The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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.

A friend of mine just wrote to say she might have discovered she has a heretofore unknown brother, discovered, apparently through the wonders of DNA analysis. He is either her half brother or the son of her father’s brothers, the result, she says of a one night stand in some hick town in Arizona with his mother who until he was 11 thought was his sister. Yeah, I’m confused too. To make the story all the more interesting, his mother is African American. Of course I’m interested in selling the movie rights…

There are studies that show between 10 and 30% of us may not have the right dad when we send those father’s day cards. This is a testament to the infidelity of the American Mom whose libido may have been vastly underestimated. I had a buddy, a white guy, who had a black kid. Kind of a surprise at the birth, but like he said, the mizzus got drunk at a party one night and hey, these things happen, but he was going to raise the kid, someone else’s genetically, his by choice. Gotta say, I was impressed. If you met his wife, you’d never guess her wild side judging by her mousey disposition.

Another buddy of mine got a knock on his door one day a few years back and found his old paramour of even further back darkening his doorway with her son in tow. He’d had a fling with her when she was 15, picked her up in a park, took her home and carried on an affair for a week or two. Yeah, I know what statutory rape is. He did too, but it didn’t stop him. So now the chickens were flying home to roost. My pal, being the distrustful sort, decided to call her bluff, especially since the kid was pretty dark like his mom and didn’t show much Caucasian. And because she wanted money. Turned out the boy wasn’t his after all. I don’t know if he gave her some money anyway, but I hope he did.

I guess these DNA tests are great for exploring the family tree. Personally, I’m okay letting Dad be Dad. I don’t need to be sending multiple father’s day cards every damn year….

A few days ago Donald Trump told an interviewer that he wouldn’t mind if the rich, including himself, paid a little more in taxes. Keep in mind that this is the billionaire who paid zero income tax in 10 of the 15 years before becoming president. In 2017 he paid $750. In 2020 he paid no tax. I suspect most of us who paid that kind of tax wouldn’t mind a small increase either. I know I wouldn’t. Of course a few days later he reversed himself, saying a tax on the wealthy would give the rich a reason to leave the country. Some loss, I say. What, we’d lose a few thousand dollars here and there, maybe lose nothing some years?

Raise taxes on the rich? C’mon, who do you think runs this country, who do you think makes the laws, who do you think you’re kidding? What you’re watching these first 100 days is a graduate level course in how to balance the budget and still give the wealthiest a tax break they think they so richly deserve. Slash the government, fire its workers, eliminate programs for the poor, maybe even gut Medicaid, strip a bit of the safety nets, sure, why not balance it on the backs of those who can least afford it? And while we’re at it, let’s lay some stiff tariffs on every nation on earth, maybe generate revenue there, so what if the price of groceries and consumer goods goes up a little, just a minor pain on the poor for long term gain later. Right? Right??

Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. Trust me, the rich don’t mean that to apply to themselves. The President is having a soiree for all those who buy his meme cybercurrencies. He’s selling Bibles and tennis shoes, perfumes and steaks, he’s selling out everyone but his rich friends. Conflict of interest? Don’t make us laugh. This is the Gilded Age. Like the man said before pulling back on one tariff plan that had sent the stock market reeling, it’s a great time to Buy. Hint to all you poor folks: jump in the Market now, the water is great.

Mind the sharks, though….

Clyde stopped by our place yesterday, wanted to know if I wanted some wood flooring. Clyde’s notorious for scrounging lumber — beams, 2×4’s, plywood, chopped off rafters and joists full of nails — he takes it all, he and his partner Fred. They’re true South Enders, no building parts are too unworthy for future projects. No oddly shaped root or burled tree trunk couldn’t be imagined as a trellis or a doorway or a garden gate. Their greenhouse/apartment is a testament to homesteader ingenuity, from the recycled plumbing for a radiant heat floor to the gnarly limbs of a cedar tree that frame a window made from sliding glass door panels. The roof is raftered with bridge beams and salvaged lumber, all covered with earth and plantings, a green ecosystem.

So when Clyde asks if I want some wood flooring, red lights go off and a siren shrieks deep down in my hippocampus. “You don’t want it yourself?” I ask, meaning, what’s wrong with this flooring if you boyz are turning it down? Clyde avows how they don’t need flooring and anyway, it’s all mismatched remnants. Like they don’t have mismatched remnants from one end of their property to the next??? “Use em for furniture,” I advise. “I took my leftovers and made cabinets and bookcases, banjos, hell, it’s hardwood.”

