The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Let’s be honest with one another, can we? Sure, Donald Trump has made a few mistakes before and since taking office as the world’s most powerful man. Some are pretty embarrassing, like those women who accused him of sexual harassment or even rape. At least he didn’t drug them like that Cosby freak. The golden shower stuff, well, nobody wants to visualize that so better to let leaking dogs lie, agreed? Course, we have the payoffs to porn stars and Playboy models to keep quiet, something that might be construed as unreported campaign expenses, but hey, you guys out there, wouldn’t you like to be in his shoes? Sure, just good old American male hormones slightly unchecked, let’s not pull an Al Franken here.

All right, I know you’re upset he didn’t show you his taxes like every other President. You don’t show yours to every Tom Dick and Harry. And okay, he makes a little money off his businesses while he’s in office. It is a capitalist country, c’mon, give the guy some credit for using his golf course as a second Oval Office. He’s rich already, who cares if he gets a little richer while he’s running the country. And the kids, they’re making some too, get over it. Think how hard it is to run your own companies while you’re problem solving the Middle East and all those other hotspots they’ve been assigned to clean up. Plus, they’re inexperienced and honestly, a little over their heads. Cut em a break, why don’t we?

You think maybe he’s a little palsy-walsy with Putin, I know, maybe something there that’s being held over him. And yeah, he sort of dissed our allies, but he did say he was going to overturn the apple cart, drain the swamp, all that less government talk we all like to hear. Sure he’s still going after those rapist immigrants. Just talk. There’s probably one or two who were rapists, you don’t think they’re all saints, do you? And those cabinet appointments, mostly lobbyists and amateurs, but you have to learn on the job sometimes and if you want to skim the top off Deep State, how else you going to do it??

And yeah, there’s this Mueller investigation, this witch hunt. Okay okay, you think maybe there’s something to it, something that might come to light that proves all the terrible things you thought about Donald were right. Sure, Flynn and Manafort and those others, are being indicted. But in America you’re innocent until proven guilty, agreed? No collusion! No guilt! Nothing! We should stop that witch hunt right now, it’s all over, nothing found, no guilt, no collusion! Let the man run the country for godsake and let’s get back to investigating something real. You know what I mean. Benghazi.

Those Facebook revelations, I knew you’d bring them up. Okay, that consulting firm harvested tons of data from Zuck, then used them in the campaign to elect Mr. Trump. So what? He didn’t know about it. He told you that. And if you can’t believe the President of the United States, who can you believe? If you want to clean up politics, how about getting those e-mails from Hillary. No, not the ones Comey and the FBI looked at, those secret ones she washed. How about that? How about we go after Hillary Clinton? She’s the traitor! Lock her up!! And that crap about her winning the popular vote?? Fake news, pal. Illegal votes. Take away those illegal votes and Trump would have won in a landslide. That’s the truth and if you can handle the truth, check out Breitbart, listen to Fox and Friends, they have the facts, the real ones. Donald J. Trump, the right man for the times. You know it in your heart. Even if you won’t admit it.

I’m the sort of person who doesn’t mind making mistakes. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, is my motto. I got a lot of friends who figure the opposite, nothing ventured means no screw ups. Life is for learning, I’d reply, but they’d probably tell me, play it safe.

It’s not like I’m a risk taker. I don’t climb Half Dome in Yosemite with no ropes. I don’t have any interest in exploring the back country of the Amazon or summiting Mt. Everest. I don’t sky dive or bungee jump. My idea is to see if I can live long and if missing some thrills is part of the plan, okay by me. But I do think we should challenge ourselves a little. Otherwise we relegate ourselves to cable TV and the vicarious lives virtual reality is soon going to make normal.

I built a kayak back about 1990, then took it out into the Puget Sound and up into the San Juans. Two years later I built a sailboat and the next year built our house. These were leaps of faith and if you knew me back then, you’d understand how far the leap was, me being a non-tool user of the first order. I grew up without the usual male oriented skill sets of my peers. When I asked my guidance counselor in high school if I could take shop class, I was told I was on a college career track. Sadly, I listened to him and opted to take advanced mathematics.

Not saying calculus didn’t help me build our house, but … let’s face it, woodworking might have been far more germane to my efforts. Nevertheless, necessity is the mother of, if not invention, at least improvisation. Ironically, my life gravitated toward the skills I didn’t have. But you learn that if you set aside the desire for perfection and aim a bit lower, most things are possible. You know, before the Digital Age made hand skills obsolete.

