WaPo: “The Gulf. How American is it, anyway? There are a few ways you can look at it.
You can look to the borders, which means looking to history.
“Do we wish to acquire to our own Confederacy any one or more of the Spanish provinces?” Thomas Jefferson mused to President James Monroe in an 1823 letter, as if the Western Hemispherewas a West Elmcatalogue. “I candidly confess that I have ever looked on Cuba as the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of states.” During his own presidency,Jefferson had secured free access to the “Gulph of Mexico” when he bought New Orleans in the Louisiana Purchase. Buying Cuba, Jefferson wrote Monroe, would expand control over commerce in the gulf and “fill up the measure of our political well-being.” Americans never got Cuba, but they did get Texas, and so they control about 1,680 miles of gulf coastline today.
You can look to the water.
In Biloxi, Mississippi, Will Ladnier tows junk boats out to the sound and scuttles them. If you get them to sink the right way — right side up, Ladnier knows the trick — they’ll create new reefs to replace coral that has died because of tides rising too quickly from climate change and other causes. ….
Perhaps the most American thing about the Gulf Coast is that it is bookended by Margaritavilles— the Margaritaville restaurant on Duval Street in Key West, Florida, and the Margaritaville resort in South Padre Island, Texas. “The whole world would not know what the Gulf Coast was if it weren’t for Jimmy Buffett,” says Karen Poth, executive director of the National Maritime Museum of the Gulf of Mexico in Mobile, Alabama, which has a new Buffett exhibit in the works. (Yes, yes — the name, the name. It’ll cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to swap“Gulf of America” into all the “Gulf of Mexico” signs and audio and visual references at the museum, Poth estimates. She’s waiting for guidance from city officials.)
Or you can simply look to Panama City Beach, where you’re likely to glimpse a familiar figure in flip-flops and Coppertone.
“You will see Bubba — well,I probably shouldn’t use that name, but, a hardworking guy, say from Mississippi, okay, or Alabama. He’s not making a lot of money, but he’s working his ass off, taking care of his family all year long, and then for one week, he pays out the ass to stay in a condo on the beach,” says Ron Sturgis, a retired naval officer who lives in the area. “And his family, they live like millionaires, for that one week a year. For them, that’s the American Dream.”
Everyone else has to find their own place in the gulf and hang on for dear life.”