“We’re jammed up,” Clyde says sadly. “Stuff we got now is getting powder post beetles. We couldn’t use it all in the rest of our lifetimes.” Which is true! They’re beyond Scroungers now, heading toward Hoarders. It’s a fine line, I know, and only a packrat like myself who’s scrounged most of his life is qualified to define the slip from Collector to Psychopathology. Clyde, I diagnosed, had stepped back from the Abyss. Enough was finally enough. Clutter was one thing, tunnels to the kitchen and bathroom quite another.

No mas! There comes a time when a sane man knows implicitly to STOP. Before it’s too late. Before madness descends like a dark curtain blotting light and reason.

Today I picked up 10 boxes of hardwood flooring, enough to lift the front end of my truck. No, I don’t really need flooring. But, you never know, right? Now if I can just figure out where to store all this wood until I need it….

Someone mentioned to the mizzus the other day he was glad to see her husband’s bi-weekly column in the Crab Cracker was funny again. I guess he figured I’d misplaced my sense of humor for awhile there but thankfully gotten it returned from the Lost and Found. Moonshine Wit and Wet Powder Wisdom is the maybe not so catchy name of my diatribes and musings which might imply bad philosophy could easily be substituted for a funny bone. Occasionally I even wax serious, if not exactly profound.

Maybe I’ve misjudged my readership. If so, I apologize to the dozen or so of you who follow Skeeter’s literary meanderings. I suppose I ought to be grateful for the criticism, maybe steer myself out of the ditches and back onto the freeway. Art is like that too. You sell something and straight away you think maybe stick to that design, no point going all ‘creative’ here when you’ve got a winning formula. After all, you need to make a living.

But … this is nothing less than a curse for anyone hoping to explore his or her or they’s creative imagination. I know plenty of good artists whose work in a certain direction didn’t sell well so they went back to work that did. Believe me, this is a prescription for self-imitation and eventually the demise of artistic exploration. I should know — I find myself pulled in the direction what few past successes pointed me. It’s like a riptide, you have to swim perpendicular to the pull, otherwise you’re sucked out to the sea of your own stunted creativity. And yeah, you may die of starvation instead of drowning in your own mediocrity.

Course, here I am once more yammering about something that’s not what anyone would call humorous, probably risking losing those two dozen readers’ attention, maybe yours too, all because I want to keep mine. If you were expecting some punchline to cap this rant off, well, just not feeling funny today, I guess, my apologies. Again. Maybe next time….

Maybe you wake up in the middle of the night, cold sweats and a fevered brain, unable to sleep, impossible to think clearly. You feel an anxiety, you have labored breathing, you feel mood swings from rage to despair. You’ve talked to your doctor and he suggests you try an extra adult beverage in the evening before he prescribes lithium. He tells you you’re not alone, that half his patients lately seem to be suffering similar symptoms. Mass hysteria, he mumbles to himself, and you go home thinking you should seek a second opinion. Or a third. Or double down on those adult beverages.

You decide to quit watching the news, stop reading the papers, forego the radio. It doesn’t help, not a bit. Menopause? you wonder, or in half the cases, male menopause. Hot flashes, mood swings, depression. You discover half the neighborhood is suffering the same malady. Something in the water? Something in the air? A terrorist nerve toxin, maybe?

And then, out of the blue, right after the President sides with Putin over his own intelligence agencies and even some of his Fox Friends wonder what in the world?, Rand Paul, of all people, comes out and says this hysteria is nothing more than intense hatred that blinds you to … well, maybe not facts exactly, but Trump’s latest diplomatic move. He even gives it a name; after all, he is a doctor. Okay, an ophthalmologist. And you are having trouble seeing straight. He calls it Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Meaning, you hate the guy so much you can’t see what he’s doing is smart, strategic and possibly even visionary. You can’t see it because you’re blinded by hatred. If he calls the EU our foe, if he believes Putin when he tells him he didn’t tamper with the elections, if he tells you he’s saved you from nuclear war with N. Korea, if he lambasts our NATO allies and drops tariffs on them and the rest of the world, well, you only see red. You’re locked and loaded with piss and vingear. You have TDS, my friend. You’ve doubled down on the double negatives.

