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What You Missed This Week in La Gaceta

From As We Heard It, by Patrick Manteiga

► Fort Moore has been renamed Fort Benning by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as part of his vow to restore the original names of the forts changed under the Biden Administration.
But Hegseth didn’t really keep his word. Fort Benning was named in 1918 after Confederate General Henry Lewis Benning who was also a leader in the secessionist movement. He voted to have Georgia secede from the union and traveled to Virginia to encourage that state to follow Georgia. The new renaming is for Corporal Fred G. Benning, who was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross during World War I for actions in France.
There’s a lot of this lame effort to undo DEI such as this. General Benning should have never been honored in 1918. Changing the name of the fort in 2023 to Fort Moore wasn’t DEI, it was just common sense.
The Moore being honored in 2023 is Lieutenant General Hal Moore and his wife Julie Moore. Hal and Julie were the inspiration for the 2002 movie “We Were Soldiers.” If the movie is half true, the Moores were incredible people and Hal Moore was a great leader and a true hero for his service in the Vietnam War.
The Moores are white. How is disrespecting these people somehow undoing DEI? In Hegseth’s railing against the 2023 renaming of the forts, he said names like Liberty and Moore were garbage. He said of the renaming, “Like it’s just, it’s garbage. It’s all, it’s just, let’s just crap all over it.”
Hegseth isn’t man or soldier enough to carry Hal Moore’s jockstrap. Hegseth is also as elegant a speaker as he is a leader.
The 2023 renaming of forts was done by a commission that worked hard and thoughtfully in making recommendations of new names. It was a process that took two years and involved many people and was done in the best interests of the military and the country.
Renaming Benning and other forts is being done on the fly by Hegseth without input from others. He is acting like a little king and doing what he wants.(to read more, buy a paper)

► In a similar action to Pete Hegseth’s renaming of the forts, President Trump has undone a small effort of environmentalists to make the world a little better. Trump hates that some beach side communities have banned plastic straws because they sometimes end up in the water where they harm marine life, such as sea turtles that might ingest them. … A story in the Washington Post featured Guy Spinelli, who at the age of 75 put his life’s savings in manufacturing paper straws in Woodstock, Illinois. He sells about $800,000 in straws. He believes he’ll lose 90 percent of his sales due to Trump’s actions. Spinelli voted for Trump.
The paper straw industry is made up by mostly small companies which manufacture them here in the U.S. Trump will hurt all of them. … (to read more, buy a paper)

► Judge Samantha Ward resigned from the bench. She has plans to work with attorneys George Lorenzo and Julie Holt, who recently retired as the public defender. The group wants to do criminal defense and some personal injury. … Ward’s sudden departure was the subject of courthouse gossip this week, but the true story isn’t as interesting as the speculation.(to read more, buy a paper)

► State Senator Randy Fine is attacking government employee unions. His bill would force unions to get over 50 percent turnout of their employees they represent to vote on the union being certified or recertified and then a majority voting in favor of the certification or recertification.
Fine says this legislation would safeguard taxpayers and improve the political accountability of governments unions. Yet, Fine is exempting police and firefighter unions. It seems those unions endorse Republicans while the unions that represent teachers and rank-and-file government workers mostly support Democrats. … (to read more, buy a paper)

From Chairman of the Bored, by Gene Siudut

► … And that’s when I discovered the Dickinson work. While it’s a nice piece, I blasted through it quickly. That’s not because I am a speed reader, but because it’s not a book.
It’s a 90-word poem.
I get the outdoorsy/spring theme of the theme of the recommended books, but with the State’s assault on schools, education, etc. I can’t imagine anyone from the State recommending a 19th century transcendentalist , let alone a poem.
I assume someone just started looking up words associated with spring and came up with the title and recommended it without ever knowing it wasn’t a book, nor its content. And for the record, “Green Eggs and Ham,” which has seven times the amount of words of Dickinsons’s poem.
Full disclosure, “Green Eggs and Ham” only has 50 words, Dr. Suess just used the same ones a lot due to a challenge that he could not write a book using only 50 words. …(to read more, buy a paper)

From The Reasonable Standard, by Matt Newton

► Not long ago, the State Legislature unveiled the Live Local Act. It held great promise: an expeditated, administrative process to vest non-residential land (i.e. commercial and industrial) with residential entitlements.
Rather than have real estate developers navigate the lengthy, very expensive, and often-emotional public hearing process, the Legislature empowered them with a cheaper, expedited and administrative option to add residential units to communities.
Many local governments were appalled.
Because here’s the thing: local governments and their elected officials have historically depicted certain land as non-residential on their long-range planning maps for good reason.
For example, urban planners typically cluster commercial land at major intersections to manage traffic and avoid strip commercial development. Many communities encourage adding residential land to these commercial developments through vertical integration—i.e. adding floors of residential use on top of floors of commercial use. …(to read more, buy a paper)

