Essays in Idleness

“Downtown Orlando has no bottom. The entire city should be levelled. It is void of a single redeeming quality. It is a melting pot of third world miscreants and ghetto thugs. It is void of culture. If you live down there you do it at your own risk and at your own peril. If you go down there after dark there is seriously something wrong with you.”

An interesting POV.

It was written by some gentleman in the Florida State Attorney’s office, ninth circuit, on his Facebook page. (I have edited for spelling and style.) I gather he has been suspended under section SA09 of the office social media policy, which requires a higher standard of civic boosterism. He may be terminated, for it was his second offence. (Earlier he was carded for the expression, “crack hoes.”)

One wonders what the social media policy was in Sodom and Gomorrah. Up here in the High Doganate we don’t have one. Nobody working for us has ever been suspended for a Tweet, Instagramble, or Facebooking. True, nobody works for us, up here, but that is another issue. We allow visitors to comment freely, but request that they wait until they have left to say what they think of the place.

The gentleman, whose identity is revealed in Fox News, had more to say. He contrasted downtown Orlando with Walt Disney World which, he suggested, is much nicer. And this although, I learn, there is risk that an alligator may eat your child. The truth is I have never been to Orlando, so am in no position to make my own comparisons. I defer to e.g. Wallace Stevens, who once said that while he’d never been to Europe, he’d been “almost everywhere in Florida.” (He refers somewhere to the Sunshine State’s “venereal soil,” but I don’t think he specifically mentions Orlando.)

Given my aesthetic sensibilities, I would probably prefer downtown Orlando to Disney World. Less, you know, “Mickey Mouse.” But that hardly means the city should not be levelled. If anything, it is an argument for extending the perimeter of deconstruction.

Cities get that way when you let people into them. People need minding, and often won’t do it themselves. They need taboos more than they need tattoos. They don’t need encouragement to misbehave. In the present state of the world, the peer pressure seems to be going all the wrong way.

Turning to other news — item after item after item from across Merica and around the world — one wonders what city should not be levelled.

Well, Fallujah is being levelled again, as I write. (I was once nearly suspended myself, for proposing in a newspaper column that the USAF make it into a parking lot, and that the USACE then build a Walmart at one end. I was being facetious, but one of the complaints against me — for “advocating genocide” — was taken to the Ontario Press Council. If memory serves, I won that case, but it was a 5–4 decision. Can’t be sure of my memory, however, for there were many hundred formal complaints, during my last stint as a fishwrap copywriter.)

And now it comes to this morning’s survey, where I find no mention of even one shining city on a hill.

So I walk out on my balconata, to look over Parkdale, and I think. Is there a way to level it without damaging the trees?