VODKA GIMLET WITH A TWIST - April
Felix Cross – Point; Bringing
It All Back HomeYou might think teen-aged boys are too ‘grown-up’ to go see Walt Disney World but I wanted some of that Magic Kingdom magic to rub off on them, and all of us.
So this past Spring Break I insisted we all go together as a family to the place that defines the American Family – or what’s left of it – Disney World in Orlando.
Now it was years ago I bailed on Florida with its crime, drugs, and all the usual ills of liberalism and secularism.
So I thought I would be prepared for what I would find after twenty years, especially since I was going to a town that is a model for a new, better America.
But just in case, and because Orlando was just named one of the 25 most dangerous cities in the country (and also because I carry everywhere), I went armed.
Most of the orange groves are gone and replaced by housing developments, not surprising since the population has gone from 60,000 before Disney to over two million today.
It’s just that I remember playing in those groves, picking the fresh fruit.
Traffic and parking here are nightmares – of course they are back home in Cary, North Carolina too – but that’s okay, that’s progress.
Good thing I have made a success out of my accounting career because the attractions in Orlando are not cheap, and another good thing we had some extra time because you spend a lot of that time waiting in lines.
But what really made me sit up and take notice (and be glad of that safety measure in my holster) are all the strange faces, and voices.
Black, brown, yellow, mixed, mongrel.
Indians, spics, slant-eyes.
Arabs, lots of Arabs; are they still allowed to be here?
Speaking gibberish, who can tell what.
I don’t really care what they are doing here; even if they are ‘working’ at all you can’t get any good service down here.
What does matter is that even this town doesn’t belong to America any more.
At least Disney will give it back to us, a clean, white, safe world.
Here I can let my teens go anywhere and we do, arranging to meet them later.
But what’s this; they are running towards us, shouting.
They tried to do what to you in the bathroom?
A cop, for God’s sake where’s a cop?
Here’s a uniform, security, please please call the police!
What do you mean no police, where are we going?
We are going through an unmarked door, down an unmarked passage, down, down.
One ahead of us and one behind, we enter a vast control area, like something out of NASA, or Star Trek.
Into a brightly lit room, with a big mirror on one wall, and the chairs and table bolted to the floor.
Another man comes in, looks like law enforcement but when I ask again about a cop he says “we don’t have police here. This is Disney and we are our own police.”
My sons, I try to tell him; someone tried to do something to them in the bathroom.
We know what they said, the man nods as he looks down, but we think maybe it could have been the other way around.
What?!
What’s wrong with you, what’s wrong with this place?!
You are going to need to sign this Mr. Cross, or they could be charged.
I’m not signing that or anything else; what the hell do you think you’re doing?
I am sure you would like that fine Beretta back, and also to be able to go back home with your family, so I think you will need to sign this.
What is it, what does it say?
That this never happened, Mr. Cross.
Sign it dad, sign it; we just want to get out of here.
They are near tears, my wife is already crying.
My hands are numbing and the drumbeats are rising to a crescendo in my temples.
The rush of rage engulfs, but I do not have my gun, and this goon definitely has his.
I sign, we leave, escorted, out an unmarked back exit, with a long walk to the parking lot.
There is a huge line at the hotel desk, so we just pack and go.
Just in time to sit on the I-4, which as usual is a parking lot.
My Beretta was returned with no clip; they said they would mail it.
I have always known that the country I used to live in is gone, long gone.
But what is this place where I live now?
Caroline Duke– Counterpoint; Bringing It With You When You ComeI went off twenty years of anti-depressants a week ago, and a week later thought I might really truly go crazy.
But then I thought no, at least I am feeling something and it is going to be that or Nothing from here on.
But without the dope, I also knew I had to find something, go somewhere, be somebody else aside from the medicated, muddled middle-aged mom addicted to shadowy sorrow and even hazier hope.
So I went on-line, looking for something that might jump out at me, and sure enough the universe listened, and it did.
