The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I suspect by now you’ve wearied of trying to sleuth out who the op-ed mystery writer was, which ‘high level’ staff or cabinet member of Donald’s dropped the grenade in the middle of the White House. And now you’re wondering who, if any, are the supposed ‘adults’ in the room. Personally, I’ve narrowed it down to one or two. And if you’re like me, you feel secure in knowing that these brave souls are responsible for keeping the President and all the rest of the temporary residents in Clowntown from steering the ship of state straight off the edge of the known world.

We’re in good hands, that’s for sure. While everyone in the Administration is running around with their hair on fire, issuing denials and no mea culpas, these stalwart few are grabbing treaties off the President’s nearly empty desk and hiding the nuclear trigger in the butler’s coat closet. I sleep more soundly now and I bet you do too knowing they’ve put a V-chip in his cellphone that blocks pornography and incoming messages from foreign leaders (with the possible exception of Vladimir). No one, not even the adults, wants to piss off Putin, no pun intended.

These are dangerous days in the Clown Palace. Who can trust who? Who is the spy in the house of love? Everybody and their third cousins are all singing to Bob Woodward the cacophonic symphony of an Inner Circle hurrying to build the Wall or lock up immigrant children or propping up those private colleges that gypped their clientele into thinking their degree was worth something. Many have left in disgrace, victims of their own hubris and greed, pigs at a very big trough too gluttonous to believe anyone would begrudge them the perks of Louis the Fourteenth. Certainly not their Republican brethren, hyper-ventilating to get their agenda rammed through the sausage grinder before the mid-term blue wave sends a tsunami crashing down on their hopes and dreams. They’ll pay a terrible price for casting a blind eye to the antics of their leader, but not before the courts are stuffed with their ilk and the economy is dragged down by trade wars and tariffs. All we can say is thanks. Thanks to the adults in the room. Thanks for hiding the toys and the marbles from the other kids. Lord only knows how much worse it might’ve been….

Amazon, those pesky little dudes whose only dream is to control the entire world, submitted an idea to the Patent Office for a cage that sits atop their robot factory assemblers that can carry a human being. Now, in all fairness, the idea is to protect us homo sapiens from being run over on the warehouse floor by these scurrying machines intent on rounding up our orders. They can send a flesh and blood being into the maw of the warehouse on top of one of these gizmos safely encased in a wire cage where, presumably they won’t be roadkill for the robots. The office will decide if this is a unique enough invention that it can be patented to Amazon.

I suspect the humans who work in the distribution centers of Amazon already feel like they’re caged. But the patent office may find this new wire pen distinct and patentable. Maybe you’re like me, the idea of a cage-carrying robot with one of our species penned like a monkey to its headless shoulder is, well, disconcerting. I know, it’s for our protection. But that’s what the automated voice on our phones says when they inform us we’re being recorded. It’s for our own good. And you believe that, right? Even chickens are getting freed from their cages these days of touchy-feely. But Amazon wants to haul us around the warehouse in one.

We’re all so busy mistrusting the government in this fact-free world we’ve tunneled into that we maybe missed the bigger threat. Amazon, Google, Facebook, all these tech-types rushing toward the future fast as their algorithms and artificial intelligences can take us. Somewhere along their digital highway, humans seem to have been bumped to the back seat of their self-driving vehicles. Most of us are happy enough, kind of like kids with their x-boxes in the back of the SUV, so long as we have our pacifiers. Give us an I-pad and a DVD player, leave the driving to Them.

I just worry the day will come when the door of the vehicle doesn’t open. Or worse, we won’t really care….

I am not Lodestar, let me say that right off the get-go before I’m got gone. And yes, I will take a lie detector test if the President asks for one. The trouble for the Donald, of course, is that we all might flunk that test. We all think the guy is mentally deranged. And there seems to be no way to get him sedated, shackled or impeached before he does irreparable harm.

Now we have the spectacle of a White House full of spies and moles and leakers. Everyone is suspect and between you, me and the New York Times, we’re all guilty. We’re all cowards. We’re all claiming to be patriots. Welcome to Clowntown. The Volkswagen keeps filling up with more, impossibly more, all those cabinet members and staff, one after the other crawling into that tiny space with big shoes and rubber noses, how in hell can it hold us all?? I didn’t write that op-ed piece, we all testified. Not me. No, Mr. President, I wouldn’t say that out loud. At least not until you leave the room.

