Cloud. - Best. state. ever.: a Florida man defends his homeland

E very few months I get a call from some media person wanting to interview me about Florida, where I have lived for three decades. The tone of the interview is never positive, or even neutral. The interviewer never asks: Why do you live in Florida? Or: What do you like about Florida?

No, the tone is always: What the hell is wrong with Florida?

I should note that these interviewers are not always calling from states that have a lot to brag about. I have been interviewed on the wrongness of Florida by people who live in, for example, Illinois. Not to be picky, but there are a few things wrong with Illinois. For one thing, the voters there keep electing criminals to high office. Illinois constantly has to build new prisons just to hold all of its convicted former governors, who form violent prison gangs and get into rumbles with gangs of convicted former state legislators. If Charles Manson ever gets out on parole and needs a job, he can move to Illinois and run for governor. The voters would say, Looks like gubernatorial material to me!

Also, Illinois has done a poor job of handling its finances, which is why its official credit rating, as determined by Moodys Investors Service, was recently lowered from Meth Addict to Labrador Retriever. And this is the state from which a media person called to ask me what is wrong with Florida.

Florida has become The Joke State, the state everybody makes fun of. If states were characters on Seinfeld, Florida would be Kramer: Every time it appears, the audience automatically laughs, knowing its going to do some idiot thing.

We werent always The Joke State. We used to be The Sunshine State, known for our orange groves and beaches and deceased senior citizens playing shuffleboard. People might have seen Florida as boring, but they didnt laugh at it. They laughed at New Jersey, because it contained the New Jersey Turnpike and smelled like a giant armpit. Or they laughed at California, because it was populated by trend-obsessed goobers wearing Earth shoes and getting recreational enemas. Or they laughed at Indiana, because the people there proudly call themselves Hoosiers even though they have no idea what Hoosier means. Or they laughed at Kentucky, for having a statewide total of twenty-three teeth.

But today all of these states are laughing at Florida. Everybody is laughing at Florida. Mississippi is laughing at Florida.

How did this happen? As far as I have been able to determine without doing any research, the turning point was the presidential election of 2000. You remember. It was Al Gore against George Bush. On Election Night almost all of the other states were able to figure out pretty quickly who they voted for. But not Florida. Florida had no earthly idea who it had voted for. At first, it looked like maybe Gore had won the state, but then it looked like Bush had, but then suddenly it was Al again, and then it was Bush again. At one point, William Shatner appeared to be in contention. It was insane. By dawn we still had no winner, and network TV political analysts were openly shooting heroin on camera.

Meanwhile, the morning skies over the state were darkened by vast fleets of transport planes swooping in from Washington, D.C., opening their doors and dropping tens of thousands of election lawyers. Some landed in the Everglades and were consumed by Burmese pythons. But, tragically, many survived, and, without taking time to remove their parachutes, they commenced filing lawsuits.

This was the beginning of more than a month of intensive 24/7 TV news coverage of the Florida elections. This coverage did not present a positive image of Florida. It featured endlessly replayed videos of deeply confused Florida election officials squinting at Florida ballots that were apparently designed by dyslexic lemurs and then turned over to deeply confused Florida voters, many of whom apparently voted for nobody for president, or voted for two presidents, or used the ballots to dislodge pieces of brisket from between their teeth. Some voters apparently just drooled on their ballots, not that this stopped battalions of Washington lawyers from passionately debating which candidate these voters were drooling