Opinion: Some good may come from all this chaos

TALLAHASSEE -- As Dr. H.S. Thompson so aptly observed, "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." And at the moment, the pros are converging on Tallahassee, exhibiting all the grace and gravitas normally found in a confraternity of hungry weasels.

We haven't had this much excitement since the 1861 Secession Convention.

Except for the legislative session or when there's a home football game, Tallahassee is blessedly silent. Now the place sounds like a dishwasher full of parrots. Every chicken shack and oyster hut, every downtown sandwich palace and blameless sports bar in our pretty town -- normally, though tiresomely, described as "sleepy" -- roars with the pandemonium of laptop-toting hacks and hairsprayed TV stand-up mannequins in the process of being seduced by Tallahassee's poppy-potent charm.

We natives, who ain't as restful as we look, lay on our most honeyed accents like Van Gogh laid on paint and help the international media, the lawyers, the camp followers and the political tourists find the best apple martini to drink, or the best white-columned house to shoot, or the best local eccentric to quote. We'll even point out how the 22-story Capitol looks just like a giant chad -- whether defined as dangling or pregnant is currently under litigation.

Hotel rooms are booked up as far north as Thomasville, Ga., a gingerbread village surrounded by quail-hunting plantations. They are packed as far south as Perry, a pine- processing town still stinking of Procter & Gamble's handiwork and maybe a little residual smoke from a cross burning -- the Klan used to be big in these parts.

Welcome to the Other Florida.

Tallahassee has become the political omphalos of the world, the hot epicenter of America's messed-up elections. You can tell this thing is important -- the FSU-Florida game is Saturday and no one has even asked about Chris Weinke's gimpy foot.

In the time it takes to walk from steps of the Old Capitol to Clyde's, the sticky-floored bar of choice for on-the-make politicos and eavesdropping journalists, careers can slide quicker than a fistful of tech stocks. Katherine Harris, Florida's secretary of state and George W. Bush's campaign co-chair, looks like Bambi just before Godzilla's foot squashes her. It has come as a nasty shock to many Floridians that Harris is actually in charge of our elections, since she comes across like a Tri-Delt with Attention Deficit Disorder. The woman is reportedly desperate for an ambassadorship in W.'s regime, though at this rate Afghanistan is about the best she can expect -- no wearing those Ally McBeal skirts at tea parties with the Taleban!

Then there's Gov. Jeb Bush, the hard worker who should have been able to hand Florida to his 30-watt brother tied up all nice like a ballotin of Godiva truffles. Instead, Gov. Jeb wears the hunted look of a man who thinks his political career may soon appear on the Federal Endangered Species List. If George W. loses, Jeb's presidential campaign slogan will be "Vote for me, I'm not as dumb as he is." If George W. wins, Jeb has to wait till sniggering memories of misbegotten syntax and misidentified heads of state dissipate and then run on "Vote for me, I'm still not as dumb as him." Either way, that exclamation point Jeb used to park behind his name is gone.

And so is the Republican Rainbow Coalition Jeb Bush congratulated himself over in his gubernatorial run. The Florida A&M University students who used to be a photo-op for him in pre-"One Florida" days are now to be found protesting at the Capitol. Jeb's rainbow looks mighty albino to them. Last week they staged an overnight protest on the floor of the rotunda, angry about the disfranchisement of thousands of Condo Coast voters in Palm Beach County.

Outside, the TV lights ringed the brick piazza, catching a lone guy walking around with a "Stop Infant Circumcision" sign; inside, slouching, sullen white troopers guarded the doors (trying to keep press out) while the FAMU kids studied the Bible and ate pizza. One reporter, struck by the surreality of it all, said, "In the '60s, Jews held sit-ins for blacks. Now blacks hold sit-ins for Jews."

Florida is Looking-Glass Land, a Magic Kingdom of the Inverse, where all you Alices must believe six impossible things before breakfast -- and that's just if you're watching CNN. If you add NBC, ABC, CBS, C-Span, NPR and the papers, you can find yourself asked to swallow more paradoxes than a postmodern philosopher. Stuff like 3,000 Jews voting for Pat Buchanan, the man who maintains that Hitler was misunderstood; or that the left of a "Butterfly Ballot" is really the right; or that voting machine technology dating from Sputnik's first launch is just fine for the 21st century.

This is chaos. But it's a chaos from which something positive might emerge. We've run elections in Florida -- and everywhere else in America -- with all the seriousness of picking a homecoming court. If the sniping and whining, the poor grammar and worse motives, the court challenges and Monster Truck metaphors get us grown-up elections with proper machines, then this week, when the rest of the world is giggling at us, the alleged "Greatest Democracy," (things are pretty bad when the Italians start calling us a Banana Republic -- and they ain't talking retail) will have been worth it.

Former Times editorial writer Diane Roberts is now teaching at the University of Alabama and is a commentator for National Public Radio.

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