Clowntown sleeps fitfully these dark days. Was it him? Could it be her? Did that Bible thumping Pence, he of the ‘lodestar’ phrase, pull off the palace intrigue of the century? Will he poison his boss’s Big Mac next? The Republicans call the perpetrator a coward and if anyone would know what cowardice is, well, step right up and hop in that Volkswagen, boys, it’ll hold a thousand clowns .

It’s a circular firing squad, a Ringling Brothers Big Top Tent Show, a Gun Expo and a Revival Meeting at the AA weekly all rolled into one. The Greatest Show on Earth, Ladies and Gents, playing nightly on Netflix and Amazon Prime!! With no net beneath these high flying acrobats, watch their death-defying leaps across logical space!! How can you NOT watch? How long can they escape the plunge?
Who will be the next to fall? Who will take their place? Who do you believe? Who really cares anymore? The Show is Everything. And the Show Must Go On …. Step right up! Step right up! I did not write that op-ed. I am not Lodestar. I think it was the guy on the trapeze. Or maybe the last clown that got in the Vee Dub. Does it matter? Keep your eye on the Ring Master. You paid your money, take the ride. Step right up, it’s the Greatest Show on Earth. Clowntown, Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls! Like nothing you’ve seen before. Like nothing you’ll see again. Step right up!

The Donald hosted a dinner for a group of prominent evangelicals at the White House the other day and warned that if they don’t get out and vote for Republicans, there will be blood. There will be violence. There will be a return to the Dark Ages of integration. Dark times, indeed! The good and righteous reverend of one of the largest Southern Baptist megachurches in the country, Bob Jeffress, when interviewed and asked how a good Christian could vote for Trump, a philanderer, a serial liar, a bully President, answered first that Trump was more moral than Hillary Clinton and second he was, like all of us, a sinner. And if we’re all sinners, where’s the moral line?

I’m glad I’m not a member of this guy’s flock. If everyone is equally a sinner (except of course Hillary Clinton, who is a huge sinner), how do we judge the differences between, say, a serial killer and a shoplifter? Forgiveness, no doubt. Repentance and forgiveness. Not that the Donald is repentant or asking Rev. Jeffress for forgiveness, much less the Lord God Almighty.

Now, I’m all for forgiveness. Say you’re sorry and apologize for those murders, it’s okay from now on. But golly gee, don’t ask me to vote for you as President. Not when you keep doing all the things you say you didn’t do and refuse to stop, much less apologize for. And Reverend, one more thing: some of us aren’t serial transgressors. Some of us are pretty decent human beings. Some of us don’t quite fit the category of Sinner. Not that I would be the right one to cast the first stone….

I guess what the evangelicals really believe is the End justifies the Means. And if Donald J. Trump is the vehicle to put the Christian God back in the courthouse and our schoolrooms, well, sir, he must be an instrument of the Lord who, as we have too often been told, works in mysterious ways. The Path of Righteousness for these folks is a 10 lane interstate if you want prayer back in our courthouses and the 10 commandments in stone out front at the entrance. And don’t forget the Nativity Scene at Christmas. This is what the Lord wants. He wants a state religion, not the perversion of a polytheologic universe where we have the right to believe what we want without persecution.

The Christian Taliban think otherwise. And now they have their crusader in the White House. Fine. We’ll weigh in on that next election. In the meantime, don’t hand me that nonsense about all of us being sinners. Hypocrisy may not be a sin, but it doesn’t feel compatible with what we used to call Truth.

The Commander in Chief tweeted out today that Google was biased against him, all those searches that turn up negative stuff on him, only proving that the monolithic search engine is nothing but a left wing conspiracy. Other than Fox News, Breitbart, Infowars, Russian bots and some neo-Nazi blogsites, the entire world is out to get him. So unfair! More unfair than at any other time in the history of the modern world. Maybe even before.

