John, Ron and John

Naturally when I heard that The Great DeSanitizer had bowed out of the race (conceding with a fake Winston Churchill quote) I thought of John Milton.

No, not the great English poet. Although Florida’s John Milton was reputed to be a distant relative of the guy who penned “Paradise Lost.”

Personally, I feel like I’ve been living in “Paradise Lost” since the anti-Ron decreed that I would henceforth dwell in The Free State of Florida (free to spread or die of Covid, free to hate other Floridians, free to pervert public education in service to willful ignorance….I could go on, but it’s all so depressing.

(Editor’s note: I’ve been calling him the anti-Ron for some time now, so that nobody could possibly confuse him with me.)

Suffice it to say that to pave his way to the White House, The Great DeSanitizer did more damage to my beloved state than perhaps any other governor in Florida history.

And then he hit the campaign trail and promised to make the rest of America just like Florida.

Turns out that even Trump-besotted Republicans shuddered at that!

The good news is that he’s not going to be President. The bad news is that he may go back to spending all of his time and energy rendering the Free State Of Florida even more broken than it already is.

So what does John (not the poet) Milton have to do with all of that?

I’ve been trying to think of a Florida governor who did more damage to Florida than did the anti-Ron. And the only one I could come with was Gov. John Milton (1861-1865).

Milton owned a plantation near Marianna (next to Two Egg, actually). He was bullish on slavery and an early proponent of succession. When he took office, in 1861, his first act was to lead Florida out of the Union…and into disaster.

To give Milton the benefit of a doubt, I am fully prepared to believe that he was the sort of benevolent slave owner who took pains to ensure that his human property acquired valuable job skills…as the anti-Ron’s revisionist Black history narrative would have it.

But I digress.

Suffice it to say that Milton backed the wrong horse (he named his son Jefferson Davis Milton, which should tell you all you need to know about his loyalties). The Union prevailed. And Florida would be decades, even generations, recovering.

Oh, and here’s the other noteworthy thing about Gov. Milton.

In his final message to the Legislature, Milton opined that the Union was “so odious that death would be preferable to reunion..”

Then he retreated to Two Egg and shot himself.

I wish the anti-Ron no such dire fate. But as he gets back to the business of governing our Paradise Lost, I dearly hope that DeSantis will reflect on – and learn from – the lessons of his disastrous presidential run.

His War On Woke was a bust. And it turns out you can’t get to the White House running as The Great Divider.

In that regard perhaps the anti-Ron may yet learn a lesson from John Milton.

No, not the traitor governor. I’m talking about the great poet.

Who wrote: “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”

Trump famously suggested that DeSantis needed a personality transplant. He doesn’t. He needs to connect with his conscience. His better angels, if you will.
DeSantis had one thing right, even if he did use a fake Churchill quote to make his point: Failure isn’t fatal.

But a conscience can be his salvation.

Who knows. Properly applied, it may even help our Ron make Florida the freest state in America in fact rather than in rhetoric.