Whew! Personhood Still Months Away

Haley Barbour is a Person. He is also governor of Mississippi, rightly famous for supporting a redo of April as Not-Winners Month.

By the way, if you have read this far, you are a Person, too.

Oh, no, not a Political Correctness diatribe! No, but you know you are sick of addressing the Chairperson; honoring Joe Paterno as the Sportsperson of the Year; pointing skyward at Superperson;; hiring a Handyperson; spicing things up with a French Person's Outfit and six-inch heels.

(Ignore that last thought. That's just weird.)

Some group named something like Planned Personhood came up with this whole personhood thing and tried, successfully, to get Gov. Haley's vote for an amendment to Mississippi's constitution that may soon be coming to a state near you.

Is Planned Personhood trying to pull a Bill Clinton and redefine “Personhood”? Does the answer depend on what “is” is at the moment is is uttered? Kinda.

Maybe, in Mississippi everyone says “Personhood begins at conception”, but that pretty much has to be it. Sorry, but it sounds forever like a majorly liberal conception, so why did Planned Personhood expect to get more than 43 votes for their amendment in Deep South, Deep Red Mississippi?

In fairness, Planned Personhood looks mighty liberal from here in Naples Bay Village. They only want constitutions and texting conversation to say “life begins at the very moment of fertilization.” Leftist talk, if ever you heard it, at least here. Maybe Planned Personhood is more afraid of Italy than your average investment banker. It is the Catholic Church that has staked out the most right-wing claim: Life begins before birth control is applied or even conceived of, probably in a slightly darkened Walgreens aisle. However that may be translated into English.

The combination of two very liberal-sounding ideas is surely what convinced more than 55% of Mississippi voters who cast ballots to cast out the Personhood amendment. 45% voted for personhood, so give Mississippi credit for some liberalism.

First of all, everyone hates the whole “person” initiative because it was a purely girly idea even before the liberals got a hold of it.

But truthfully, even a layperson's gotta go with the Pope's “life” definition to be really conservative.  Mostly because it is in Latin, the best language for those wanting things the way they used to be.

PIG Baby to Doom Naples Bay Village. First.

Subtitle: Oh, Never Mind.

Lately, there has been much ado about the mythical Naples Bay Village that, really, defines South Naples, Florida. The Brigadoonish Naples Bay Village has been the subject of budget-stressed political infighting so fierce that makes national campaigning look like Herman Cain with his hands in his pockets at all times.

No, wait, lest that sentence be parsed by Rick Perry's campaign, substitute “elbow deep in pizza dough at all times.”

For Naples Bay Village, though, it has been all about evaporating budget dollars, daunting debt refinancing, juicy director salaries and a collapsing hooker-based economy. Forget all that.

Baby PIG is coming.

No, not some County Commission-sponsored Bayshore Road farewell block party with hogs on spits over mortgage bonfires .

This PIG baby spells D O O M.

Antarctica seems pretty far away from a toasty place like Naples, especially when you don't keep a decent-sized globe in your living room because the kids hands get stuck in the frame. You know that Antarctica has penguins skating on it. Maybe some poor navigated alien spacecraft buried two hundred miles down. Nice place to visit, not so much, unless you like to look up at nights for holes in the Ozone. In three layers of nano-polyester-filled body-length parkas.

The omnipresent “Scientists” are touting the new PIG baby as bigger than New York or Berlin, depending on where you banked your Greek bonds. Birthers, forget Hawaii and Indonesia, this is bigger than any lineal descendant of Kenya. It's bigger than Al Gore pushing a book on Letterman.

PIG stands for Pine Island Glacier, Antarctica (there being no Counties or Commissioners in Antarctica, that's the pettiest political subdivision available). Again, far, far away and too frakking cold to even think about. Really?

PIG is calving an iceberg as big as any metropolis this side of Oklahoma City. PIG's baby should crack off by Pi Day or April 1^st of 2012. These Scientists probably hope it crashes into the ocean by New Year's Eve, so they can dual-purpose the champagne.

