The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

There’s nothing like reading about the future in the morning paper to wake you right up to Full Alert. This morning, buried among the scintillating stories of the Prince of England’s funeral and more mass murders, was the article about the company here in Washington state that was deploying its mobile lasers to prowl the agricultural fields at speeds up to 5 mph zapping weeds. I know what you’re thinking, probably those Jews in outer space that start forest fires in California, but let’s leave that for the Qanon folks to chew on when they get tired of wondering how the Donald never quite managed to penetrate the Deep State and the assault on the Capitol ended with him retreating to a mansion in Mar-a-Lago.

Part of the article concerned the plight of the poor strawberry pickers and the field workers whose low paying jobs might disappear when Artificial Intelligence Machines could pick apples or harvest cucumbers. Hello? I guess the writer thought maybe we should go back to the happy days of slavery and resume picking cotton by hand. The laser weeders would eliminate the need for pesticides, but hey, maybe that would cut down on oncology doctors. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not excited about a future of drones taking away good paying factory jobs or self-driving vehicles eliminating taxi drivers and Uber folks.

Now I know lasers don’t kill, people kill. And I suspect drones will be given all the protection the NRA can muster for their 2nd amendment rights to keep and bear arms. And if one of the weeding machines runs amok, well, that’s the price we pay for freedom. Just another unfortunate incident of malfunctioning technology, frequent but nothing that should be considered grave enough to ban automatic lasers in our suburbs when dandelions are taking over the fescue.

I was on the campus of the Univ. of Wisconsin in Madison, my old alma mater, down near the cafeteria I used to work at for 3 years, watching these little R2-D2’s at the intersection waiting for the students who had called in their pizza orders to come and pick them up. Pizza delivery folks must be weeping. But at least the boxy white drones weren’t armed with lasers. No tip, buddy? Try a small burst from the rear laser then, maybe you’ll remember next time. And have a nice day, kid.

My suggestion? Carry gratuities at all times. You don’t want to piss off a laser armed drone when they all start to ‘carry’.

Somewhere deep in the bowels of the White House a caged animal paces back and forth, channel changer in clenched hands, howling for attention, howling for his twitter, howling hour after long hour. Imagine a prisoner held without food or water. It’s nothing, NOTHING, like the torture of this miserable creature denied access to Twitter where his every keystroke is available to millions of his minions. Hell has no fury like a Trump without tweets, bet your sweet biddy on that, buddy.

I feel for the man, I really do. No Geneva Convention can help him, no First Amendment will give him access to those lost and locked platforms, no Human Rights Watch will intervene. If this isn’t an enhanced interrogation technique, I don’t know what is beyond 24/7 rap music piped into his cell, drowning out Fox and Friends no matter how loud he turns the volume up on his big screen TV. If this is not torture, what is?

Well, maybe what we endured for the past 4 years. But shouldn’t that give us an enhanced empathy for what he must be going through down in his personal dungeon. The man’s oxygen is attention. He lives for the headline, the latest outrage, the gasps of disbelief. When the time comes for an accounting at the Pearly Gates, all those lies, all those illegal activities, all those attempts to undermine the Constitution will come back to haunt him, but for now, are we to be his judge and jury, no sympathy, no quality of mercy? Couldn’t we maybe let him on some right wing app for a few minutes, something to give him balm in his darkest hour of need? Oh, I know what you’re thinking, he separated parents from their children down at the border, why not give him a taste of that kind of horrendous severance, the man from his social media?

And yet … aren’t we better than some Old Testament eye for an eye revenge, and yeah, I know, it’s one of his favorite passages in his favorite book, but c’mon, we shouldn’t let ourselves descend to that low a level. I know he thinks waterboarding was just fine and it would be easy to inflict the equivalent. But we’re evolved beings, not fighting dogs, not CIA rendition operatives. Although … I would wager a month’s salary he won’t make it to the Inauguration Day ceremony with anything like a semblance of sanity. Not that I’m proposing an office pool. Just sayng…

bubba’s outhouse service