The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

No doubt you were as cheered as me recently to hear the news that a lab had successfully cloned a monkey. Human clones can’t be far behind. Probably all Kardashians. Or maybe Lottery winners. Sure not going to pick genes from losers. It’s a treat to live in a Brave New World. Clones, artificial intelligence, robots, drones, Facebook, cellphones, heated car seats — the future sure looks bright!

What I think is the genie’s out of the jar and he’s not granting three wishes. The guy who cloned the chimps said he can’t imagine cloning humans, too dangerous given the high failure rate. Monkeys okay, they can use them as experiments and save the ‘real’ ones. I’m kind of wondering what happened to the ‘failures’. Did they live, any of them? The humans? Will we keep the botched clones? Will we make a separate category of Homo Sapien? Can we expel them as illegal immigrants? Would you let your daughter marry one? Dr. Frankenstein is working on one now, you know it, I know it, Igor knows it. Just a matter of time before he succeeds, less for him to fail, then we get to make decisions afterwards.

Will we use them as the new scapegoats? Make them use separate bathrooms? Substitute them for crash test dummies? All kinds of great potential. Personally, I figure we’ll opt for bright robots. Cloned people? Passe’. Be like buying eight tracks over I-pods, maybe a nostalgia market, but not real big. And of course, the narcissists. Breed a few more of themselves. Nothing in the constitution yet that says multiple Donald Trumps can’t run for president.

Tim Cook, the poor schmuck running the trillion dollar company called Apple, sat down for an interview yesterday after introducing an app that would let Apple users monitor their addictions. In a speech earlier he had told appsters how Apple was a company dedicated to making humanity better. Google states it somewhat differently, Do No Evil, but in the end all these techno-innovators are convinced they are the salvation of the world. Asked if he thought his company had addicted millions to his device, Tim took umbrage. No, not at all. His device gave them freedom.

Earth to Tim, then why do they need an Apple app that tells them how much they use it? Just another product, he said, that gives its customers more flexibility. And as far as addiction was concerned, well, he told his interviewer, he was not a clinician. He also mentioned how surprised he was at his own time spent on his marvelous device, something he really hadn’t noticed previously. Why he needs the app, I guess.

I’m not a clinician either, but I doubt if I need a degree in psychopathology to diagnose the folks sitting at a dinner table who manage to operate their thumbs incessantly and only occasionally, if at all, join in a conversation. Or the people in a checkout line who work the phone while their groceries are bagged. Or the ones in aisle 8 calling a spouse to see if the mayo is the correct brand. Watch how many people jump in their car and immediately pick up the phone. When’s the last time you actually had a conversation with a kid who didn’t have earpods jammed in or who wasn’t checking text messages? I haven’t had one since about 2006.

Addiction? Oh baby, we’re addicted. We’re addicted to our devices. We’re addicted to TV. We’re addicted to video games and email and text messaging and Facebook. We walk around all day with the syringe plunged deep into our brain and the guyz who brought us this smack say they’re not clinicians. Neither is the heroin dealer in my neighborhood.

They’ve rewired our brains. They’ve transformed our society. They’ve altered our politics and they’ve pulled the rug on democracy. Let’s imagine, like Tim, that this is for our own good. That this will be a brave new world. That with his device we’re so much more free. But I’m not buying it, literally or figuratively, and yeah, I know, I’m going to be left in the exhaust. There’s an old Ry Cooder song that comes to mind that probably applies to me, my very own app: The Very Thing That … Makes You Rich … Makes Me Poor. I know, Tim, you’re not an economist either.

Our Fearless Leader showed the lying press the big fat letter Kim Jong Un sent to him and mentioned how it was a very interesting letter. What, the lying press asked, did the North Korean dictator have to say? The Prez was in a jovial mood so he taunted them with it. I bet you would, he said, and maybe, just maybe, if they said pretty please with sugar on it, he might tell them. Later.

This pesky press! Always digging. Always prying. Always lying. Why not keep it from them, this missive from the Koreans over the summit coming in less than two weeks to determine the fate of the peninsula? Ha ha, I bet you’d like to know, you curious cats. But I’m the President of the Once Free World and I’ll let you in on this little secret in my own good time. So there.

Course, the lying press wouldn’t leave it alone. No, they kept asking, kept bugging him, kept repeating the question, what’s in the letter, what’s in the envelope? So finally, to shut them up, geez, how much pestering can a man take!, he told them he hadn’t opened it yet. And needless to say, the lying press howled, the lying press hollered, the lying press said what an idiot!

