Watching rich locals tangling over a really rich local is what the rest of us locals in West Palm Beach’s cheap seats call popcorn night.
This evening’s entertainment? Air, sir! Big air! Mar-a-Lago air!
Grown men have been known to approach that club’s immigrant groundskeepers, maids, servers and that one guy who got stuck dismantling the oversized martini glass with the nice lady who clearly has a promising future in presidential pole dancing after her turn at Trump’s Gatsby-themed Halloween party.
They approach with tears in their eyes because they lack the $1 million club fee and they are also not a rando Chinese spy wannabe, so cannot just walk up to Trump, only to his staff, and it is to this staff they say, “How lucky you are to breathe this be-best air, and also how lucky that a mascara malfunction has glued Kirsti Noem’s eyes shut to your presence.”
Such air cannot be disturbed.
Of course nothing flies over Mar-a-Lago when Mad King Donald is in residence doing his mad king thing. But the Federal Aviation Administration has quietly ruled that just the memory of his being there is enough to establish a new no fly zone: Now, nothing — not blimps, not balloons, not even quality birds — can intrude in the 2,000 feet above Mar-a-Lago, whether he is puttering about or not.
Not even the tip of a wing of a jet can be allowed to unsettle this privileged air. The tip and the wing and the rest of the many, many jets now detour to lesser air over the homes of nearby Palm Beach billionaires and Intracoastal Waterway multimillionaires and the occasional inland almost-seven-digitaire.
This is sad, and not just because so few Black-legged Kittiwakes get FAA bulletins. Long ago, someone believed that Palm Beach County would never attract anyone beyond the rich (Palm Beach) and their service workers (Everybody else). So, they built Palm Beach International Airport smack dab in the middle of West Palm. How smack dab in the middle? Air Force One pilots can practically pick up a Starbucks drive-thru on their glide path down. I know. I live close enough to watch them try.
PBIA has spent years delicately balancing noise levels to avoid flattening entire neighborhoods.
Now, they are relieved of that burden. Now, pilots can buzz Worth Avenue at will. Breakers resort guests can preview seat selection options from their balcony. Jetwash-induced waves can propel surfers right up to the front door of Palm Beach’s only private island, bought by an Aussie billionaire who does not appear to have politically invested in $Trump crypto, Trump ballrooms or even Trump bibles.
Luckily, Palm Beach has plenty of other billionaires who have hitched their financial wagon to this president’s star and who assume their slavish devotion to Trump Inc. has earned them the right to sleep past dawn. It is the persuasive powers of these folk that the fate of quiet local luxury will depend upon.
Thus has it always been. The environmental privileges afforded to the rich, the access to the very stuff of life — air, water, afternoon macarons at Café Boulud — are different from those afforded to you and me. Take rocketeer Jeff Bezos, whose Blue Origin federal contracts are not at all connected with his switching the Washington Post editorial pages from bright blue to fresh compost. Florida’s Department of Environmental Persecution has blessed Blue Origin’s plan to dump 500,000 daily gallons of wastewater eventually bound for the environmentally sensitive Indian River Lagoon. Sensitive, shmensitive, as someone somewhere must have said.
As it happens, everybody’s favorite snowflake lagoon and whatever Bezos plans to pour into it stops just a few miles short of Mar-a-Lago’s jet-free back lawn, where the only sounds these days are the lapping of the Intracoastal, the rifling of bathroom files, the soft rustling of Epstein’s shade and the shrieks of sleep-deprived socialites who voted Big Red.
More popcorn, please.
Pat Beall is a Sun Sentinel columnist and editorial writer. Contact her at beall.news@gmail.com.
