Meanwhile, reporters and camera crews and obstreperous demonstrators crawl all over the front steps of the building where my spouse works as a staff attorney for the Florida Supreme Court.

The threats keep coming in, via phone, via fax, via e-mail -- threats against the judges, the staff attorneys, their children. The threats, one security guy says, "are getting weirder."

I ask what that means.

"I don't want to know," my spouse says, hanging up before I can ask anything more, which is probably good for all involved. The ethical bonds of the court prevent employees from saying anything other than "No comment" and "Read the statute yourself." If I asked one more time if there's some kind of spousal exemption, no one could be blamed for crushing my skull with a law dictionary.

Bomb threats and kidnapping threats are probably to be expected in any situation like this. I doubt if anything bad will happen to my spouse or my child or anyone affiliated with the court, and I'm equally sure that all over Tallahassee there are people who work in offices -- say, the Secretary of State's Office -- who are laboring under more and weirder threats. That said, from where I sit, there's no "like this" to this situation.

The O.J. Simpson trial happened in Los Angeles, which everyone knows is a loony bin.

The Clinton/Lewinsky scandal happened in D.C., which everyone knows is a loony bin.

The Elián González situation happened in Miami, which everyone knows is a loony bin.

But this is Tallahassee, Fla. I've lived here for four years, and it's no loony bin. Would that it were.

Tallahassee -- where the panhandle meets the pan. Live oaks, pine woods, rolling hills. A strip-malled Southern semi-boomtown, with roads and an airport that have just reached the levels of service they needed to provide 20 years ago. When you drive through for the first time, it's necessary for a local to point out that the otherwise random collection of intersections and three-story buildings is the downtown. It's a city defined by college football, boiled peanuts, smoked mullet and sinister Ken-doll lobbyists. It's defined architecturally by the Old South/New South juxtaposition of the clichéd but lovely old State Capitol building and the new Capitol that looms behind it, which is so ugly you never see it whole on TV -- a 26-story white shaft flanked on each side by a white dome, which seems egregiously phallic.

Tallahassee -- ground zero of the news-gathering world.

I should be less surprised. After all, as an accident of long-superseded demographic logic (Tallahassee is equidistant from St. Augustine and Pensacola, which, when Florida joined the Union in 1845, were the state's two largest cities), this is the capital of the state of Florida. And this year has been nothing if not the Year of Florida.

It was a year that began with Little Elián, the kind of "everyone is wrong" mess that America does better than any nation on earth. All summer and fall, Florida issues defined the tone and agenda for the soporific presidential campaign; few people in my social circles or even generation could give one-tenth of one goddamn about prescription drug benefits or Social Security lockboxes, but Florida was a battleground state represented disproportionately by old people who vote, vote, vote. Which brings us -- o, sweet bird of irony! -- to a well-meaning gesture by a Democratic do-gooder to print up a presidential ballot in BIG TYPE so that the grayheads could read it. Only the ballot spread onto two pages and confused the high-octane bejesus out of those same old people, who intended to decide the election in Gore's favor but will probably wind up deciding it -- the entire national election -- in Bush's.

Of course, Florida isAmerica. I don't blame you for not wanting to own up to us as a microcosm of you. But that cruise ship has sailed, skippy. Florida is governed (as we're all about to be) by one of President Bush's unaccomplished and deeply shallow boys. Like America, Florida's agrarian economy has been replaced by a feed-me, entertain-me, enhance-my-equity, smokestack-free mishmash of amusement parks, healthcare, video chains and surgically enhanced Realtors®. As in the rest of America, the rural people and the urban people regard each other as space aliens. Florida's principal urban areas (Jacksonville, Orlando, Tampa/St.Pete and Miami/Fort Lauderdale) represent, respectively, the aggressively vulgar right-wing New South, the mother of all tourist-traps, the triumph of grim vacuous suburbia over an actual sense of place and an entertainingly corrupt polyglot international urban area.

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