He’ll read it later. He’ll let them know in his own good time what it says. But meantime, oh yeah, the lying press are having fun with this. No wonder the Prez hates a free press. They turn everything around, twist it this way and that, make him look like a fool. He said it was an interesting letter. A very interesting letter. Well, he didn’t say he’d read the damn thing, now did he? Just that it was a very interesting letter. Later on, someone will read it. Probably not him, not something that fat and obviously more than a tweet’s worth of words, he doesn’t have time for excess verbosity, whaddaya think?

Meanwhile the Summit is on. The agenda is no doubt being set right now. Great things will be resolved, he says. Might take more time than one meeting, we’ll just have to wait and see. Me, I just hope Kim Jong Un didn’t write to cancel it. Be a shame to open that letter and get the bad news the day before….

Televangelist Jesse Duplantis is asking his followers for some donations to help him buy his fourth jet. $54 million, to be exact. The old jets, well, they can’t reach the far corners of the globe without refueling and that takes time and time means Lost Souls. He’s doing the Lord’s work and the Lord wants him to have that jet.

As a newly ordained minister, I’m driving down to Oakland to marry my friends who needed a man of the cloth to officiate. Probably have to drive my old pickup, who knows if I’ll make it without a breakdown. You readers out there will certainly understand if I call out to you for some tithing to old Revered Skeeter, a few pesos to help him purchase a small turbo prop to get me to the church on time. Nothing extravagant. Oakland’s not that far. When the demand for gay marriage officiating gets hot and the need to reach Fiji or Hawaii or the Bahamas or the Canaries means I’ll need something non-stop to tend to the flock, I’ll come back with further requests.

Prosperity preaching, the quaint notion that God rewards the successful. The more you got, the more God must love you. A $54 million dollar Falcon 7X luxury jet with a global range, well, God might just be thinking of making you a disciple of his Son ever comes back to lay waste to the earth. If you’re poor and haven’t got a pot to piss in, well, maybe you need to try a little harder, eh? A good start would be a small (or large) donation to my turbo prop. Might even be able to buy one of Jesse’s old jets before my Oakland gig. Later we can trade it in for an upgrade.

But wait! If you act now, Skeeter Ministries will send you an autographed Jesus bobble head that velcros right to your dashboard, a constant affirmation of the Lord’s approval while you drive your used car, the one that with a few more donations should shortly become your New car. Act now, Heaven is yours for the asking.

Patriotism Redefined

Call me a commie and paint Lenin’s goatee on me now that none other than the President himself has called those of us who didn’t applaud his sedated State of the Union speech unpatriotic. He said this week those football players in the NFL who won’t stand up for the national anthem ought to be fired or leave the country. I guess, like those protestors, I’m guilty as charged. I even think it’s okay for them to stay in the country.

It used to be a free country and I, for one, miss it. When I was a school teacher and my high school played the Star Spangled Banner over the loudspeaker, I didn’t put my hand over my heart. I didn’t stand up. My rural schoolkids asked why. I said because it’s a free country. Course, I didn’t teach there long. They were free to hire someone else and they certainly did, probably a teacher who took a pledge.

I’m not really much of a commie. Or even a two bit radical. I just don’t like people telling me what to do or what to believe. Seems sort of un-American to me. I came of age in the ‘60’s, not the Eishenhower 50’s. The President wants to make America great again, code for turning the clock back to white male Protestant ethic. He wants the #MeToo movement off his back. He hates the Black Lives Matter folks. He’s talking lately about God, this from a man who has no church, whose God is his mirror, who lies incessantly, who is a crook and a molester, who got elected President but still sees himself as a star in his own reality TV show.

I guess I don’t know what patriotism is in this strange Lewis Carroll world of Trump. But I know what it isn’t and the President doesn’t know either.

So close … and yet, so far. The Nobel Peace Prize was Donald’s for the asking. He had already declared victory for the world and, of course, himself, the Master Wheeler Dealer of the Century, the man who showers accolades on himself deserved or not. He had wrung concessions from Little Rocket Man by threatening nuclear holocaust on the Korean Peninsula and now all he had to do was show up in Stockholm and accept the prize.

Easy as pie for the Donald. Nothing to it. Those other yahoos, those previous presidents, they’d taken the long route, sent over diplomats, set the table, delved into those pesky details, laid the groundwork … only to have it blow up at the end. The Trumpeter was not going to be pulled into that vortex of complexity, not for a minute, no fool he. Throw the Hail Mary and before the ball had even begun to descend toward the goal line, declare Victory and grab the Prize. Be home to Mir-a-Lago in time to catch Fox and Friends and take the congratulatory call from Hannity. Fantastic work, Mr. President!