You want to hold him accountable for all the wild promises he made this last election, end the war in Ukraine in a week, find peace in the Middle East immediately, end inflation right away no problem, build the Wall, round up the illegal immigrants. Well, he’s rounding up the immigrants but all you can see are shades of the Japanese internments of World War Two. Why? Cause you hate the guy. And when he says he’ll clear out Gaza and make a beautiful resort playground there, you probably can’t imagine making reservations. No, because, well, you know the reason.
And from here on out, you will hear that diagnosis again and again. There’s no cure and I suspect no one is looking for one. So today, when the Trumpster reverses once more, imposing new tariffs, reducing others, suspending a few, jumping back to his original position, which, if you remember, was before he explained the double negative he actually meant to say, well, you probably gnashed your teeth and beat your fists and screamed into the storm. Because you hate the guy so much, you are blinded to the genius of his strategy. You probably even think, like me, that Trump Derangement Syndrome isn’t a description of us, it’s a perfect description of him. Quite a disease….

I been listening for the last year or more this growing drumbeat against public service employees, social security entitlements, health care run by the government and, well, damn near everything run by the government. You’d think teachers were communists and firemen were Marxists and anybody who wasn’t working for themselves or for a corporation were leeches on the body public. We suddenly got ourselves a debt crisis and some folks thing the only solution is to shrink government down to a size they can flush in a toilet.

I used to be a school teacher way back in the Paleolithic. And I don’t mean Sarah Paleolithic. I find it troubling that public employees are the bad guys now. That somehow they don’t contribute to the wealth of America. The Ayn Randians think the corporations are the only way to restore the nation to its former glory days, but I’m not sure what glory days they mean, although probably any time before last year would do.

We got a lot of folks out of work right now who can’t pay taxes if they don’t make a living. And we got a Congress with a lot of senators and representatives who want to cut government jobs some more. Because, I guess, they aren’t real jobs. Don’t pay real taxes. Don’t buy real groceries and cars and television sets. Don’t pay into social security. Don’t get loans or put their phony money in banks. I guess. These senators and representatives, it should be pointed out to them, don’t have real jobs either. And lately, most of us might at least agree on that point.

What I don’t understand, being a communist on the South End, is how we watched the banking industry and the Wall Street boys and the hedge fund managers and all the heroes of Ayn Rand take us down a subprime mortgage meltdown and nobody seems to think anyone is to blame but the government. Call me stoopid and paint a clown face on my hat, but something is terrible wrong with this picture. Something’s upside down and inside out and distorted like those old funhouse mirrors at the carnival. Why aren’t some people in jail for gaming the system? Why aren’t laws being passed to keep it from happening again?

I’m not a Bolshevik just because I want to lock up thieves who were supposed to be capitalist heroes, am I? I just want somebody to tell me how it is we think one job is more valid than another, why a private construction worker is more important to the economy than a government construction worker the FAA laid off the last few weeks, why we should want a private agency security person instead of a municipal cop, why we think a corporation beholden to its investors is more honest than an employee working for us, the people.

Course, I’ll have to admit, in full disclosure, most of us down here on the radical South End, aren’t too much interested in jobs. Any jobs. Work, I hate to admit, isn’t high on the value chart. And here’s something for the Sarah Paleontologists: you won’t find too many communists here either. Everybody’s supposed to work under communism. That isn’t gonna fly down here. We got a few better things to do than work. Maybe we should’ve run for the Senate.

76 trombones led the big parade. With a hundred and ten cornets close at hand.

Aw, who doesn’t love a good parade, marching bands, twirlers, floats and banners and our boys in uniform? Women too now! And Transgenders! Followed by tanks and artillery, jets flying overhead in formation, bunker buster bombs carried on carriages two blocks long. Formation after formation of the Army, the Navy, the Marines and the Air Force. Battalions and generals and military hardware. The Commander-in-Chief looking down from the stage specially constructed for his viewing pleasure, salutes to him as thousands pass by rank and file, hail to the Chief!!

Damn the expense! If we can’t put on a good military parade once a year, what kind of cowpie country are we? Let the rest of the world cower before our display of drones and cruise missiles moving mile after mile down the banner festooned streets of D.C. Patriotism on Display!! Military Might on Display!! Who doesn’t love a good parade?? Forget that Mickey Mouse balloon stuff. Homer Simpson three blocks high. We’re talking about Fire Power, not Star Power. Save the Disney stuff for the Mummer’s or the Rose Bowl or Mardi Gras. Bring on the Bradley Fighting Machines, the 1126 Stryker, the MK19 grenade machine gun, the Black Hawk helicopters, the MK-54 torpedoes, bring it all out and let the world tremble.

