| 5.11.06 |
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An
In-Between Place
By Rebecca Wakefield I’m not a big fan of television, but last month I finally gave in after three years and got cable. Almost immediately, I remembered why I had stopped paying for TV. The Internet and Netflix have demolished my ability to sit through commercials and surf through hundreds of crappy channels to find 10 interesting minutes at a time. Ah, but the reality shows are like crack. Even though the supposedly real people on them are clearly manipulated by the producers into asinine behavior, it’s still great when it works. 8th & Ocean doesn’t work because it involves South Beach models so vacant they can’t even manufacture drama. My Super Sweet 16 does work because it lets you loathe spoiled rich kids. So do shows like Wife Swap, which give you a glimpse of the banal strangeness of middle America. Absorbed self-delusion is what all these shows have in common and none more so than the various government meetings shown on local cable access channels. A favorite is Flashback, a feature Miami Beach offers of meetings that are anywhere from 10 to15 years old. It’s a wonderful way of recalling all the old scoundrels, back when they were trying to blend with the straights. The county should put together a flashback version of Know your Commissioner with Miriam Alonso, Pedro Reboredo, Bruce Kaplan, James Burke, Joe Gersten and hosted by Inspector General Christopher Mazzella. Miami City Manager Joe Arriola should definitely look into the reality business when he leaves his post June 1. I’m thinking A Simply Surreal Life featuring Joe taking on different workaday jobs around town, such as bus driver, short-order cook, construction worker, or a customer service rep at Miami Heat games. Trash-talking State Rep. Ralph Arza is a natural to take over Yo Momma from Wilmer Valderrama next season. For some reason, I’m seeing outgoing Beach mayor David Dermer hosting an Idol spin-off as an homage to Bill Murray’s sleazy lounge singer routine on Saturday Night Live. I also like the idea of somebody giving our governor a reality show when he comes back to town in a few months. Call it Jeb! and have it just be him crawling the walls of his condo, bored out of his mind and cursing the lesser Republicans dismantling his legacy while trying to keep Columba from shopping and the kids out of rehab. I would totally watch that. Speaking of Jeb, the state recently put out a report (www.oppaga.state.fl.us/reports/educ/r06-40s.html) about one of the unaddressed problems in the FCAT arms race — ill-prepared college kids. The clear-eyed folks at the Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability found that (in the 2003-2004 school year) 78 percent of students enrolling at state community colleges needed remediation in mathematics, reading and/or writing. Almost two-thirds of them needed remediation in more than one subject. The reason? “Over the past 10 years, Florida has implemented several initiatives and programs to help improve the academic skills of high school graduates,” the report states. “However, remediation rates have improved little since 1997. This is likely because the general focus of most of Florida’s educational improvement initiatives has been on improving educational outcomes in the K-12 system and not specifically on improving college readiness.” The state spent about $63 million last year bringing community college students up to speed. The U.S. Census Bureau also just put out a nifty report about America migration patterns (www.census.gov/prod/2006pubs/p25-1135.pdf). Florida gained 190,894 people a year from 2000 to 2004, just in migration from other states. That’s up from about 112,000 a year in the 1990s. The math works out to about two million Americans moving here in the last 15 years — hurricanes, failing infrastructure, voting irregularities be damned. Amazing. Not so amazing is the fact that our fellow Americans are not coming all the way down to South Florida. For the metro area including Miami and Fort Lauderdale (sixth largest in the nation), the 1990s brought in an annual net average of 2,768 people from other states. From 2000 to 2004, our area actually lost an average of 5,745 people to other states every year. The numbers show that most of the out-migration comes from Miami-Dade County, where 126,148 people left for other parts of the country in the past four years. But at the same time, the county gained about 176,500 immigrants during this period. Factor in births and deaths and we end up in the plus column by about 109,000 people. Miami is probably always going to be a gateway city, through which people and things flow. An Israeli-Brazilian transplant in Allapattah’s wholesale markets recently put it to me this way: “I came here because it’s tropical and Latin, but done the American way.” Comments like that remind me that Miami really is an in-between place, a shifting kaleidoscope that displays its shapes and colors differently with every twist of a new hand. An interesting twist in the local political world is Gepsie Metellus deciding to run for Solomon Stinson’s School Board seat instead of Audrey Edmonson’s County Commission seat. Gepsie is a smart lady, and has the street cred of being the executive director of the Sant La Haitian Neighborhood Center. She’s got a good shot at becoming the first Haitian school board member. But she could also have easily given Edmonson heartburn while state Rep. Phillip Brutus takes a swing at Dorrin Rolle’s seat. I smell a deal. I’ll know when I see who Barbara Carey-Shuler endorses. Clearly the energy in the black voting districts is coming from the Haitians. The two things that could temporarily derail their ascent are African-Americans’ fear of losing power and the infamous in-fighting among political factions that resulted in the mayor’s seat in the Haitian stronghold of North Miami going to an openly gay white male. I can’t wait to read the campaign reports. Comments? E-mail wakefield@miamisunpost.com. |