Oh sure, they said the Koreans might worry about John Bolton mouthing off after writing that article proving beyond the shadow of a doubt we had the right, if not the moral imperative, to attack North Korea pre-emptively. And when he mentioned they should follow the Libyan model for disarmament, maybe they worried Fearless Leader would end up in the same ditch as Ghaddafi. But that’s the kind of tough talk that works far better than subtle diplomacy. So what if a week ago the deal with Iran was torn up. A deal’s not a deal unless Donald says it’s a deal. After all, he is the master of the Art of, well, you already know, the Deal. And he was offering Little Rocket Man a deal. You disarm those nukes, we’ll make you rich and happy.

Well, if you can’t trust Trump to honor a deal, who can you trust? He gave you a chance and you turned your back. Now you’ve pissed him off. You’ve cost him that Nobel, no easy thing for him to digest. He’d already had one made and if you think he’s sending it back, you don’t know jack about negotiating. Surrender now!

I was just ordained as a minister. I can now legally perform marriages, funerals, exorcisms and the like. I know what you’re thinking: I’ve turned over a New Leaf, decided to clean up the mess that’s my life and now I’ll probably become a sanctimonious and self-righteous proselytizer of you sinners. And of course I just might once I get my little Church of the Profane up and running.

Actually, becoming a minister isn’t as hard as you might suspect. I went on the internet and signed up for an online ordination, nothing to it once you get past the scams and the oaths to Jesus and the request for additional money for everything from wedding certifications to ceremonial instructions. Me, I just wanted to jump right to reverend. Seminary school, no thanks. Pope, takes too long. Rabbi, doubt if they’d let me. Buddhist priest, okay, maybe. But minister? Oh yeah, anybody can be a minister. Check out your religious stations on cable if you think it takes any kind of training or intelligence. You wonder how folks can elect Donald president, take a gander at the people these folks give money to who seem as phony as a 3 dollar bill or a Trump tax return. Trust me, even YOU could be a religious leader in this America. We don’t believe in science or facts or the truth, but we believe these hucksters. And I’m happy to report, I’m now one of them.

And no, stop worrying, I’m not hitting you up with a request for money to convert the poor Crackers in Mississippi or the skinheads in Idaho to my banjo based belief system. Although, if you need a charitable tax write-off, I’m your man. Actually, I’m your Church. Your Rock. Your, if you’ll let me, your Salvation. Least I can do to pay back the internet site that sponsored my Holy Conversion. A man of good deeds, like yours truly here, is like the Lone Ranger, just save the day and leave a silver bullet on the table. No need for thanks, the fight for truth and justice is plenty.

I know I have a lot to live up to. I don’t have my disciples lined up just yet and the South End String Band, my first choice, seems hesitant to cleanse and oil my feet. A miracle would surely help, but I haven’t got any up my robed sleeve. And of course I need to write down some rules, commandments maybe, that followers can adhere to. A lot of work ahead of me, but like I said, getting to BE a minister was the easy part.

I got a little wedding in about two months down in California, a lesbian matrimony where I will be officiating in the very heart of Sodom and Gomorrah. Could be a niche market, these gay matrimonies. The Path is narrow, my friends, but follow me, for I Know the Way. Or at least I’ll try to find it. Blessings on you, my children!

Well, when you corner a feral animal, you need to expect it will show some fangs when you close in on it. The new NRA president, Ollie North, the pardoned criminal of the Iran/Contra scandal, came out swinging when the public outcry pointed accusatory fingers at the hallowed National Rifle Association. Not us, he bellowed, not guns! Ritalin, that’s the culprit. A society that’s drugged its kids and made killers of them.

Ollie’s not alone feeling cornered, snarling at the suggestion their guns will be confiscated by an enraged elitist mob of liberals. Bad school design, some are shouting back. Unarmed teachers in the classrooms! Violent video games and a culture of violence and mayhem! Poor school architecture! Trench coats! Too many doors, too many windows! The answer for most of these cringing curs is more guns. Always more guns. If we only had more, we could stop the bad guys.

