The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

PENSACOLA, Fla. — The sun was shining and it felt a little like spring was in the air as we pulled out of the Conecuh National Forest this week and crossed over the Alabama state line into Florida.

After working on a house in need of renovations to make it occupiable owned by our new friend Kirk Sanborn in what they call the Bagdad neighborhood, right down from Marquis Basin, we took the night off Friday and ventured downtown, arriving just in time for Gallery Night, Pensacola’s monthly art street event. The crowd was even more animated than usual since the annual Comic Con was happening at the Pensacola Bay Civic Center.

We parked by a little park with a fountain near the Pensacola Bay brew pub and tried the tasty Lil Nepoleon IPA, then checked out some food at Hub Stacy’s, where a rock band was setting up and people were gathering getting ready to dance the night away.

Simply by virtue of synchronicity and putting out the MoJo word that we were in town, the artist Walter Simon and I hooked up with some progressive activists and checked out the crowd on Government Street. There were comic heroes and villans walking about, sampling the vendor food and enjoying a cool winter night.

Then on Saturday, we made it downtown again for the Palafox Market in time for the progressive lunch at the Wine Bar, where a hearty group of anti-Trump farmers, merchants and activists meet every week for food, drinks and like minded company.

Like anywhere you go, people have to ask where you’re from, and that’s never an easy question for me to answer since I’ve moved around so much. For Simon it’s fairly easy to just say Mobile, Alabama, even though he wasn’t actually born there.

It’s funny that even here in the well-known most conservative Congressional district in the Sunshine state, a place known as the Florida Panhandle, people immedietely turn up their noses at the mere mention of Mobile. They can’t help but launch into their own stories about negative experiences they had there, the less than famous old South city on the industrialized Mobile Bay where nothing ever seems to quite work out right.

If anything, it is the city that is so loath to progress that it famously turned down a bona fide overture from Walt Disney himself, who went on to build Disney World in Orlando instead of his first choice, Mobile. Overcoming the inertia of an old South mentality, a distrust of outsiders and no apparent desire to make something of itself just keeps Mobile down.

After spending the past five winters there, and trying everything I could think of to get various business ideas off the ground, I managed to escape this winter after my close friend and business partner David Underhill died. Upon reflection, when I have a chance to go into more details in telling people my stories about the place, I now conclude that Mobile is one of those places I have spent time in my life that just seems to have a pall hanging over it, literally a dark cloud of smoke, dust and other negative matter. It’s like a coffin, a hearse or a tomb that claims to have been the home of the first Mardi Gras, yet it was New Orleans that went on to make the winter festival famous, and create entire art forms and originial music known the world over.

Knoxville, Tenneessee was such a place, where I spent four years working on a Ph.D., teaching journalism and writing. While many of the most talented musicians in the state came from East Tennessee, the chamber of commerce types turned Nashville into Country Music City. The rest is history. As it happens, I was just beginning to peruse the Autobiography of Mark Twain this morning and learned that his father bought a bunch of land in East Tennessee thinking he would make a fortune there, but lost it all and moved to Missouri, where Samuel Clemens grew up.

A similar tale could be told about my actual home town, Birmingham, Alabama, which famously turned down an opportunity to nab an international airport many decades back. Atlanta grabbed that opportunity, and well, you know the story about the explosive growth that came to that town in the last half of the 20th century.

Of course some good things are happening in Birmingham these days I hear. But you know what they say about a man being accepted in his home town. Even Jesus, as the story goes, had to leave Nazereth to launch his ministry, and once supposedly said, “No prophet is accepted in his home town, by his/her relatives, his people, the world and even by the people who call themselves God’s children.”

There’s even science that actuially shows it is bad for your brain to stay in the place you were born.

Pensacola

Pensacola, on the other hand, managed to get it together a few years ago and fix at least some of the main problems with its local government and bring its downtown to life, while many other small southern towns still linger in the doldrums, held down by local corruption and malaise.