I built myself a guitar last winter. What I learned, other than how unprepared I was for such an endeavor, was how much there was to learn other than just slapping wood together. The science of audio physics, to name one obvious aspect. So when I finished my little project, I was disappointed in the sound my guitar projected while weeping. Which, I confess, propelled me to violate my vow never to make another guitar again and try one more time, maybe see if I could create an improved audio landscape. Maybe put that calculus to use.

Halfway into the second guitar I came across a You-Tube video showing a guy tapping the soundboard as he shaved the braces underneath. By the end the difference from a dull thud to a ringing sustain was downright impressive. I realized my first guitar was more like the dull thud, so naturally, in the middle of the second’s construction, I disassembled the first one. One step forward, couple steps backward into the realm of luthier repairman.

I just finished both yesterday. The first one sounds much better. Meaning, if I had done that earlier, I would’ve saved myself the month I spent on the second. But now I have two handmade guitars, both of which I’m happy with. Maybe I should take some time now to do something else. You know, maybe learn to play one…

Success is a tough word to define. Failure, not so hard. That old adage about not succeeding at first, so try try try again, I gotta tell you, that might be good advice for a third grader but I’m not so sure about us old guyz. Last winter I put my nose to the grindstone trying to build an acoustic guitar. The fiddler in our band, the South End String Band, builds violins and cellos professionally. He studied for three years at a luthier school in Salt Lake City. If you’ve ever been to TempleTown, you might have some idea how long three weeks would be down there, much less three years. Criminey, three days is an eternity. Salt Lake City is most definitely NOT Party Town USA.

A friend gave me a copy of Clapton’s Guitar, a great read about an Appalachian guitar builder who pretty much was self-taught and now is building masterpieces of luthiery for the locals and folks like Eric Clapton. To say the book was inspirational would be an understatement. I decided right then and there if this good old boy in the hills could do it, why not this good old boy in the nettle hollows? Determination, right? Pluck, correct? Desire and fortitude? Why, just last week there was a story in the news about a guy who built a rocket and launched himself into the sky nearly a mile and lived to tell about it. Building a guitar surely wouldn’t be as dangerous to my health. Would it??

Well, not counting mental health anyway. I gnashed teeth and bent wood and hacked away, read a lot of articles and watched a dozen you-tube tutorials, slept badly but finally finished my first guitar, the one I promised the mizzus would be my last guitar. It looked pretty, played all right, sounded okay. Not bad, I thought, you know, for a first guitar. Not so good for a last one, though. Thinking about all those mistakes a novice like me made on the first effort, I finally convinced myself I could learn from them. I could get better. I could, if I took my time, make an improved version. Like for instance, maybe not try to reinvent stuff, maybe look at a musical instrument less as an art object and a lot more like an audio device. It is, after all, meant to produce sound. And why reinvent wheels that have been rolling for centuries? Maybe learn from the Masters, not try to be inventive on the first go around.

So I’m back on the grindstone. Making mistakes already that no doubt will prove useful to future attempts, but not so much helping the current project. I suspect there is a truth to not letting failure deter a person. Perseverance, youngsters! Push on! The best is yet to come! And I certainly don’t want to be the cynical grouch who refuses to hang the kids’ drawings on the refrigerator with advice like maybe you should try something besides crayon art, sweetheart, and detour some future Picasso into shoe sales. But … I think the time will come when I have to tell myself, Clapton doesn’t want any of my guitars. Even if he does buy about 20 a year.

Maybe you saw the video of over a hundred newscasters who work for Sinclair Broadcasting Group, the company that owns a big chunk of all the TV stations in America and wants to buy hundreds more, reading a word-for-word warning to their viewers about fake news. Their chairman of the board, David Smith, when asked about requiring all these independent stations to read from the script, said all stations do this. Meaning, all news stories are submitted to editors. The difference Dave omits, of course, is that those other stations have in-house editors, not Big Brother dropping edicts to its myriad minions.

The other difference Dave misses is that there are news stories and there are opinion pieces and it used to be they were kept separate and made clear one was not the other. Fake news, if you were to ask me and I know you didn’t, is synonymous with Fox News, those fair and balanced folks who wouldn’t know a fact from propaganda if you beat them with a National Enquirer. They blurred the lines intentionally the way Rush Limbaugh can twist the truth into a pretzel with hot mustard and call it a hamburger. Destroy the public’s faith in honest journalism, you can pretty much manipulate truth to your own ends. Donald Trump is living proof.