You got to feel for the little guy, cornered like a possum in the tree top he thought would save him. The most powerful man in the world and he acts like a 6 year old punk with his hand in the cookie jar. It’s enough to make you feel sorry for him, this mess he’s gotten himself into when all he wanted in the first place was to bolster the brand. TRUMP. Synonymous with wealth and prestige. Trump Steaks, Trump Hats, Trump Tower, Trump Urinal Soap. President? Well, surprise or not, all the better to sell the brand. Who knew being Leader of the Free World could be so hard?

And a lot harder when half his days are spent strategizing about those illegalities he doesn’t think are really criminal. You don’t like the news, call it fake. You don’t like Google, call em biased. You don’t like the rats who snitch on you before jumping ship, say it shouldn’t be legal to get immunity. You don’t like people who criticize you, don’t lower the flag when they die. Only 36% of the electorate approve of the man’s presidential stint and over half want him impeached, according to the fake news’ polling today. These are tough times for the Man in the High Tower. Tougher yet for those of us down on the ground.

His accomplices are singing like canaries and making deals with prosecutors now that they see the hounds closing in. Mueller keeps digging, corroborating evidence is piling up, the Trumpster’s personal attorney spent 30 hours testifying. You don’t believe all this, Google it up. Oh, right, never mind. Those negative stories, they’re just fake facts….

The slab showed up unannounced, a 4 foot by 4 foot concrete square sitting at the edge of the little park I caretake, a mystery to me. Maybe the county had decided to bring in artwork, who knows, maybe a commemorative sculpture of me, Ranger Daddle. I know, not too likely given the fact the county may not know the park even exists or if they do, who is doing the maintenance. But a mystery, like winning the Lottery, is mostly about firing our greedy imaginations.

A week went by … then two. A month. No bronze Skeeter appeared one morning. No plaque. Nothing. Just that square of concrete poured apparently by hand in the dark of night either by aliens or South End tricksters. I mowed around it and pondered its meaning the way astronauts in 2001: A Space Odyssey pondered the Black Obelisk, knowing only that some intelligence had brought it, who knows whether for good or ill. All I knew was I wouldn’t be moving it, not a half ton of concrete.

After a few weeks I stopped paying attention to my mystery square, stopped guessing what its Maker intended, stopped seeing it at all … until a few days ago when the phone booth showed up, one of those rectangular booths from a time just before the cellphone made public telephones obsolete. Clark Kent would have to change in a McDonalds bathroom hereafter and every citizen, no matter how impoverished, would need to purchase a personal phone and a plan.

And yet … here was the Last Phone Booth on the South End, possibly in America, maybe even the world!! In my park. Under my care. Which, considering I do not own a cellphone, is Totally Apropos, as if the Gods of Wire Transmission or the Ghost of Alexander Graham Bell had anointed me Keeper of the Dial Tone.

Of course it arrived without a working phone, just a payphone with no incoming line off the street. Most gifts, if you think about it, come with strings attached. Mine did, but not the useful ones. Nevertheless, I’m the Ranger, an American Dr. Who with his very own nonfunctioning Tardis. I would find a Way, count on it, because that’s my job. The concrete square was, it turns out, my new purpose, better, I suspect, than winning the Lottery where the end of my days would be filled with South Enders begging for loans.

John McCain died this weekend, a Senator for six terms, a two time Presidential candidate, a man who worked both sides of the aisle even after that was considered unacceptable, a man who was a prisoner of war in Viet Nam, a war he volunteered to serve in as pilot until his plane was shot down over Hanoi. Say what you want, the guy spent his entire life serving his country. We now have the spectacle of the current Prez of the United States refusing to pay any sort of homage to the man he declared wasn’t a war hero. Getting captured, he famously sniped, wasn’t his idea of a hero. Probably being killed makes you ineligible for honors too.

This is what constitutes leadership in America these days, the idea that government service is for leeches and suckers, that self-sacrifice is for losers, that John McCain was no role model in these narcissistic times. The flag that was flying half mast at the White House was raised half a day later, symbolism be damned. No statement honoring the man would be forthcoming. Bury the dead in the swamp at the back of the building, the Lilliputians are running things now.

