Paradise Screwed by Carl Hiaasen

Carl Hiaasen wrote a column for the Miami Herald for about thirty-five years, from 1985 through 2021. It was the old-school style op-ed, mostly focused locally and mostly about outrageous things - stupid politicians and other prominent folks taking bribes and wasting public funds and backing boondoggles and making big giveaways to their friends and building badly-conceived construction projects and just generally being corrupt, shameless, money-grabbing, and pandering.

He had a lot of material: he did work in Florida, after all.

There were three books of the column: Kick Ass came out in 1999, and I read that at some point before the birth of this blog. Dance of the Reptiles cane out in 2014, and I covered it here. In between was 2001's Paradise Screwed, which covered mostly the same stretch of years as Kick Ass (1985 through 2000), and which I have been ostensibly reading almost since then. (In my post on Dance of the Reptiles, I noted I'd been reading Paradise for a dozen years at that point.) I had it next to a chair where I sometimes sat and read, in a stack with other books, many of which also had bookmarks in them, but it mostly sat quietly there for what I have to admit turned into two-plus decades.

I finally started again from the beginning, putting Paradise Screwed in the smallest room of the house, and read it through, one column at a time, over the past few months.

It's a time capsule at this point: oh, sure, the general outlines are still very familiar, because pandering and rent-seeking and bloviating are eternal - but the specifics are very '80s and '90s, back in the era when Florida thought it might be able to control development and possibly not destroy the habitats of every last kind of animal that lived there. Hiaasen has the standard tone and stance of the local columnist: vaguely fiscally conservative, not otherwise particularly partisan so he can attack all sides equally as required by the facts of the day, but generally only writing about things that are mistakes, scams, frauds, corrupt bargains, or otherwise expected to be shocking to the sensibility of his mass-market newspaper-reading audience.

It's divided into twenty-two thematic chapters, with allusive titles - things like "The Bearded One" for stories related to Cuban exiles, for example - in each of which the columns run chronologically, from 1985 through 2000, over and over. The columns themselves were selected and arranged by Diane Stevenson - she did the same for all three Hiaasen column collections - who was a teacher of writing at the University of Florida. (For those hoping for one last collection to cover the end of his column career: she died in 2016, so I suspect there will not be a fourth book, even though there's at least enough material.)

It's a book that would have been better closer to the time it was published; newspaper material ages quickly by design. And it's better in small doses: again, that's inherent to the column format, and to the decision to organize this one thematically. (Reading a half-dozen pieces about Elian Gonzalez in a row, for example, is pretty pointless thirty years later.) Luckily, I did read it one piece at a time, so I could do that part, at least.

I haven't read one of Hiaasen's novels in ages - I keep thinking I will, but it hasn't happened. So I can't compare this to his better-known work. I think it's got roughly the same tone and something of the same stance, and Hiaasen was always deeply concerned with ecological issues. Though, in the columns here, it mostly comes up because he wants to keep places wild so he can go with rod and gun to kill various things there, which isn't what many of us think of as the core ecological issue.

Politics has gotten even nastier and stupider and more punitive since then - in Florida as nationally, though for once maybe not more in Florida than nationally - so this is somewhat of a nostalgia trip, for the days when politicians were only corrupt and stupid, and not actively malevolent and anti-democratic on top of that.