Watching Bad Bunny’s extraordinary tribute to America In Full on Sunday night, I could only thank goodness for small favors.
In this case I was thankful that the Super Bowl hosting this amazing American’s tribute to America In Full wasn’t taking place in Miami.
How embarrassing would that have been?
Miami owes a huge part of its very identity to generations of Latino-Americans very much like Bad Bunny.
But it has the misfortune to be located in a state that has become so churlish about the rich heritage and amazing diversity of its people that it will no longer allow residents to take a driver’s license exam in anything but English.
And never mind that Floridians were speaking Spanish a couple of centuries before anybody came around uttering the King’s English.
Yeah, like our deranged Village Scold In Chief, I also didn’t understand many of the lyrics Bad Bunny was singing. But I got the message.
And unlike The Donald I didn’t consider the show “an affront to the Greatness of America.” To the contrary.
Rather, I blamed my own slothfulness for having grown up and lived in Florida for most of my life without bothering to learn Spanish.
You know, Florida’s mother tongue. (Unless you count Calusan or Tumucuan or such.)
As for Florida’s Great DeSanitizer: The Guv of a state with more than 4 million Hispanic speaking voters was musing on X that the American heavy metal band Metallica would have been a great Super Bowl halftime act.
Anyway, these days our anti-Ron has his nose out of joint because a coalition of human rights organizations issued a “travel alert” to foreign tourists planning to come here for the upcoming FIFA World Cup games. It warned that they are liable to be “detained, questioned, held in immigration custody, or removed from the United States…”
One of the FIFA host cities being Miami. How embarrassing for Miami.
The Great DeSanitizer was not amused, He posed on social media: “How many years have left-wing groups pulled this travel advisory stunt vis-a-vis Florida?”
Of course, this is the same guy who used a series of phony-baloney “emergencies” to unilaterally build the only state-funded undocumented migrant concentration camp in the United States.
Talk about a stunt.
To date, our anti-Ron has spent nearly $600 million in state taxpayer funds on Alligator Alcatraz and related emergency-driven anti-migrant purges.
Not to worry, though. He keeps saying that the feds are gonna reimburse us.
And we all know how reliable The Donald is when it comes to paying his bills.
The check’s in the mail, Florida.
Apropos of nothing at all: As I was writing this I was sitting at the bar in a GNV restaurant. In the kitchen I overheard a lively discussion about the racism and disrespect routinely experienced by the Hispanic-American employees working there.
“I’m Puerto Rican and I’m proud,” one young woman said. “But I’m getting sick of this.”
I said nothing because, well, I wasn’t in the kitchen.
Nonetheless, I too have grown sick of the racism that America’s Village Scold In Chief and Florida’s Great DeSanitizer have been trying to jam down our throats for a very long time now.
Liked I said before, friends and neighbors: For all practical purposes I stopped following popular music after the ‘80s because my cranial play list was packed full.
But even with the language barrier, I understood exactly what Bad Bunny was saying and exactly what he intended us too understand.
Ain’t that America? (Glad I got to quote John Mellencamp, 1983.)
Hey, look who I ran into at GNV’s Grove Street Market the day after the Super Bowl. I mean, what are the chances?
FreeGNV 