From In Context, by Doris Weatherford

► Elon Musk believes that the federal budget is full of waste, fraud, and abuse because that’s what he sees when he looks in the mirror: he and his billionaire friends routinely rip off the government, so he thinks that poor people do, too. By his standards, it would be only rational: he has had some $38 billion in federal subsidies for his adventures in electric cars, space exploration, and more. I’m not opposed to such innovation, but I am opposed to the pot calling the kettle black. And I’m delighted to see that at least a few of the low-income Musk/Trump disciples are awakening to how they harmed their individual selves by dancing to the tune of deceptive oligarchs.
The point that many of us have missed is that Republicans didn’t (narrowly) win the election because voters agreed with Project 2025: they won because Kamala Harris lost. They won because many people, sadly including some women, couldn’t bring themselves to vote for a woman, especially a woman of color. The deciding Electoral College difference was in the Rust Belt states, where masculinity is threatened by the long-term underemployment that was created by billionaires such as Musk. …(to read more, buy a paper)

From Silhouettes, an interview with Jane Hernandez, by Tiffany Razzano

► As a University of Tampa graduate, one of Jane Hernandez’s greatest passions is the restoration and preservation of the Henry B. Plant Hall on campus.
For the past 16 years, she’s been a member of The Chiselers, an organization that was founded in 1959 and is dedicated to raising funds – hundreds of thousands of dollars each year – to restore the historic building, and now serves as the group’s president.
Plant Hall was initially built between 1888 and 1891 by railroad magnate Henry B. Plant as the Tampa Bay Hotel. Today, it’s home to classrooms, UT administrative offices and the Henry B. Plant Museum, and is a designated National Historic Landmark.
…(to read more, buy a paper)

From Líneas de la memoria, por Gabriel Cartaya

► Cuando supe de la existencia del libro Jose Martí y las flores (2024), no conocía a su autor y, mucho menos, que vivíamos cerca. Un día me llamó por teléfono y entonces supe que Vilfredo Ávalo Viamontes radica en Port Richey, trabaja en Tampa y tiene otro libro –La floriografia martiana (2025)– donde se extiende, sin terminar, su larga investigación sobre este apasionante tema.
Ávalo Viamontes es de Camagüey, Cuba, donde se hizo profesor, historiador e investigador. Desde allí dio a conocer sus primeros escritos acerca de un campo del conocimiento martiano poco conocido, en artículos como “Descripciones botánicas de Martí sobre las flores”, “Aproximación a la visión martiana en torno a la jardinería” y “Las flores en el corpus de la obra martiana”. Posee un doctorado en Ciencias Pedagógicas y se ha desempeñado como docente en universidades de Cuba, Venezuela y Ecuador. También, ha publicado en revistas como Islas (Cuba), Razón y palabra (México), Tendencias pedagógicas (Madrid) e Historia de la Educación Latinoamericana (Colombia).
En las páginas de estos dos libros de Ávalo, como se expresa en la presentación del primero, se afirma su “utilidad para adentrarse en el fascinante mundo de las flores y su relación con la virtud como parte de la ética y la estética martianas”. Con el ánimo de propiciar que esta obra se conozca, y se reconozca al autor, le solicitamos una entrevista que damos a conocer. … (to read more, buy a paper)

From Briznas culturales, por Leonardo Venta

► Ya está próximo el 45.º aniversario luctuoso de Roland Barthes –que falleciera el 26 de marzo de 1980, varias semanas después de ser atropellado por un vehículo en una calle parisina– y he decidido rememorarle con el siguiente humilde y breve trabajo sobre Mitologías (1957), una colección de ensayos que previamente habían aparecido en Les Lettres nouvelles.
Barthes, crítico literario, sociólogo, semiólogo y filósofo francés, fue uno de los intelectuales más relevantes del pasado siglo. Es considerado responsable de aplicar a la crítica literaria las percepciones surgidas del psicoanálisis, la lingüística y el estructuralismo. Estableció conceptos como el “del placer del texto” y de este como “un cuerpo”, así como el de la “muerte del autor”, entre otros. Es igualmente reconocido por articular la teoría y la práctica de la intertextualidad, así como promover el estudio de los signos culturales.
En el campo ideológico, se destaca por su posición desafiante a las normas establecidas y, por consiguiente, a las clases hegemónicas. Uno de sus aportes más relevantes e interesantes al pensamiento moderno es la nueva valoración que ofrece al concepto del mito. …(to read more, buy a paper)