“Spiritual Healing Workshop, Orlando Florida; Are You Woman Enough?”
Well that’s completely off the wall, I thought; who in their right mind would want to go to Orlando, especially to try to get better?
But then the idea grabbed me, and in fact kept me awake all that night.
How else to dig out from the Underground than to descend into the maelstrom, jump in head first, and find your renewal there, amongst the demons?
(I went to a Buddhist retreat once, all very quiet and peaceful and nurturing. Until the monk, fiftiesh, from Long Island, tried to hit on me)
So off I trundled, to meet a group of ladies very much like me.
Our fearless, and I mean fearless, leader, was a graying Brit who had traveled far and wide and deep, and found her home amongst us lost souls.
Traveling to Florida is going to confirm much of what we in North Carolina already know from the toxic human backwash that has overflowed up here; a No-place that has sold out it its inheritance of natural beauty and filled in the life-sustaining land with the most crass and clueless lifestyle in the entire country.
So when a cigar-smoking cretin blithely clears the deck of a nice restaurant I am hardly surprised.
It was, however, almost too much when, savoring the peace of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings home Cross Creek, with Black families fishing in the placid stream and a Bald eagle trying to wrest a fish from an Osprey, the scene was torn apart by an airboat roaring through, its three fat white boys drinking beer.
And approaching Whorelando, you can see that the Visitor’s Centers should be giving out free development models instead of free orange juice.
The housing developments and strip malls stretch beyond the horizon, beyond the imagination, and the few citrus orchards and horse farms left boast similar signs of the times, what should be the official slogan of the Sunshine State.
For Sale.
One of the largest remaining cattle ranches in central Florida has already been bought for subdividing, but the developers are sitting on it knowing that the land (as the influx of Floridiots has caused back home in North Carolina), is going to do nothing but increase in development value.
I won’t talk of the sessions we had; like AA they were too personal and too important to share outside the group, but I can reveal some of what we learned, and where we went.
She asked us to pay attention to the birds, as indeed it was impossible not to.
Egrets and Woodstorks feeding in parking lots, hawks and ibises flying everywhere in this urban hell, great flocks on the lakes and wetlands.
What is their secret, she asked us; how can they stand this place, and survive, even thrive?
Think about how can you, how can we?
Driving home the point, she took us into the centers of the belly of the beast; a ‘service’ at one of the numerous mega-churches in Orlando where the sheep are herded in and out according to a schedule planned in accordance with traffic patterns.
Exercises in White Noise, Then…Disney World.
Thanks to a recent article in National Geographic I already knew something of its dark underbelly; secret land deals, a secret ruling committee, private police force, no state inspections of the rides, pedophilia, a private empire above the law.
But as we tread lightly through the chaos and cacophony of the ‘attractions’, we were going be taught more.
We were walking not just across the acres of concrete, but atop the vast underground bunker that is the nerve – and spy – center for the entire park.
Celebration, the artificial village built by Disney on the property, offers no ownership, for that would grant owners rights to self-determination, so the entire façade is sold through timeshares.
To best underscore the utter falsehood of all things Disney, Celebration was built with a Town Hall, but no government.
Just as telling was the bit of a ruckus we encountered leaving the ‘park’; the private security guards taking away an agitated gentleman yelling about the bathrooms.
Our leader grimaces and shakes her head.
“You do NOT want your children going into these rest rooms unattended,” she said.
I detour on the way back to avoid another pit of Florida hell – Jacksonville - and head for refuge in Georgia and South Carolina before heading home.
Okeefenokee, Cumberland Island, Caw Caw, Folly Beach, Charleston, Congaree, where I try, like the scientists that have just left, to conjure an Ivory-billed woodpecker.
No such luck, but then again I may have conjured something even rarer, and just as endangered.
Quick, grab the field guide; I think I can identify this creature out here on this limb.
As I remember rightly, my natural habitat.
Could be Me.
