Enough is Enough, Florida. Your Rampant Racism is Showing

You know how parents warn, “That is enough!” to children behaving badly? This is what needs to happen in Florida with the gruesome governor, officials who wrought this new “curriculum” from within the bowels of the Florida Department of Education, and anyone who supports their sordid attempt to claim slavery was somehow good for those who were enslaved—and brutalized in the process.

I tried not to think about this atrocity over the weekend, as it was making me sick on so many levels. With temps yet again reaching 115 degrees on Saturday, and still no J6 indictment occurring during a swelteringly tedious week, I was glad I’d gotten a book for comic relief by a favorite author, Tim Dorsey. What I thought was the latest in his Serge A. Storms series set in Florida.

I purchased Shark Skin Suite because Amazon Prime sent me an email hailing the “latest books of summer.” Hence, I assumed it was Dorsey’s latest. When the book arrived (at least on time), I was surprised to find it was published in 2015. Luckily, I hadn’t yet read it, but what’s up with Amazon shilling eight-year-old novels as new? Enough already. Life is confounding enough as it is.

Also, you’d think reading a series set in Florida maybe wouldn’t be so very comical during this trying time, but that’s the crux of the matter. Dorsey, like adored Florida author Carl Hiaasen, does not suffer Floridian fools. And as the Tampa Bay Times said of this particular book, it “Dances with Florida’s weird side.”

There was a time when the Sunshine State was merely weird and sometimes quite awful in its quirky strangeness, but now it’s fallen into a racist ignorant swamp of pathetic putritude. Yes, I did just make up a word. I can do that. Given how Florida can blithely make up utter vile shit to whitewash history and claim their crap to be true.

Here’s an irony of prophetic magnitude: The introductory Mark Twain quote Dorsey used for Shark Skin Suite is, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”

Unfortunately, Florida’s latest rhyme is total slime. And sadistic twisted slime at that.

As Dan Rather posted on Twitter, “Slavery was pure and unadulterated evil. There is no ‘other side to the story.” Boy howdy.

Is there anything worse and more gobsmackingly idiotic than hapless white people arguing about whether the atrocity of slavery endured not by them, but by African Americans brought to America by force, was bad? Their hubris is as suffocating as humidity in the Florida Keys.

Can you believe there are actually white idiots telling black people that they should be grateful to Republicans because Lincoln freed the slaves? Such astounding arrogance, such breathtaking bigotry devoid of a self-assessing clue.

Dan Rather also tweeted about these moronic defenses to this monumental stupidity of epic racist proportions: “Yes, we KNOW Lincoln was a Republican. You’re not being witty. It isn’t a gotcha. But what does that have to do with Trump and today’s Republican Party?”

A repugnant Republican Party filled with folks like DeSantis for whom enough is never enough when adding insidious insult to racist injury. They are as dangerous and damaging as featured creatures in Shark Skin Suite, including invasive Burmese pythons and slimy lawyers (DeSantis, anyone?)

And yet, there is still comic relief. I was laughing out loud from the start over searing commentary about hordes of Floridians parading around in camouflage caps with machetes and baseballs bats, intent on killing pythons because, despite a snake-catching contest having concluded, “stupidness continues.”

Here’s an excerpt showing why my personal adoration of Dorsey’s snark knows no bounds:

The snakes wiggled through boat canals and curled up in the engine blocks of surprised car owners…It was the attack of irresponsible pet owners who’d become mollified by exotic species that knew no local predators, found an abundant food source and grew to an unnatural scale. The pets had either gotten loose or were deliberately released when the owners’ motivation was required for more pressing matters of buying lottery tickets and fireworks.

I haven’t yet finished this brilliant book, but I’m looking forward to more well-deserved comeuppance for banks and their lawyers who prey on vulnerable people with an absolute lack of ethics or human decency (DeSantis, anyone?).

Until then, here’s another prescient tidbit uttered by Dorsey’s Serge A. Storms, especially given how Shark Skin Suite was published in 2015, one year before sheer hell was unleashed on the American populace:

Economic turmoil, unstable foreign governments and fractured politics at home all combine to create a fertile window of opportunity for a new leader to emerge.

Problem is, men like DeSantis and the flagrant fascist formerly occupying the White House aren’t leaders. They’re weak wannabe dictators denying history and denigrating any intelligence they might possess by displaying a decided lack of integrity or empathy. Because that would require the “wokeness” in others that they are so hellbent on hurting. Merely to remain in power.

They are far worse than a Burmese python, but equally gluttonous, consumed by greed and their animus for other races.

Enough is enough. As Vice President Kamala Harris said, “Extremists want to replace history with lies, and we will not stand for it.”