Florida Man and His World: Two Books by Craig Pittman & Dave Barry

Sometimes you read two books because they cover the same thing, because you expect they'll bounce off each other in your mind. It doesn't always work out right -- books often aren't what you expect they will be, and you can never know how you'll react to them -- but it's always good to stretch yourself.

This was a very, very minor way of stretching myself: reading two books about how weird Florida is. Craig Pittman's 2016 book Oh, Florida! (an expansion and reconfiguring of a blog series of the same name in Slate a few years earlier) is the more-or-less serious version of the "hey! lookie how crazy this state is!" story, with more than a little history and a dozen-and-a-half thematic chapters. Dave Barry's Best. State. Ever. (also 2016) is vastly more frivolous, a book barely half the length with half as many chapters, all but the first of which were "go there and do the crazy thing" reports. (Since Barry had been retired as a columnist for about a decade, and the book doesn't credit previous publication, my guess is that all of the visits were for the book -- but it's possible that he did manage to sell them as articles as well, and the book just kept silent on that.)

I, of course, read them in the wrong order: Barry first, since it's shorter and funnier and sillier.

The reductive way of contrasting the two books is to point out that Pittman is a reporter: mostly on an environmental beat, for the Tampa Bay Times for the past decade or so, with three serious books of reportage on serious issues (manatees, orchids, grasslands) behind him. He's good at research, knows a lot of facts, and has a point of view that he doesn't let get in the way of a good story. He's also a native Floridian, that rare (but endlessly self-identifying) breed.

Barry, on the other hand, is a humorist: he wrote a column for several decades, and has made a very good living off writing one to ten thousand funny words about This Silly Thing on a regular basis for most of his adult life. He moved to Florida long enough ago that he spent most of his career there, though I still think of him as a Northeastern guy, since he was syndicated out of a Philadelphia paper when I discovered him.

Amusingly, Pittman covers most of the factual pieces in Barry's book, along with much more, in his longer and more in-depth book. (Pittman is silent on the Skunk Ape and did not, unlike Barry, attempt to get salable copy out of being a middle-aged man in a hot Miami Beach night club. Barry's chapters are also all about Being Dave Barry in a specific place and milieu; Pittman is much less present in his own book.)

The real difference in the two is tone. Barry is rich and successful, and got that way by being willing to be silly and happy in public, writing about any nutty thing that came his way. Florida, as Pittman says many times, is the land of the optimist and the dreamer, so Barry fit in well there. Barry gives no sign that the deep endemic corruption of his state matters in the slightest to him, or that any of the systemic issues -- the climate change that will probably doom Miami, the bone-deep racism curdled into things like "Stand Your Ground" laws, the toxic and hypocritical brand of evangelical Christianity so common there, the pure demographic weight of millions of old people who move there to waste their money and avoid paying taxes before they die -- are of any concern. So Barry's book is sunny and entirely happy: hey! let's chase a Skunk Ape! wow! let's go drinking in Key West! cool! it's the biggest retirement community in the world, and they're having lots of sex!

Pittman, on the other hand, clearly sees the rot. But he's a classic reporter, and so doesn't show any evidence that he thinks the rot could be entirely turned around or cured. Florida is a land for scams and schemers, he says: it might be possible to clean up parts of it here and there, but there's always a new crazy money-making idea (or an old one back again, like land speculation) and always several million idiots willing to put their money into it and probably lose it all. That's amusing, assuming he's talking to people too smart to be taken in by the schemes; the rot in other areas (destroying habitat for animals or humans permanently, the gun culture that kills millions, all of the particularly Florida kinds of corruption and graft and malfeasance) is less amusing, but equally entrenched. Pittman doesn't like any of that, but he doesn't have a muckraker's zeal to fight against it, either. And he's got a long, long catalog of nasty funny things that happened in Florida to run through before the end of his book, carefully organized into thematic groupings so the reader can see all of the depressing similarities.

(Pittman's epigraph is not "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown." But it could easily have been.)

So Pittman's book is subtly depressing for a careful reader. I image it's had a lot of uncareful readers, though: people who skim it for the crazy stories, let those reinforce their existing prejudices, and meander on with their little, misinformed lives. We can never do anything about those people. They will always be with us, and much of the time feel like a majority. Perhaps it's good news that, in Florida, they are at least entertaining in their idiocy?

If you want a silly, amusing book about Those Crazy Floridians, Barry has exactly what you need. If you want a deeper understanding of why they're Crazy, even if that doesn't lead to any blueprint to helping them (or you) get any saner, Pittman is the writer for you.