Beach boycott?

This is a big change for a big fella. He’s just above 200 pounds now, and justly proud of himself.

“You can stop calling me a fat-cat,” he observed, as if daring one of us to call him exactly that. The temptation is, in fact, still tempting; we suspect his income as a stockbroker (“investment adviser,” he prefers to style it) is still in excess of two grand per pound. But it’s his health that he, and we, are delighted to see improving.

“The target’s 180, maybe 185,” he said.

Either would be, as he would readily acknowledge, about a hundred pounds fewer than he was carrying at his heaviest, far too much weight even for his 6-2 height. As a constant critic of government entitlement programs, his bulk brought him his share of (mostly) affectionate ribbing from us, given that obesity is the principal driver of Medicaid spending in Arkansas and every other state. He’s well to the right of us on almost every issue, but that’s politics, and the rest of us could be wrong, after all, and he’s impossible to dislike. So we compliment him, and when he orders the spinach salad with vinaigrette dressing (“No fat, right?” he emphasizes to the server) we tease him not for his fireball devotion to unfettered capitalism — he’d make Ayn Rand swoon — but for his discipline: In the past his customary midday meal would be a foot-long chili dog with a side of chiliand- cheese fries.

Yep, it’s our lunch bunch, the occasional gathering of some guys who have more than a passing interest in politics and policy. We’ve not had a chance to assemble since late spring. The kids, the grands, family vacations. And Labor Day weekend, right around the corner, that last taste of true summer. The west coast, the mid-Atlantic coast, the Gulf Coast. Except — “No Florida, and I’m gonna tell them why,” said the attorney we call Big D. “Them” is the agency through which he has rented a beach house near Panama City every August for years. And the “why” is not just Gov. Ron DeSantis, says Big D, but the “squirrely” laws enacted by the Sunshine State’s legislature, “at least as big a bunch of rightwing kooks” as the Arkansas General Assembly.

“So, where you going? Alabama?” grinned the insurance guy. “Mississippi? Louisiana?”

He’s about a seven on the one-to-10 conservative to liberal scale, our insurance buddy, which in today’s climate could equal a nine, perhaps a ten. And his recitation of beach states (he threw in both Carolinas, as I recall, and maybe Texas) was not only a playful needling but an assessment, accurate to a T, of the political atmosphere in what, decades ago, was termed the New South. Florida, with a native son seeking his party’s presidential nomination and a legislature eager to assist him, may have set the conservative, culture war pace. But every other state south of the Mason-Dixon line, ours included, is in lockstep.

So, assuming he intended to boycott DeSantis-land, where did Big D propose to take his clan? Hey, August is half gone. Time’s running out.

Big D was quiet for a moment, sulking. “Lake Chicot,” he mumbled.

Well, that’s a dandy place, one of us deadpanned, but “I didn’t know you could build a sand castle there.” Big D has a couple of grands who aren’t even in kindergarten, is always displaying the latest snaps of them.

Our stockbroker, quite more in sympathy with DeSantis than with Big D, was smiling over his platter of spinach. He put a gentle elbow in Big D’s arm. “You’re gonna do a Bud Light on Florida, huh?” DeSantis helped drive down Bud Light sales after that trans label business. You read about it. He hasn’t had the same success with Disney. You might not have read about it.

“Let’s see: There’s a dozen of you, maybe 20, right? And you’ll spend your three, four, five grand somewhere else and bust DeSantis’s budget, right?” Big D was nodding — yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, OK, enough, lay off.

I had nothing against southeast Arkansas, but “How about the Buffalo?” I suggested, thinking of that marvelous sandy shoreline at Pruitt and the family of my youth. Newton County is a marvel; you’ll all love it. But he knew that. Just as we all knew he and his family would be on a beach in Florida in a couple weeks.

Now it was the retired federal agency manager speaking up, on the sympathetic side. He’s sometimes to the left of the insurance guy, if usually by a point, no more than two; but he went for Reagan in ’84 and Bush I in ’88. A southern moderate.

“Kind of frustrating,” he smiled softly.

Big D nodded, shrugged. Our stockbroker just let it go.