This was an excellent year to be a Republican and/or a fan of sludge.
President Barack Obama was largely invisible for most of the year, ceding the majority of his screen time to two inanimate objects incapable of human emotion — Nancy Pelosi’s heavily Botoxed face and the BP Spill Cam.
With such a powerful vacuum created at the top of the political structure, we Americans are unbelievably lucky that what got sucked into it and deposited atop our structures of governance, which are sublimely slimy.
Like most of the other living creatures in the Gulf of Mexico region, by the end of 2010, Floridians found themselves facing many years of sifting through tons of grime, poison and greasy dealings.
Gov.-elect Rick Scott, who Florida residents bravely elected to the highest office in the state in spite of his questionable past (he paid the largest Medicare fraud fines in history and may in fact be He-Man’s archenemy Skeletor), has promised to fix what ails our state with an emphasis on accountability.
Holding people accountable for their actions is how one commonly defines accountability, but a more subtle reading of the word is necessary due to the confining nature of the implicit idea that accountability must deal in some manner with reality.
Accountability in Florida for the foreseeable future must be strained through two layers of conservative cheesecloth, as the new Florida Legislature is so chock full of blindingly white Republican men, it makes the Jim Crow-era legislature look like a rap video.
Defining how accountability will be interpreted in Florida is easy.
All you have to do is break down the word “accountability” to the two root words Rick Scott must think it comprises — “account ability.”
Most animals have meager bank accounts and almost no ability to access large sums of money.
The lack of opposable thumbs means animals would have negligible check-writing skills and therefore are among the least likely to attend the fundraisers and banquets that are the natural habitats Republicans as a species find most hospitable to their unique set of needs (a minimum of nine hours a day under artificial lighting and a climate suitable for a fine Merino wool coat they shed in the summer).
Alongside the less enterprising animals in our state, another group set up for failure in Florida is public school students who are unable to pass standardized tests.
The now-conventional wisdom concerning accountability in Florida is these students, who are disproportionately poor and overwhelmingly disadvantaged, is that they would not have been born poor and disadvantaged if they had any foresight or real drive to succeed.
As money is diverted from schools that house tested failures, maybe Rick Scott and the Legislature can create a work program that employs poor kids who fail the FCAT in somehow rehabilitating the Gulf of Toxic Dispersants.
I hope so, because we’re going to need all the help we can get now and far into the future cleaning up the slime that 2010 hath wrought.
Tommy Maple is an international communications graduate student. His column appears every Tuesday.
