my id and leered.

  Glenn took me outside to film some impressions. I wanted to say, “This isn’t the America I know.” But wasn’t it?

  “Seems to me Donald Trump won the country by sowing doubt as to the veracity of received narratives,” I said. “Doubt as to the veracity of received knowledge itself.” Hell, through sheer single-minded assertion, Donald Trump managed to elevate fear, resentment, and gut feeling to the status of truth in the minds of his supporters.

  Seems to me, I went on, they voted for a Trump administration because they felt a Trump administration would mean a return to the callous, heedless, retard-strong America that executed Manifest Destiny, overthrew Fascism and Communism, shot men to the moon. More than that, a Trump administration would serve as the yearned-for F-U to the sneering minority who revel in condescending to and/or demonizing the America where people go to church, send sons to war, work their asses off for less and less, fall further behind on mortgage payments.

  Seems this way—but is it true? “Fuck you!” I told the camera. “Knowing’s got nothing to do with it! Does any of this feel true? Then it is true.” Trump admitted as much in his book The Art of the Deal, where he described his sales strategy as “truthful hyperbole.” The real question is: Did the real estate developer manage to develop the truth into something you’d like to buy into?

  “I would despair more,” I said, “if this turn of events wasn’t such a that’s-so-funny-I-forgot-to-laugh example of the chickens coming home to roost.” For more than half a century now, I explained, der kommissars of the arts & culture & entertainment & media & academic institutions in this country have worked to ensure that young and old alike get well drilled in the “axiomatic” principles of Gramsci, Foucault, Derrida, and the rest of the critical-theory chuckleheads. (I know this because I myself was once an aspiring kommissar, media and academic divisions.) Call it what you like—relativism, postmodernism, deconstruction. The lesson is one and the same: The truth is not out there waiting to be objectively uncovered. The truth is made. Facts are fabricated as seen fit by the powers that be, and then consent for those facts is manufactured, enforced. The Dark Ages fantasy of a tabs-keeping sky daddy was an oppressive ruse of this caliber, sure; but no less so was the Enlightenment ideal of (white) man and his natural, neutral, unmediated, unbiased access to truth through reason.

  Can you grasp the paradox? There is no truth except this: There is no truth. And because there is no truth, there can be no ethics distinct from politics. No authority distinct from power. “Truth” has been subsumed under the form of war. Therefore, we must ask not whether a statement is true or false; we must ask, Who is stating it? And what does their side stand to gain by stating it?

  Each of us is a prisoner of language who always speaks our truth from a standpoint we owe to our background and biases. “As a straight white man, I think…As a native Floridian, I feel…As a practicing Catholic, I believe…” What I, you, or the person across the street holds as self-evident “truth”? Why, it’s nothing more than the social construction we grew up with, or implicitly prefer, or were indoctrinated into.

  Got that? To make the sociologists’ and cultural anthropologists’ point in more direct, Trumpian language: A lot of people are saying that fact is fiction, bigly. So why should I believe that lyin’ [news media, advocacy organization, opposition party, member of any identity group I do not belong to] if what they’re saying, I don’t feel to be true?

  LOL. Or so might croak the troll who appreciates hubris and the nemesis risen to meet it.

  “Welcome to the Florida presidency,” I concluded.

  “The good news for you,” Glenn said as we reentered Applebee’s, “is people will be so fed up with Trump takes by the time this airs, they’ll tune out your soft-cock pretension.”

  The three of us sat at the bar in our shared solitudes, sipping our drinks and widening our moats. It was official: This long, ugly, and immensely stupid election season had drawn to a close. The TV said Trump had won Florida by some 119,673 votes while flipping a few other battleground states like Wisconsin and Michigan. Around the rest of the country, slightly more than half of voters went for Hillary. Unfortunately, this majority was improperly distributed, geographically speaking. And so, after having masterfully stoked culture-war resentments and peddled a nebulous program of populist economics and protectionism—all while simultaneously inaugurating our posttruth era—this confidence artist was awarded the presidency by the Electoral College.

  “Only in America,” Noah snorted. He licked salt from the length of his thumb like a man about to ship his parcel of consciousness around the world.

  “I can’t even fucking bother with this right now,” Glenn said. Then his anger got
the best of him, and he added: “You’d all sooner destroy the world than be made to feel uncomfortable. And you”—he elbowed me heavily. “Fucking, you…” He waved a hand. “Ehhhhh.” He gagged himself with drink.