Okay, boys, here’s the bad news. We do have more guns. More than any other so-called civilized country in the world, probably more than most of them added together. And in case you haven’t noticed, it doesn’t really seem to quell the violence. The argument that video games are causative, sounds good until you figure kids watch these all over the globe, Canada, Britain, France, Italy, and they don’t seem to run out and shoot up a school every other week. Unarmed teachers? Give me a break. No sane person outside of Texas wants to holster up their elementary school teachers. School architecture? Build concrete and steel schools the way we built Iraq Green Zones blast zones. C’mon, why not just put tractor trailers underground, lock the kids in until 3 PM. Ban trench coats? Wow, why not? Maybe ban long pants and winter jackets too while we’re stripping the children down to their bras and BVD’s.

And Ritalin? Maybe Ollie is on to something here. All those hyperactive Attention Deficit kids mellowed out on Ritalin most of their lives, that must be the answer. Earth to Doctor North, Earth to Doctor North, please come back down here. We promise to take the kids off Ritalin if you’ll do one thing for us. Tell us how a yahoo who waged a secret war in Central America with money from arms sales to Iran has any right whatsoever to lecture us about a culture of violence. Talk about prying a gun out of your cold dead head…. Maybe an IQ test should be required to buy a weapon.

There’s a bar in Seattle that planned to open its doors at 4 am so patrons can watch a live feed of the royal wedding this morning. Oh sure, I thought about staying up and driving down to catch the marvelous matrimony, but then I decided it’s been, oh, nearly 250 years since we declared independence from the Mother Country, probably enough time to have moved beyond fealty to the Crown. Not that I wouldn’t love to know what the royal couple wore and watch the play by play pageantry live on TV.

I’ve never understood the fascination some of us have for the Royals. I don’t even understand why the Brits still keep them on their payroll. Princess Di, Prince Charles and Whats-her-name, the whole inbred bunch all endlessly under the microscope not only in their home turf but here in the land that declared independence. Every wedding, every birth, every scandal. They can knock the latest mass shooting at another high school right off the headline. They can even outshout Trump. Blimey, limey, what’s up with that?

Kings and queens and a joker that’s wild. I gotta thank George Washington for preventing us from reinstating royalty into the American body politic. He could see the national passion for a monarchy and he wanted no part in it, not after fighting the British all those hard years with farmer soldiers who went shoeless in the snows of winter. These were our overlords, our masters, the folks who taxed us without representation, who ran the colonies for their profit. These were our Romans. These were the good folks who waged genocide on the Irish.

Oh, they seem benign now, not the ruthless bastards who made serfs of their minions, who conquered lands near and far, who ruled with a whip hand half the earth. Cute princesses and dashing princes, the telegenic offspring of slave traders and treasure pillagers and outright murderers. What’s not to like? Me, I prefer not to worship our leaders. Trump, of course, thinks he’s King and his family all royalty. And of course there are plenty of us who think a coronation might be in order. Maybe we should teach history again in our schools.

Seattle, like a lot of large cities, has a homeless problem. Not too surprising, really, when you consider that the average price of a house in the Emerald City is somewhere above the rainbow, well over half a million dollars. Rents are skyrocketing accordingly and if you aren’t employed or if you work at minimum wage jobs, chances are good you can’t afford to live in a house or an apartment. If you own a car, running or not, you can park it and call it a home. If not, the options are not real good for you. Check out the freeway overpasses and bring a tent.

Seattle’s City Council decided it might be time to address this situation and so they floated a plan to tax the largest companies and corporations a head tax on each of their employees, the money to be used to house the homeless. I guess the idea was that these folks had benefited from Seattle’s attractive work environment, the one before traffic gridlock and income disparity had created a model for the Have – Have Not society, and that taxing them would begin to address some of these discrepancies. Might even keep Seattle an attractive city for corporations.

Amazon, that posterboy for corporate bully, the Godzilla in the Godzilla vs. Bambi movie, weighed in and promptly stopped construction of two projects in the downtown area. The steel worker’s union literally shouted down the councilwoman they have who is a socialist and probably their most ardent supporter for fear their jobs on the Amazon towers would be lost. So much for worker solidarity, comrades. It should be noted that Amazon’s objection to being taxed to help support the folks they bear some responsibility for comes at the same time they pay zero federal taxes. Zero, as in none, nada, zip, zilch. I know, it boggles the mind, at least mine. I pay more federal tax than Amazon. The folks under the freeway overpass probably pay about the same.

In the end Amazon forced a compromise, cutting the head tax in half. I guess this was a victory for the Job Creator, one small step for Godzilla, one helluva toejam for Bambi. If you’re poor, it’s time to leave Seattle. Kind of why I left 40 years ago.