Now, that was an accomplishment! In short, if Plato ever persuaded Zeus—Plato professed to believe in Zeus—to reincarnate him so that he might return to earth to find the ideal-typical White Anglo-Saxon Protestant woman, he would come here to Miami and pick Mac.
On paper, Ed was an ideal-typical member of the breed himself. Hotchkiss, Yale… tall, six-three, slender in a gangly way… light-brown hair, thick but shot through with glints of gray… looked like Donegal tweed, his hair did… and of course there was the name, his last name, which was Topping. He himself realized that Edward T. Topping IV was White Anglo-Saxon Protestant to the maximum, to the point of satire. Not even those incomparable nobs of snobbery, the British, went in for all the IIIs, IVs, Vs, and the occasional VI you came across in the United States. That was why everybody began to call their son, Eddie, “Fiver.” His full name was Edward T. Topping V. Five was still pretty rare. Every American with III or higher after his name was a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant or had parents who desperately wished he were.
But Jesus Christ, what was some White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, some last lost soul of a dying genus, doing editing the Miami Herald with a name like Edward T. Topping IV? He had taken on the job without a clue. When the Loop Syndicate bought the Herald from the McClatchy Company and suddenly promoted him from editor of the editorial page at the Chicago Sun-Times to editor in chief of the Herald, he had only one question. How big a splash would this make in the Yale alumni magazine? That was the only thing that took hold in the left hemisphere of his brain. Oh, they, the Loop Syndicate corporate research department, tried to brief him. They tried. But somehow all the things they tried to tell him about the situation in Miami wafted across his brain’s Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas… and dissipated like a morning mist. Was Miami the only city in the world where more than one half of all citizens were recent immigrants, meaning within the past fifty years?… Hmmmh… Who would have guessed? Did one segment of them, the Cubans, control the city politically—Cuban mayor, Cuban department heads, Cuban cops, Cuban cops, and more Cuban cops, 60 percent of the force Cubans plus 10 percent other Latins, 18 percent American blacks, and only 12 percent Anglos? And didn’t the general population break down pretty much the same way?… Hmmmh… interesting, I’m sure… whatever “Anglos” are. And were the Cubans and other Latins so dominant that the Herald had to create an entirely separate Spanish edition, El Nuevo Herald, with its own Cuban staff or else risk becoming irrelevant?… Hmmmmh… He guessed he already knew that, sort of. And did the American blacks resent the Cuban cops, who might as well have dropped from the sky, they had materialized so suddenly, for the sole purpose of pushing black people around?… Hmmmh… imagine that. And he tried to imagine it… for about five minutes… before that question faded away in light of a query that seemed to indicate that the alumni magazine would be sending its own photographer. And had Haitians been pouring into Miami by the untold tens of thousands, resenting the fact that the American government legalized illegal Cuban immigrants in a snap of the fingers but wouldn’t give Haitians a break?… and now Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, Puerto Ricans, Colombians, Russians, Israelis… Hmmmmh… really? I’ll have to remember that… How does all that go again?…
But the purpose of this briefing, they tried to tell Ed in a subtle way, was not to identify all these tensions and abrasions as potential sources of news in Immigration City. Oh, no. The purpose was to encourage Ed and his staff to “make allowances” and stress Diversity, which was good, even rather noble, and not divisiveness, which we could all do without. The purpose was to indicate to Ed he should be careful not to antagonize any of these factions… He should “maintain an even keel” during this period in which the Syndicate would be going all out to “cyberize” the Herald and El Nuevo Herald, free them from the gnarled old grip of print and turn them into sleek twenty-first-century online publications. The subtext was: In the meantime, if the mutts start growling, snarling, and disemboweling one another with their teeth—celebrate the Diversity of it all and make sure the teeth get whitened.