White-Haired Man Speak With Forked Tongue

Florida’s governor, Charlie Christ, is a good environmentalist. He cares about manatees, and he has recently helped broker a deal to sell U.S. Sugar’s lands south of Lake Okeechobee to the state. This major accomplishment will not exactly restore the Everglades to their former capabilities, but it will go a long way.

For those who don’t know how the ‘Glades work, pull out a map of Florida and look for the huge blue bowl in the state’s southern third. That’s Lake Okeechobee. A low lip on the lake’s bottom end used to spill out into what guardian angel Marjory Stoneman Douglas called “the river of grass.” Not exactly a river, the nearly coast-to-coast flush once made Florida Bay one of the most productive ecosystems in the world. Let’s just say that a lot still flushes from the Everglades, and that the past century’s mega-development, corporate farming, and attempts to re-engineer the area have done some serious, almost irreversible damage. A rhetorical question: how healthy would you be if Florida’s washouts were spiffed up by transfusions through your life-blood?

With U.S. Sugar, a major polluter, soon to be out of the picture, I imagine that Saint Marjory is doing a spiral dance of joy to all the goddesses from her grave.

Meanwhile, a few doors down those gold-paved streets in Heaven, another Marjorie (Carr) is freaking out, having tuned in to MSNBC.

“Archie, Archie, wake up!” She runs over to her husband, a famous environmentalist himself, who is dozing in the hammock dreaming about the mysteries of Kemp’s Ridley Turtle and sloths in the trees of Nicaraguan parks.

“The sea turtles are in danger off Florida’s west coast,” Marjorie cries, dumping Archie out of his hammock. “Charlie Crist has reversed his position on offshore drilling! We have to get busy”!

“Jeezus H. Christ!” the notoriously potty-mouthed Archie yells. “Oh, shit, not you, Lord. That was just an apostrophe. Marjory S.D. Quit your dancing. These ghosts have some haunting to do!”

And so a holy trinity of Florida environmentalists gets busy doing what they do best. The trouble is, they can do only so much from behind the Pearly Gated Community, which keeps folks in as often as it keeps them out. As usual, however, they know before everyone else the wages of environmental sin.

Are we going to do what we did before, and ignore them as strange voices crying in the wilderness until we realize that we’ve gone way past FUBAR?

Florida’s governor, Charlie Crist, is a good environmentalist, who loves manatees and brokered a deal to sell U.S. Sugar lands to the state. What’s that? A small voice in my head – where could that be coming from? – tells me that U.S. Sugar was in a pinch because Earth Justice held South Florida’s Water Management District’s feet to the fire, resulting in a successful lawsuit that was about to send the polluter to the poorhouse. What’s that? The voice tells me that they had to unload that property or else they’d be in a real fix. So Governor Crist really did something that was good for business, and the environment was just sauce on the gravy.

Florida’s governor, Charlie Crist, is a good environmentalist, who loves manatees and brokered a deal to sell U.S. Sugar lands to the state. He would not steer us wrong on this offshore drilling thing. Our nation is in an oil crisis. Our boys and girls are dying in Iraq. No more blood for oil. What’s that? A small voice in my head – where could that be coming from? (o.k., maybe that one is “welling up” from deep inside me) – tells me that our boys and girls should not be fighting a bogus oil war in Iraq to begin with. And Americans should stop driving those gas sucking pigs of vehicles. And wasting energy in hundreds of ways big and small. No more blood for oil is absolutely right, just not in the way that most people mean it. Have you ever seen what offshore drilling looks like, the voice in my head continues. It is ugly business that will destroy some of the last vestiges of beauty that Florida has. It is one thing to take Florida’s washouts through your lifeblood, but damned if I want to take oil washups on my coasts.

But Florida’s governor, Charlie Crist, is a good environmentalist, who loves manatees and brokered a deal to sell U.S. Sugar lands to the state. He would not steer us wrong. And don’t forget, the voice nudges in again, he’s completely and utterly heterosexual. He recently became engaged to the lovely Carole Rome. And certainly, the voice gets in one last dig, no self-respecting queer would purchase his beloved’s ring at strip mall (Eegad, does that not defy everything we have learned from “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy”? Where is Carson when we need him?).

The ghosts will continue to keep watch over Forked Tongued Charlie from their live MSNBC feeds to Heaven.