To quote Al Gore, “Can you say 'Global Warming?'”

Well...

Actually, PIG gave the world a big iceberg back in 2001 when there hadn't yet been an inconvenient hysterical warming movie to carpet in a suitably warm red. And it has happened plenty in the past, but dinosaurs were notoriously uninvolved in the whole greenhouse gas thing, except, maybe, for contributing a few tons of methane after a late dinner.

For Naples Bay Village of South Naples, Florida, though, both political heat and global warmth will probably be watched through the wavy lens of a yard or two of Bay. Baby PIG is going to melt before long and sea-, Gulf- and Bay-levels will all rise. The Republican Economists (they don't actually have scientists anymore) pooh-pooh such concerns, saying that this happens all the time when the Democrats are in power. Democratic Scientists (they don't actually have economists anymore) say “run like hell to Denver... Uh. Wait, run like hell to Pittsburgh! They have more hills inside their city than fries inside their sandwiches!”

Villagers threatening to Occupy Bayshore Road should calm down. Since the 2007-08 credit freeze, Naples Bay Villagers have been treading water, figuratively, awaiting the return of liquidity, living on hope and unpaid condo fees. Now, the flash political threat to its existence and the negative equity of its real estate is meaningless to the Village. Baby PIG is going to melt and... 

You know that liquidity you Villagers so desperately wanted? Over your already upside head.

Brigadoon, at least, got to disappear, neat as an 18-year Scotch, into the romantic mist.

A Mythical Village in South Naples

A couple of Collier County Commissioners, Tom Henning and Georgia Hiller, are rightly skeptical of the very existence of the Bayshore area of South Naples, with its fancy new name, Naples Bay Village. Many are doubtful about the whole South Naples thing, too, assuming south means swamp.

To be fair, many world travelers and Naples residents are confused by the term South Naples and simply reject reports of a place called Naples Bay Village or Bayshore or even of a street by that name. These folks know of a place long-called Kelly Road, famed for its many indoor and outdoor drug marts, cheery red lights and ready bail loans. You can look it up in any Fodor's or follow it on any bargain vacation AAA trip-tik that drops you off at the Naples Botanical Gardens.

To the mind of most of Collier County and the world, there is no Bayshore. They've never seen a Naples Bay Village, unless you mean the nearby near-bankrupt Naples Bay Resort, where you can still get Bang-Bang Shrimp at Bonefish for five bucks on Wednesday; which means you are not at Naples Bay Village. So turn right out of Bonefish and keep going swampish on the Tamiami Trail for a couple miles.

Keenly aware of this recognition problem, a group of Villagers have heroically worked up plans to repurpose the neighborhood as an artsy beatniche well worthy of the name Naples Bay Village: A place where creativity can blossom and live performance centers can rise, unless, of course, it rains a lot. They have done wonders visually, too, for those who eyes do not roll into their heads at the sight of a Big Lots.

To the rare visitor who can actually experience Naples Bay Village, its residents do not mention--much--their one true curse: With real estate values stuck deeper than the bottom of Naples Bay itself, the Villagers can never leave their Village.

The H-monogrammable County Commissioners have certainly visited the region, missed the street signs, the landscaped boulevard and the modern empty lots and found nothing that looks remotely like a Naples Bay Village. All they see is Kelly Road, right where it has always been, running between the Tamiami and a mixed six-pack of Budweiser and night-crawlers from Del's. It is as Kelly as always, conclusive evidence that Naples Bay Village and Bayshore Drive, after the least-noted and briefest of appearances, have disappeared, along with their tax rake-off, for another 100 years.

Longtime residents of the mystical and missing Naples Bay Village, of course, view this disappearance as the blessing of sorts, an escape from petty politics and endless rebranding. They alone know that Kelly Road was probably named for the legendary performer Gene Kelly.

And the Village's real name has always, surely, been Brigadoon.