The non-profit group Civic Con named Pensacola a “strong city” in 2019, saying they saw a strong investment in civic education and locally owned businesses in a place that values expertise and planning, lets “metrics” lead the way by gathering data before trying to solve problems.

Project proposals are scrutinized not just for long-term financial sensiblity, but to fit a “smart growth” plan of more dense development, not surban sprawl, which has plagued many American cities, including Mobile and Atlanta.

“It is working to make a strong and vibrant downtown area, while not being in a hurry to grow too quickly,” the group said about Pensacola last year. “It is focused on transportation issues” and “has created an ecosystem for building small- to mid-market companies.”

The group called the local government “responsive” and said city leaders seemed to have adopted “regulations to create the best possible scenario for residents.”

So we seem to have found, at least for now, a new winter camp. The plan is to return to DC and Maryland for one more summer this year, passing through one of our favorite places in North Carolina along the way of course. But for an RV local address, Pensacola seems like the place to be.

Besides, while Alabama will no doubt vote to reelect Donald Trump as president in November, Florida is a battleground state. In fact, the New York Times editorial board recently declared it the state that could tip the election in 2020 due to a ballot initiave that passed in 2018 granting the right to vote to ex-felons.

And in other news, for the first time in Florida’s history, a political party in the state has more than 5 million registered voters, and it’s not the Republican Party. As of Jan. 31, Democrats had 5.04 million registered voters in the state, compared to 4.79 million registered Republicans, according to Florida’s Department of State. Democrats gained approximately 53,000 new registered voters in the last year, while Republicans only gained 33,000 voters.

Then there is another good reason to spend some time exploring this area where we might be able to make a difference and do some altruistic good in this world. One of the worst members of Congress hails from Fort Walton Beach and got himslef elected here in a special election in 2017, about the same time we helped get Senator Doug Jones elected in Alabama over Roy Moore.

But Matt Gaetz, who got famous for introducing a bill to nowhere proposing to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency, now has some serious opposition in Navy veteran and Democrat Phill Ehr, who even the Pensacola News Journal calls a hero and a patriot.

Ehr is already one of my heroes for showing the guts to go around in this area calling Gaetz “a Trump fan boy.”

“I never thought I’d see the day when American leaders would use information warfare against their own people,” Ehr says. “I love the country I spent my life serving and I can no longer stand by and watch dishonorable men like Donald Trump and Matt Gaetz treat the American people like enemy combatants.”

He recently put out a video for his campaign taking on Trump and Gaetz. The video was produced by Win Productions under the direction of Bill Hyers, the former campaign manager for Bill de Blasio’s successful mayoral run in New York City.

“The ad is brutal in its depiction of Gaetz, using digitally-scrambled footage both of Gaetz making his own more incendiary comments on issues ranging from guns and the Parkland massacre to the Russian elections meddling investigation, and of commentators talking about Gaetz, including TV talk show host Stephen Colbert declaring that he is ‘famous for being a Trump fanboy.’ The impression is one of immaturity,” according to the local paper, which was recently one of the Gannett owned papers bought out by Gatehouse Media.

Local activists are already beginning to feed us dirt on Gaetz, who could very well be vulnerable to being booted out of politics in November, especially now that we are on the scene digging. The New York Times and Washington Post are sure to follow soon, along with the national TV news networks.

Stay tuned for exciting news folks, and look out for that corona virus. We will see if the wool falls from people’s eyes as they finally begin to see how this administration’s incompetence is failing to deal with a crisis that actually needs scientists on the federal payroll.

As the stock market continues to crash and the economy starts to tank as the 2020 election approaches, we may have a chance yet to turn things around and save this democracy and the planet from the idiocracy surrounding Trump’s deep state of doodoo in D.C. Trump did not drain the swamp. He filled it with a whole new class of swamp monsters more evil and corrupt than anything we’ve ever seen before.

The Democrats are far from perfect, but at least they seem to try to make government and democracy work. This Trump crowd seems intent on breaking everything on purpose.