  Donald Trump appeared onscreen to deliver his victory speech. His closed-mouthed smile seemed unusually taut, almost a grimace. His eyes appeared somewhat vacant, too, as though he was seeing past the present moment and into his future. Like he was realizing right this moment that, shit, those castles in the sky he’d been taking down payments on? He was now expected to build them.

  I don’t know. I could’ve been tipsily reading into it. But there and then I experienced something approaching…what? Not quite sympathy for the man. It was more a mixture of cringing nausea and vicarious shame. I had some small measure of pity for Donald Trump. From native son to adoptive one, I wanted to say: You got too greedy, my dude. Sank in too deep. You should’ve begged off when the out presented itself, started that “reality” news network. There’s no skipping town now. The marks have called your bluff.

  The few patrons remaining in the Applebee’s applauded. One guy rebel-yelled. Then they went back to waving Bud Light bottles in the area of their mouths.

  Like most Americans all of the time, they’d championed the guy who appeared to be Everyman and Superman at once. A quote-unquote self-made self-maker who had the attributes we respect (wealth; resiliency in creating wealth; a professed disregard for the opinions of others coupled with a crippling need to be liked), as well as the faults we not so secretly cherish (brusqueness; pride; malignant narcissism; pride; fuck you I won’t do what you tell me–ism; pride).

  “Christ Almighty,” Glenn said. “What sorts of horrors have you just unleashed upon the world.”

  I didn’t respond. Instead, I reached down and tugged on my right pinkie toe’s dead squiggle of keratin. It stretched and snipped off like the tilde of translucent fat at the end of a piece of undercooked bacon.

  —

  MILE 674 — PLANT CITY

  I GOT NOTHING

  The sun didn’t come out. We walked to Plant City. We regretted all that we had done and all that we had failed to do.

  Regret is memory on the offensive, I wrote.

  —

  MILE 695 — TAMPA

  SALUTATIONS! FROM DEATH’S FAVORITE STATE

  We proceeded through blue-green strawberry fields on our way into the Tampa Bay area. My plantar wart broadened; the pain it summoned broadened, too. I convinced myself that the one great thing about a period of shocking decline is it lays everything bare. A period of shocking decline denudes a civilization; it pulls the stopper on the reservoir of mythos. Suddenly, everyone is able to see what had been hiding there all along.

  While we shuffled, Glenn, Noah, and I repeated anecdotes and inside jokes (ending each with Captain Dale’s trademark “uh-huh, yessir”) as though checking the pilot light on our friendship, proving to ourselves that all was indeed well. And, indeed, Donald Trump’s election had taught us some important lessons. Per our documentary, at least.

  For one thing, we learned that practiced crudeness was a risky strategy, yes, but half crudeness was a certain one—certain to fail. For another: We received proof positive that nonsense can be talked into existence. No matter how outrageous the proposition, saps will trust you with their votes and their money if you purport to be letting them in on a little secret. Psst, here’s the real story behind the true story.

  Tampa is…fine. It’s fine! Nothing much to say about it that hasn’t been said elsewhere. White-sand beaches. An Air Force base. Couple of colleges. A historic Cuban district that houses a defunct cigar industry. A high concentration of Midwesterners, owing to the old Dixie Highway that connected the heartland to the Gulf Coast of Florida. (Whereas U.S. 1 ran from Maine down the Eastern Seaboard to Miami, funneling New York–New Jersey types to the Atlantic side of the state.)

  Far more interesting is St. Petersburg, the peninsular city across the bay from Tampa proper, which happens also to be the first city to have hired a public relations director to convince the rest of the world that it was, it’s true, a city. The PR flacks’ first target: the elderly. St. Pete went after the elderly hard in the early 1900s. The “Sunshine City” sent them postcards featuring tourists and winter residents relaxing on the city’s green benches whilst reading newspaper obituaries, drinking from dippers of Fountain of Youth water. The aged liked what they saw so much that they came and mimicked the advertisements. A Fortune magazine writer described the ensuing scene as “a bustling, cheery, thoroughly American sort of death.” Another lampooned, “The old people sit like passengers in a motionless streetcar, without a destination.” He added, “The grayness of age lies over them like a fine dust.”

