If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the garden. One hour is my max time in 90 degrees.

Last week, Ron DeSantis, with a straight face, told reporters he had had nothing to do with the Florida Board of Education’s new curriculum peddling a softer side of slavery. “I wasn’t involved with it. I didn’t do it … It was not anything that was done politically.”

The day before Donald Trump was indicted last week for trying to obstruct the 2020 election, his FEC reports revealed the extent to which he uses his donors’ money, rather than his own, to pay his lawyers.

On May 19, country singer Jason Aldean released “Try This in a Small Town,” a song from his upcoming album. The song contrasts big city violence with small town law and order: “If you’re looking for a fight, try that in a small town.” The video was even more graphic, contrasting a performance clip of Aldean singing and playing in front of the Maury County courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee with news footage of city slickers rioting, looting, and burning the American flag.

Watching politicians like Ron DeSantis ignore climate change while the nation cooks is like being trapped in the backseat of a car - windows up and locked - with a crazed driver who won’t stop smoking. Coughing falls on deaf ears. Complaining makes him chain-smoke. Explaining the science of carcinogens and lungs makes him twitch and light cigars - simultaneously.

Recently my friend Fred Fejes, professor emeritus at Florida Atlantic University and an authority on Florida’s LGBTQ History (“Gay Rights and Moral Panic”), delivered a lecture titled “Queer by the Beach: The History of the Fort Lauderdale LGBT Community.”