Shock and awe on the streets of the USA, that’s what we need. You wonder how we won the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria, well, sir, check out that hardware we’re selling to every hungry dictatorship around the globe. What’s on display here is more than Uncle Sam’s mighty muscles, it’s a runway for arms sales, pure and simple and who better to brand that than the Trumpster himself, Captain America. You need a second generation jet, we got em. You need some Surface-to-Air missiles, we’re your supplier. Just don’t resell them to terrorists. Don’t want those SAMs falling into the wrong hands like that time with the Taliban back in the cold war days when they were fighting the Soviets.

No, give me a good parade any day. Celebrate the weapons of destruction. Hell, drop a nuclear bomb out in the countryside, nothing too big, just a little show of atomic power, a warning to the enemies of liberty. Small mushroom cloud over the capitol, better than the 4th of July. Guns and God, let freedom ring. 76 trombones and a huckster Music Man, is this a great country or what?

My President doesn’t really read anything other than ‘news’ articles about himself. Mostly he watches TV, news stations whose talking heads talk about him. In reverent tones. Far as anyone knows he doesn’t listen to music, doesn’t dance, doesn’t sing or play an instrument, doesn’t write much of anything beyond a florid signature, doesn’t paint or mess with art. What art he appreciates is anyone’s guess. My guess is the only art hanging in the penthouse of the Trump Tower would be a full size mirror. In a gold frame, of course.

Maybe I’m being ungenerous. Nobody has to read literature, no one is required to listen to music, you don’t have to appreciate art to be a full human being. I know a few South Enders like that and they’re plenty happy to go to work, come home and watch ESPN sports without becoming narcissistic cretins. They just don’t care much about the arts. C’est la vie.

But they didn’t fire the Director of the nation’s premier Art Center and any of the Board Members he felt were too Woke. The man with zero aesthetic appreciation just put himself in charge of the Kennedy Center making himself the Czar of Culture in America.

Apparently Trump isn’t content to wage war with his own government. Isn’t content to make enemies of the press. Doesn’t mind alienating neighboring countries or allies. Is willing to denigrate the leader of Ukraine, call him a dictator and accuse him publicly of starting the war with Russia. Seems to be open to alliances with true dictators who have traditionally been our enemies. And with malice toward all, now he needs to co-opt the Arts too??

My friends who voted for him think he’s the businessman this country needs, a billionaire who’ll bring back the Gilded Age, who’s transactional, meaning he sees the world as a zero-sum game, everything through the lens of profit and loss, money, goods, relationships. The Art of the Deal and only the deal. A gold toilet is the throne for this kind of thinking. But a full size mirror is not art, merely a narrow two dimensional reflection of a small one dimensional man, the last man on earth who should be the Czar of Culture.

When I was young and heading off to college, Humanities were still an honorable degree. History, Art, Philosophy, Music, Literature — you could get a diploma even if your chances of getting a job were slim to none. I guess I was more interested in getting an education than a career because I took a double major in the humanities at the Univ. of Wisconsin in Madison, a time when the Vietnam riots were in full swing, a different education altogether.

Jump 50 years into the future, a half century — the trend now is to downsize or eliminate the Humanities, the argument being that high tuition costs DEMAND degrees with maximum employment potential and a salary to pay off the huge student debt. Bizness degrees, I.T., engineering, high tech — that’s where universities and community colleges are funneling their students. Microsoft and Amazon, Google and Facebook, the billionaires of Silicon Valley, they’re all driving the pilot-less train into a brave new future of automation, artificial intelligence, drones and a wired world. The Digital Age is rapidly replacing the Industrial Era, leaving the Romantic Era beneath deep sediment. Who needs poetry when you can program the next generation of androids to write a ditty?

We call the Humanities humanities because we’re exploring just that, the qualities that make us human and not machine, an altogether necessary endeavor in this next evolution of mankind. It is more than alarming to watch the diminution of the Humanities at the same time humans are inexorably merging into their own technology. As an artist, I’ve never been one to argue that we’re the saviors of the culture, the Sensitive Ones, the Visionaries. I may have been wrong. More worrisome now — we may be canaries in the mine.