  Success in attracting the elderly didn’t stay localized in St. Pete. In the sixty years between 1940 and 2000, Florida went from a state numbering fewer than 2 million residents to a state with more than 2 million inhabitants over the age of seventy. A lot of factors went into this growth: the passage of the Social Security Act in 1935; the oversight of the Veterans Administration and the Federal Housing Administration; the world-historically robust economy that included guaranteed pensions; the democratization of the very idea of retirement and end-of-life leisure; the relative dearth of taxes and abundance of warm weather in Florida. Up north, promotions in Sunday supplements promised “retirement in Florida at $35 a month.” The 1947 book How to Retire in Florida advised Middle Americans on how to do just that. In The Truth About Florida, a retiree promises that an elderly couple “can live comfortably, have a whale of a good time and save money on an income of about $40 per week.”

  These whiplashing developments were new and exciting, but they also bucked against millennia of conventional wisdom re: the elderly and what’s best for them. Old people are old. They are frail. Often, they are senile. Why ever would they want to cut themselves off from their traditional communities, their families, their support networks?

  For mother-loving freedom, that’s why! Life expectancy shot up more than thirty years in the American Century. For the first time in human history, a society was faced with a surplus of aged citizens who were living longer, healthier, more active lives. Like everybody else postwar, these Americans wanted to test their new social, cultural, economic, and demographic privileges. They wanted to break out of the motionless stuffed rooms where they were objects to dust around but never to rearrange.

  As for the long-standing belief that they were links in a chain of relationships? That they should thereby aspire to contribute to the common deposit that had been built by those who preceded them and would be maintained by those who followed? As for the idea that such chains bind together a shared social order which contains and conveys to succeeding generations the story of place, and how place may be lived in, sustainably tended, respected, loved, and understood? As for the truth that any place lacking in authentic local culture will be open to exploitation, and ultimately destruction, from the outside in?

  “To live for the moment is the prevailing passion—to live for yourself, not for your predecessors or posterity. We are fast losing the sense of historical continuity, the sense of belonging to a succession of generations originating in the past and stretching into the future.” Christopher Lasch wrote it in 1976. Those flocking to the Sunshine State lived it out. And thanks in part to them, Florida became a megastate on par with California and Texas—yet, too, the state with the fewest native-born residents after Nevada.

  By the early 1960s, a thousand retirees per week were arriving in Florida. By the 1990s, ten out of eleven of America’s most senior counties, and fifteen of its top nineteen, were in Florida. The 2000 census revealed that the number of Floridians aged five to nineteen only slightly exceeded those aged sixty-five and older.

  Senior living centers cropped up like mushrooms after rain. Sun City Center, Century Village, Kings Po
int, Sunrise Lakes, Hawaiian Gardens. “We give years to your life and life to your years,” brochures promised. Most controversial was The Villages. Founder Harold Schwartz—whose ashes sit in a statue in the “town square”—came up with the idea while hawking mail-order swampland in Chicago: a prefabricated, elder-person Disney World. Schwartz purchased Orange Blossom Gardens, a trailer park off Highway 27, and converted it into a self-contained arcadia (about 130 miles north of Arcadia) where various snow peoples could enjoy all that the good life had to offer: polo fields, bowling alleys, microbreweries, a total and ruthlessly enforced embargo on children. Today extending across three counties, The Villages’s 66,000-plus residents play out their strings at sixteen golf courses and four hundred social clubs where nary a whippersnapper is seen or heard. There’s even a developer-run TV station and daily newspaper. The Villages is highly stratified by income and ethnicity; it is also wildly successful. “Still Booming with Retirees, The Villages Gives Trump, GOP Edge in Florida,” the Tampa Bay Times proclaimed just recently.

  The Villages is the prototypical community of tomorrow that Uncle Walt promised but never built, where (as one scholar put it): “The land uses are under control. The people in the neighborhoods are under control.” Everything inside of The Villages’s security perimeter was under the control of Schwartz and then Schwartz’s son, H. Gary, until the latter’s death in 2014. Now it is H. Gary’s family who run things. (And whose refusal of filming privileges we were too scared to flout.) No mayor, no city council, no municipal elections in The Villages. Rather, Community Development Districts (ring a bell?) dictate how people live. The main one, the Village Center Community Development District, provides “water and sewer utility services, recreation, security services, and fire protection and paramedic services to the residents.” It also taxes them without representation, funnily enough. The Villages, like Disney, promises not democracy but freedom from democracy.