We tend to believe what we want to believe. With the internet and blogs, we can narrow our media right down to our selective viewpoint, reinforce our beliefs and live merrily in our bubble of ‘facts’. Right and left both. We all know there will be biases in reporting, selective editing that swings in one direction or the other. PBS will pick a story on the plight of immigrants while a Texas television station might highlight the illegal immigrant who killed a woman and got acquitted by a jury. One will cover the effects of global climate change while the other will simply call it a hoax and drag out some scientist in a different field who corroborates it.

There is, however, a huge difference in liberal or conservative bias in a news station and just calling everyone else liars and fake news. One is just human nature and hopefully a good media outlet will attempt to minimize that bias; the other is propaganda intended to mislead an audience. We have a President who attacks the media, sometimes by name and sometimes by individual, and we have a monopolistic broadcast group who is more than happy to help him.

Fair and Balanced? Fake News! Corporate Censorship? Monopoly Media!

These are confused times, amigo, made more so by cynical politicians and corrupt media moguls. If the aim was to sow discontent and anger, they’re doing a great job. Fifty years ago the Jefferson Airplane wrote a little ditty called White Rabbit that perfectly captured those times when the liberals were the ones who were anti-government and maybe captures these times too.

When the men on the chessboard
Get up and tell you where to go
And you’ve just had some kind of mushroom
And your mind is moving low
Go ask Alice
I think she’ll know

When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen’s off with her head
Remember what the dormouse said
Feed your head
Feed your head

Damn good advice. But what are you gonna feed it?

You maybe don’t watch as much Fox News as some sectors of the American Public so it’s altogether possible you missed Sean Hannity ranting and raving about Mueller’s overreach when he confiscated Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen’s personal files. Time to end the investigation! the Fox commentator yowled. Time to lock up the traitor James Comey! he growled. Time to end the Witch Hunt! he hollered.

Funny how things turn out in this Trump era. Up is down. Down is kind of the high point. So when the Trump Team lost its bid to have the Cohen trove kept secret, the name of the client who didn’t want his name revealed to the public was ultimately revealed. Surprise, surprise, as Gomer Pyle used to say. It was our favorite Trump apologist and bromancer, the fair and balanced Sean Hannity. So what does Mr. Hannity say to all this, you ask. He says Mr. Cohen was not his attorney in any legal sense of the term.

Like me you probably find that an odd parsing of words. Not my attorney in any legal sense of the word? Just an attorney in what sense, then. A fixer? An unpaid attorney? A pal? Methinks something here is amiss. You know, and I do too, the best is yet to come. Mr. Cohen knows where the bodies are buried, where the women have been paid their hush money are, who set up the meetings in Prague, why the President is jittery about Russia. If this were a made for TV series — and trust me, it will be if it isn’t actually one already — Monsieur Cohen would turn up dead in Episode 23. Can’t have him turning State’s witness. Add to that those tapes he liked to record, god only knows what jewels lay waiting in those ready to be uncovered.

Trump Fawlty Towers. It’s going to make Watergate look like a one season flop. This one’s got it all. Foreign intrigue, mob bosses, porn stars, Playboy models knocked up and paid to have an abortion, political gamesmanship, lies and more lies, one great big soap opera full of twists and turns, pathos and comedy. American Entertainment! Start stocking the popcorn, we ain’t seen nothin yet.

If I was writing this series, Sean Hannity would commit suicide before the rest of Cohen’s dossier comes out. Just a suggestion, of course, but he and the Fox Friends will probably see if they can weather the investigations. Good luck, Sean, and Good Night.

Pity the poor Republicans. They stand stoic behind their President, grim smiles frozen on their faces as the cameras capture another of their profiles in courage, and you know they’re thinking, how did this happen to us? How did we elect a playboy reality TV star to be our Leader? A man so bereft of morals and decency, a president who we will soon be asked to impeach.

At a news conference with the purported purpose of discussing the American response to the Syrian nerve gas attacks, the Fearless Leader went ballistic instead about the FBI raids on his personal attorney’s office and home. Veep Pence and newly installed Pompeo sat stone-faced while Trump ranted and raved, castigating the FBI, Jim Comey, Hillary Clinton, Jeff Sessions, just about everybody but Assad. You know what they were thinking. Same as Rex Tillerson at the Boy Scout’s speech: here’s a fucking moron.

Maybe the same thing Adolph Hitler’s generals thought when Adolph took over the war planning and attacked Russia. Course by then Hitler was already Fuhrer and the machinery of fascism firmly entrenched. We’re not quite there yet, but if the Republican party thinks power matters more than morals, we’re on our merry way.

