But first, about last night…
I never imagined doing this—writing a newsletter, that is. More of a long-time listener, never-time caller type, I’m normally quite happy to leave my two cents in my pocket where they belong. Keeping your foot out of your mouth, to mix metaphors, is easy when you don’t open it.
Which is why this is all so odd, I suppose. I created this space to serve as a creative outlet, a kind of digital diary, more soliloquy than sermon. Sharing it with a few close friends and contacts was an impulse, an editorial drunk dial after a few too many keystrokes. I didn’t think anyone would actually read this stuff.
Well, as it turns out, people do read this stuff. More than I could have imagined. More than I could have feared. But fear, as I’ve learned with age, is often as foolish as it is inhibiting. Watching this newsletter bounce around town and onto the screens of so many smart, informed, and engaged people has been a surprisingly gratifying experience, the happiest of happy accidents. It’s been the most rewarding two cents I’ve spent in quite a while.
So to you, my dear readers, I offer a hardy and heartfelt thanks. Or as the kids like to say with a couple of thumps to the chest, ‘preciate you man!
Now, where was I?
The thing about being your own audience is you don’t need to fuss around with context. You can forgo the tedium of preambles and exposition and just dive heedlessly into the nearest stream of consciousness. I think I did that, or at least something like it, with my first two posts. They were heavy on trees and light on forest.
Ariel and Castro (I like to refer to Ariel by his first name, because like Cher or Bono or Madonna, he’s simply sui generis) are interesting subjects and will, I can assure you, earn a lot of attention around these parts. But each is the product of something larger, nonetheless, mere pieces of a larger political, cultural, and philosophical puzzle, a puzzle that is probably worth a moment’s attention.
How come all the pretty ones are crazy?
For all its virtues, the City Beautiful has aged into a mild identity crisis. It doesn’t seem quite sure whether it’s a quant suburb or a chic metropolis, probably because it is a little bit of both. On one hand, with only 49,000 residents, you could fit every adult in the city inside an average sports stadium with room to spare. On the other, it has to wrestle with a $250 million budget and nurture a municipal economy the size of a small island nation’s. It’s a dynamic that begets that familiar Gables idiosyncrasy: the one where today’s prevailing controversy might be dog-poop bags, while tomorrow’s a 200 million square-foot, $500 million mega-development.
But this is an eccentricity, at best. In fact, it’s probably more charming than anything, like a mild case of dyslexia or a good snort-laugh. What Coral Gables has, rather, and don’t kill me for saying this, is a democracy problem. Before you gag on the sheer triteness of that, please understand that I’m not implying a deliberate subversion of democracy (such a 2020’s cliché ), nor am I suggesting we are in the grip of some kind of communist or fascist takeover. It’s more benign than that, more or less in the spirit of Churchill’s worst form of government except for all the rest thinking.
You see, I think democracy scales rather poorly, both up and down. When you scale democracy up and plug, say, 300 million people into it, you run into massive signal-vs-noise problems. Who voted for whom, when, why? Is the election even over? Will it stand? The will of the people is lost in all the noise. You get modern American politics.
When you scale democracy down, however, you run the risk of a different problem altogether, one of capture. The smaller the pool of voters, the easier it is for any given subset of that pool to capture an election. If you take, for instance, a population of roughly 50,000 people and, through either complacency or apathy or whatever, abdicate the most important form of civic input to a subset of roughly 7,000, you create an environment in which a motivated, organized, and ideologically aligned faction can swing an election and, in so doing, monopolize the awesome power of the democratic process.
True, the Gables isn’t exactly famous for its stellar voter turnout, but it had shown some signs of life in the years leading up to last April’s election. The 2021 election saw a turnout of roughly 10,400 voters, which makes the 2023 election and its turnout of less than 7,000 something of an aberration. Just imagine a 33% drop in voter turnout during a presidential election, imagine the nonstop and frantic cries of election rigging that would ring out from the losing camp. Oh how the talking heads would explode.
