A joust in the kingdom
By Varela
King Carlos Álvarez rules a fiefdom called Miami-Dade, where one of every 12 residents is out of a job, another is getting unemployment benefits with food stamps, and another sleeps under a bridge.
Where students are packed, like sardines in a can, into trailer classrooms without air conditioning in 95-degree days.
Where the biggest hospital – with more patients than beds and ambulances with bald tires – has declared itself bankrupt.
And where the only businesses that make a profit are Medicaid-Medicare fraud and mortgage trickery.
Last May, our King fell in love with a $62,000 German car, because his old vehicle is two years old and had depreciated to less than $40,000 … and we all know that the King must ride a royal horse(power).
This sounds like a cynical joke, but it’s the truth.
Also true is the fact that our King Álvarez bestows six-figure salaries upon his friends in the castle and the counts, marquises and barons of the realm. To his intimate associates he pays two salaries, one here and another in Panama, using phantom payrolls.
But all that could come to an end, because a Knight errant, famous and powerful, has challenged him to a major joust, in which, if the King loses, he loses the throne. In other words, the Knight has decided to remove the King from power.
Multimillionaire Norman Braman, who has made a name for himself in car sales and victories in jousts against big politicians in the fiefdom, has stated publicly that if our county mayor Carlos Álvarez raises taxes (as he has threatened to do), he will lead a campaign to knock him off his steed.
But the angry mob wants more, because the mob is the one that suffers. And it asks that, to halt the King once and for all, he be arrested by his former comrades, the police constables (Álvarez was once their chief) and toss him into jail with the knaves, the crooks, and the disgraced youths.
I have never seen, in a local tournament, so many Hispanic spectators side so staunchly with an Anglo-Saxon Knight in a fight against a Hispanic Caballero.
That’s a symptom that should be taken into account, because the people are siding with Braman the same way (I remember this well) they did in the 1990s, when the Boy Penelas, our first Greater Miami-Dade King, insisted on raising the sales tax by one penny.
Penelas staged the campaign of the year, with frequent trips to the radio and TV stations, utilizing the palace scriveners, pages and jesters, because he handled the press media very well.
But Norman Braman, the local Knight errant, suddenly appeared in a tournament of titans and ran the best campaign of his life.
And he not only wrested the penny tax from Penelas (read: millions of florins) but also pummeled and shook him up so much that the then-King suffered a wounded pride and eventually lost his throne.
Our current King Álvarez should look at himself in a mirror. And he should remember the words of a great politician whose name I don’t remember: “You can fool all the people some of the time, you can fool some of the people all the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time.”