Paul Ryan just jumped ship. The Speaker of the House, 3rd in line for the Presidency behind Pence, took a curtain call. He didn’t call out the President, but he bailed before the midterms, proud, he said, of what he accomplished. A tax cut for the rich that will drive the deficit into the trillions. Cognitive Dissonance, I think the psychiatrists call it. Silver linings in the thunderheads. Today Trump pardoned Scooter Libby, the aide to Dick Cheney who took the fall for outing a CIA agent, what some would call treason. Even George Bush wouldn’t pardon the guy, but Trump is testing the waters for future pardons, including himself.

The Republicans so far show no shame, no blame for what will be a truly dark chapter in the history of this republic. Get off the boat, I say, leave this sinking ship while you can still pretend you had nothing to do with enabling this slide into totalitarianism. Maybe the rest of us can right the vessel when you’re gone. Take a life preserver, take a lobbying job, but take a swim. Don’t worry about the sharks, they’re you.

I heard today our President planned to order troops down to the border, maybe make a human Wall now that Congress won’t fund a concrete or steel one. Yesterday I heard he wanted to force the Washington Post to register as a lobbying group. Two days ago he started a trade war with China. The day before that he called up the Russian president to congratulate him on his Big Win and maybe have him over for a pow-wow at the White House. The week before … well, the list goes on and on, one outrageous act or tweet or threat at a time, each on the heels of the next.

Try to keep up with this guy. You can’t. He’s up in the pre-dawn hours, fingers flying over his device, threatening, bullying, ranting and raving. One day he’s waging war on California, the next he goes ballistic about immigrants, same afternoon he goes after the mainstream media and fake news, a little later he’s attacking somebody or some company he doesn’t like, give him time to catch his breath he’s calling out some Congressman he’s got a derogatory name for, in between he’s firing another cabinet member. It never slows down. It never stops.

Democracy, in order to function properly, demands a bit of respect for opposing opinions. Demonizing the other side, well, that works for creating a dictatorship or a totalitarian regime. We’re right, the others, lock em up! The news media, fake fake fake! Make em register as lobbyists, shut em down, lock them up too!! The political opposition, liars, crooks, lock em up!! The truth, there is no truth other than ours!

Day after day the foundations of our experiment in democracy are under assault, death by a thousand pinpricks and tweets. We get numb to the outrage, we grow weary of what a year or so ago would seem unbelievable, we close our eyes and our ears, overdosed with all these attacks on our institutions. But the water is growing hotter, we just don’t notice the incremental heat being steadily turned up with every lie, with every affront, with every firing, with every personal attack, with every violation of the norms of decency we no longer expect. By the time it’s too late to jump out of the pot, we’ll have no one to blame but ourselves. Dictators don’t always come in with a coup, sometimes they come in with the stew.

Imagine, all you bazillion readers of this incredibly viral blog on your screen right now, that I start asking you for all your preferences, your inner secrets, your friends’ as well, that I need to gather up your nationalities, your gender, your buying history, that I keep track via GPS on your mobile device all the places you go, who you see, where you work, that I have a database that has every e-mail, phone call, credit card purchase you ever made. All that for free so that you don’t have to subscribe to this addictive and incredibly entertaining blog I post every day of your lives!!

And I promise that your information is protected. Ha ha. You and I both know it’s not protected. I’m not a bank. Not at all, but I would sure like to take your personal information and sell it to folks who could help me get to the bank. Folks who could sell you commodities they figure out from that data you want. Or politicians who could sell you Senators and Presidents based on your preferences. Or unscrupulous actors who could convince you to think democracy and liberty are fictions that need to be tossed on the scrap heap of history.

A guy named Max Schrems, an Austrian privacy activist, decided to ask Facebook for an accounting of what they had for information on him. He received 1000 pages!! That’s a lot of data collecting by any standard you can think of. Today my boy Mark Zuckerberg is testifying before Congress, apologetic as a killer on death row, claiming innocence but contrite while he awaits a pardon from the Governor. He’ll probably get that pardon, along with a slap on the hand.

Most of us in this Future Shocked world don’t care if Mark has collected all that information about us. We want that ‘platform’ he’s offered us for free. We want Google and Amazon and instantaneous algorithmic information and we don’t want to pay for it. What’s the harm if those pop-up ads target us? What have I got to hide? Maybe I wanted those hotel rooms in the country I just googled. Big deal. I can take it or leave it. So what if that item I just checked out on Amazon is now offering me a bargain over on the right of my computer screen? I don’t have to buy it.

