Miami will never be an intellectual bastion. It is and will forever be inhabited by middle class folks, regardless of how much money they have. Our major universities will never be Harvard or Yale, our elected officials will policemen or firemen no matter how high they rise in the hierarchy, and our city planning will always be determined by the well placed coin of the realm. So maybe I have been kidding myself that a mega-casino in the middle of Levittown South would spoil the atmosphere; it will probably fit right in, along with all of the other edifices placed with little or no city planning or foresight. Maybe Hollywood got it right; let Jimmy Buffett define us with his hotel on the boardwalk.
It is who we are. Bush League.
From a therapeutic standpoint, there is strength and self-actualization in recognizing that. I guess, coming from a different world, not the East Coast of the U.S., I expected a little more. But, except for some rare and treasured exceptions in this intellectual wasteland, the intellectual gives way to the uninformed and unconcerned political, economic and parochial factors as determiners of decisions and goals for our governmental and business leaders. And, there is strength in acknowledging that. Better to be who we are than to beat ourselves up over who we might, but never will, be.
So, go ahead and build a monster casino across from the $450 Million Arsht Center, built with our funds. And go ahead and throw a gillion bucks into infrastructure behind a project for which the City and the County will probably not obtain an irrevocable performance bond for the building and the costs to be incurred by them and who could get left holding a $2.3 Billion bag, making more contractual mistakes such as have been made here with other big buck projects; the Marlins had us for lunch. Go ahead and name the Miami Art Museum after some Johnny-Come-Lately. In the long run, it won’t make any difference because we will never be what we are not. And maybe being Atlantic City South will be best for us after all and will continue to attract like minded folks; we will never be Monte Carlo, not with the current level of planning and thinking and continuing to allow carpetbaggers free reign. Didn’t your Mother tell you to just be yourself.
2 comments:
Margaritaville, not Margaretville.
She must have been latin....
Well yes. For Miami, just as for us personally as individuals, it is our pretensions that make us miserable failures.
And Miami is very pretentious. The pretension begins -or began - with the initial belief that we could and should build cities here in a topography that is wholly unsuited for them.
Having moved here from New England many many years ago as a young boy, I could never understand why I was always uncomfortable here. There was always some basic instability; I never could feel truly grounded. After a while I figured it out - the water table is 6 inches below the surface. It's like living on a lilly pad. There's water constantly flowing under our feet when there should be granite.
There's just nothing to stand on here.
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