Granted, small electorates produce bigger swings, and the names on the ballots matter. But a 1/3 drop in turnout from one election to the other is a decidedly poor development, especially when that massive drop in turnout coincides with what was seen by many as a revolution of an election. Indeed, you probably don’t want less than 10% of all registered voters calling all the electoral shots in your city. You probably don’t want to funnel all democratic authority through a group of voters smaller than the occupancy of a single condominium—you probably don’t want the political modality associated with that.
Lord of the Flies
Other than their being toxic cesspools of lunacy, mendacity, connivance, hostility, machiavellian ambition, and boredom-induced petulance, I have nothing against homeowners and condo associations. Ok, maybe they’re not all bad, but the ones that are, really are. I’m talking street-gang levels of depravity; MS-13 only with fanny packs instead of face tattoos. There isn’t a professional politician on the planet that can match the sheer ruthlessness of Mrs. Nelson when she’s hellbent on getting Mr. Rosenblatt’s Pomeranian kicked out of the building. Tammany Hall has nothing on Turnberry Isle.
Hyperbole aside, the HOA is a necessary evil, every condo and private community needs one. But they do, nevertheless, have a propensity to engender a peculiarly raw power dynamic. They have a knack for fostering a small, naked, and petty kind of politics that brings out the worst in people, one that unleashes inner Gollum of so many otherwise decent human beings. I won’t go down the psychoanalytical rabbit hole of trying to understand why so many associations lose themselves in Payton Place type dramas while their buildings crumble around them. I’ll simply reemphasize the notion that you probably don’t want HOA power dynamics anywhere near your local government—you don’t want the HOA-ification of Coral Gables.
The HOA-ification of Coral Gables.
Well, if that ship hasn’t sailed it’s definitely throwing off the dock lines. Notice the shift in the tone and tenor of commission meetings over the past few years, notice the growing contempt for established norms and procedures, notice how the same handful of residents engage with virtually every agenda item as if they are de facto commissioners. Where does one get the idea that an unelected member of the public should, as though a sixth member of the commission, opine at length on every issue? Every. Single. One.
Notice the new commissioners egging it along, even leveraging it, and notice the contempt for the gavel and who holds it. The veteran commissioners definitely have, which is why you heard the phrase “through the mayor” used more during the last commission meeting than in the past 20 years combined. I’d recommend making a drinking game out of it but I don’t want to be responsible for anyone’s hospitalization.
Notice the lack of intellectual diversity in the community’s social-media spaces, the tribal identity that has emerged from a very narrow set of ideas and principles. Notice how only one group of residents is doing any of the talking. Notice how it’s only Ariel and Castro’s voters that bother to show up these days.
Look at me, I’m the captain now.
The political ethos in a city of 50,000 people is becoming increasingly defined by a relatively small group of like-minded residents, an entity that is similar in size and disposition to a mid-sized HOA. As the real body politic shrinks, as it becomes more insular and more homogenous, it grows more emboldened and contemptuous of the status quo and every low-stakes issue becomes a personal obsession on its way to becoming a matter of life and death. Robert’s Rules of Order become a silly contrivance, a procedural bag of tricks used by the chair to silence the public; Vox Populi, Vox Dei after all. Opposition is viewed not as the product of respectful disagreement, or as the result of different values and perspectives, but as a moral crime of the highest order, royal disregard for the “will of the people.”
Do I begrudge these residents for banding together? For seeking to maximize an election’s consequences? No. I voted their way, after all. But to vote is not to defer, it is not bequeath, it is not to unequivocally agree. I did not agree to the idea that there are now only 3,972 people living in Coral Gables, to the idea that the city’s last election was its first election, or to the idea that a mayor and two commissioners won their seats by virtue of winning a raffle.
I voted for a broader, more inclusive, and more politically diverse community. I did not agree to join the HOA Beautiful.