CARL’S DEPARTURE is good news for sleazeballs nationwide
Carl Hiaasen is retiring. This is good news. It’s good news for sleazeballs, charlatans, buffoons, blowhards and fools. It’s good news for the powerful, the pompous, the entitled, the smug and the slimy. It’s good news for those who view the Everglades as a useless swamp, or look at mangroves and see only a bunch of smelly trees blocking the view.
It’s good news for those people, but it’s bad news for Florida. For decades this state has had no watchdog fiercer (or funnier) than Carl. He has more than earned his retirement, of course. But he’ll leave a void in the journalism landscape the size of Lake Okeechobee.
What made Carl such a great columnist? For one thing, his temperament. I’ve known Carl for more than 30 years. I’ve spent countless hours hanging out with him, talking with him on the phone, attempting without success to teach him how to play a Csharp-minor chord (the one thing Carl does not do effortlessly well is play the guitar). In all the time I’ve spent with Carl, I have never known him NOT to be pissed off about something. I’m not saying he’s a downer to be around. Quite the contrary: When he’s pissed off, he’s hilarious. I’m just saying he has a wondrous capacity for outrage. He simply cannot tolerate crooks or idiots. And of course Florida has an inexhaustible supply of both.
There was nothing contrived about the passion Carl brought to his columns. He’s a Florida boy, born and raised, an outdoorsman and avid fisherman. He loves the state’s natural beauty, its land, its waters. He loves its wildlife, even the scarier critters (he is inexplicably fond of snakes). He takes threats to the ecosystem personally; he genuinely loathes those who would harm it.
But it’s not just passion that made his columns so consistently good: He’s also a superb writer, a first-rate craftsman with a comic novelist’s eye for the absurd. His raucous only-inFlorida novels and delightful youngadult-fiction books
are always instant bestsellers. He’s a literary superstar with a multitude of rabid fans. He doesn’t need a day job. He could have quit newspapering decades ago, given up the relentless pressure of column deadlines for the more-sedate pace of the novelist. A lot of people, given the opportunity, would have done exactly that.
But Carl kept writing columns, week after week, year after year, skewering, as only he could, the corruption and craziness of the state and — especially in the last four years — the nation. Many commentators took aim at the same targets; none hit them more often, or more effectively, than Carl.
And now he’s retiring from column-writing. We will miss his voice. Although I suspect — I hope — that he’ll still weigh in from time to time in the Miami Herald. I figure he’ll need an outlet. It’s not in his nature to stop being pissed off.
But for now, on behalf of his readers, I say to my good friend Carl: Thank you — for caring, for fighting, for all those wonderful words. May your semiretirement be at least semi-relaxing; may the bonefish always be biting. And may you, some day, master the C-sharp-minor chord.