So when I start dropping news feeds my Russian bot pals want to ‘share’ with you because they got the info that you prefer Fox to MSNBC or you got hot and bothered about pulling down those Confederate Statues or that you bought a subscription to Ammo Guns and Anarchy, you wouldn’t mind, would you? Course not, you’d rather read faux news than news that upsets your worldview. Life is hard enough without complicating things with facts. Naturally, I’m not talking about you and me — I’m worried about those folks who vote different than us, who think different than us, who are gullible and stupid and deplorable. Lock em up if we could. Lock em up!

No, I’m not talking about us.

I’m doing my 2017 taxes today, the 1040, the Schedules B, C, and Self Employment. Crossing my fingers, but I’m hoping my quarterly payments cover what I probably owe. If they don’t, I’m trusting that the Trump Tax Cuts will, mostly because of those personal exemptions and because we never itemize. April 15th, the real Black Friday. Or Black Tuesday this year.

So it comes as a shock to read this morning that my neighbor to the south, Amazon.com, is paying less than me this year. Less than you too if you paid anything at all. Their tax bill on 5.2 billion dollars in profits is … well, zero. Zip, zilch, nada. All legal, all sanctioned, all approved by the IRS. Not that I’m picking on Amazon, they got their own problems what with the President Tweet-bullying them daily, mostly because their owner is also the owner of the Washington Post, the newspaper that prints stories unfavorable to Donald, faux news, he yells, fake news, he hollers.

But dammit, it grates to write a check to the IRS knowing that the 4th largest corporation in the world gets off scot-free. I don’t know about you, but I honestly don’t think I should pay more than Amazon. Sure, my little stained glass company is an economic engine here on the South End. And some years I’m even a Job Creator. But I didn’t get a mega tax break to open up my factory here – okay, my glass shack here — and the county didn’t have to woo me from settling up at the North End with property tax moratoriums. No, I just got treated like an ordinary individual, no special treatment.

The Supreme Court ruled that corporations are to be treated like me, like an individual, didn’t they? So why aren’t we individuals treated like corporations? The President won’t show us his taxes so we don’t know if he pays more than you or me. But I think you know he pays proportionally less. He is, after all, the Deal Master. Maybe what he hates about Amazon is they pay less than him even. Gotta grate. Gotta get under his thin skin. For once … and maybe the only time … I hafta agree with him. Meanwhile, I need to finish my taxes. Somebody’s got to pay for America.

I remember the first grocery store card I ever got, something I resisted at first, until they made it clear those sale items I had in my cart would cost me full price. What are you guyz tracking? I asked. They said my buying habits. How come? I asked. To help bring you better service. Tailor our product to your needs, they said.

You got to love these folks, worried about my needs and all. They’re like the companies on the phone that are recording our conversation. For my protection. From what? I asked. They didn’t know. If they don’t know, who does? I asked.

The nice lady who monetized Facebook is making the talking head rounds the last couple of days. Sheryl Sandberg says she and Mark — she calls Zuckerberg Mark — she and Mark understand the Seriousness of these latest revelations that Facebook has allowed the privacy of their people to be harvested to folks with fairly questionable intent. Sheryl — I guess it’s okay to use her first name, friends and all — was the brains behind the monetization. Facebook users got free access to what Sheryl repeatedly refers to as ‘our products’. In return, like TV, they get ads.

Sheryl Sheryl Sheryl, let me explain a small difference: my TV, at least not yet, doesn’t keep track of my viewing habits, my dietary preferences, my social networks, the movies I watch, my bowel movements, my reading inclinations, my everything in the world preferences and sell them to your advertisers so they can offer me mood lifters when the TV camera senses I’m a bit depressed or laxatives if I haven’t taken a dump in 24 hours. But Facebook does. And worse, they sold that information to political operatives. This isn’t just capitalism run amok, it’s creepy and it’s destabilizing and it’s just plain wrong. That, Sheryl, is what is really ‘Serious’. Not to mention, but I will, the fact that you and Zuck knew this was going on for a few years and didn’t do one damn thing to stop it, not if it meant cutting into your profits. Now that the government is dropping the hammer on you, yeah, you can see the Seriousness and you’ll probably make some cosmetic corrections. And hire plenty of powerhouse lobbyists….

Sheryl, I’m sure you were a whipsmart Harvard bizness grad and all. You certainly helped Mark figure out the money end of the product line. You both may be swell people, bringing the world closer together, shining a light on those dark corners some of us prefer. But I hafta tell ya, friend to friend, you treated us like a dumb bunny addict customers. You sold us lock stock and barrel to the highest bidder. You handed crooks and creeps the keys to our house and said go on in. I’m afraid we have to unfriend you, Sheryl cause you ain’t no friend of mine.