I don’t know what Donald J. Trump’s heroes would look like. If there are any other than the man he admires in the mirror. I doubt he has any idea what the definition would include. And the folks who think HE’S one, well, they must not have much of a clue either. It’s a sad day for all of us. A country that cannot mourn for its best and brightest, that refuses to honor their sacrifice and their service, you tell me if that country is worth any of our loyalty. Today, after a tremendous backlash at raising the flag over the White House, our hero decided to lower it once more. Far as I’m concerned, he can keep it lowered until the day he leaves the building once and for all.

Down here in the hoary valleys of the South End, we represent a striking cross-section of Trump’s America, meaning, the Have vs Have Not Society where Income Inequality prowls the hollers or hides behind gated security fences. I’ve got neighbors who live in mold-spored single-wides slowly rotting into the weeds living just a stone’s throw from Microsoft executives buying million dollar bluff homes as weekend vacation retreats. I used to think this diversity was healthy. I don’t mind rubbing shoulders with the fabulously rich any more than I do my fellow unemployed.

But lately the trend is decidedly against the poor. Rents are skyrocketing, jobs are scarce to non-existent, cost of living is going up, the rich keep getting richer and the rest, good luck to ya. Wages never budge upward but CEO pay is astronomical. The Great Recession didn’t hurt the wealthy. Wall Street got bailed out but not the poor. Even the Democrats abandoned the working stiff in favor of the middle class while they courted the corporate elite.

Capitalism never guaranteed income equity and now in the 21st Century, democracies around the globe are embracing right wing populism. Fascism is back in style and it’s popular, governments and corporate interests hand in hand. Karl Marx wasn’t too far off in his analysis, just his solution.

My neighbors aren’t particularly political and insofar as economic analysis goes, they’re happy so long as they can manage the monthly credit card minimum. One of my pals has a bumper sticker that reads: TRUMP: RESISTANCE IS FUTILE. He’s living in a travel trailer. If Trump is the solution, god help him.

America was spozed to be the Land of Equal Opportunity. But folks can see now it’s not. They’re being left in the dust of the digital age and corporate hegemony, they’ll never get ahead, they’ll never share in the Facebook dividends — and they’re pissed. They’ll vote for anyone who pretends to care about their plight, a Trump, a Mussolini, a Duterte. They’ll listen to their lies and they’ll find out too late they’ve been duped. So will the rich. Trump serves their needs for the short term, we’ll see what Apple and Google think when the coup d’etat is a fait accompli.

Resistance, I hope, is not futile. The issue to fight for is income inequality. We’re seeing what unchecked capitalism leads to and sadly, we ain’t seen nothin yet.

The great joy of living in the Information Age — or the Information Glut, more accurately — is that every news flash, gossip tidbit, sports score, you-name-it, comes at you via everything from your cellphone, laptop, tablet, TV or microchip in your head. Whether it’s faux news or viral rumor, well, who knows? Or these days, who cares?? The real point is that your time is full up, boredom is a thing of the past, information is flying at you at the speed of light … or a Trump tweet.

If you feel overwhelmed, welcome to the future. If you no longer have time to cook dinner, plant a garden, learn to play an instrument or read a book, you’re in good company. After all, this isn’t rural Iowa circa 1850. It’s the New Age. 21st Century. Modernity run amok. Remember when we were all ga-ga about those ‘Time-Saving Devices’? Copiers, computers, answering machines, cellphones, electric knives — all to free you up for more important stuff. Like Facebook. Instagram. E-bay shopping.

I know … sure beats the horrors of self-improvement or learning new hobbies or searching for wisdom and enlightenment. How many LIKES on your post? Easier than meditating or studying or practicing. The virtual world is your oyster now. Maybe not heaven or paradise, but it sure takes your mind off those for awhile and comes a close 2nd. Or 3rd.

Who needs a guru when you got Google? God is just an algorithm now, Plato’s a poor boob looking at shadows in a cave. So roll over Socrates, let Wikipedia give you the news. The news is as phony as a 4 dollar bill, most of it, and the time we ‘saved’, worth about the same. Artificial intelligence is right around the corner and by then we’ll gladly take any intelligence that’s offered. Just so we won’t have to do the thinking….