The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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?

So I get this call just before dinner and this woman starts right in with Hi, How am I today and before I can say I’m busy here with some friends who are visiting she gushes Golly it’s good to talk to someone who wasn’t like the last person she called who was as cranky as her mother-in-law and I’m going, Holy Replay, Batlady, this is the same solicitor of two days before who had really pissed me to the gills.

Now, I could have just quietly hung up the phone. After all, I had guests who were listening in, wondering who I was talking to that it was so damn important to interrupt our conversation and usually with company I don’t answer phones, but … well, no excuses. I had violated my own directive and was guilty of abject rudeness. And the irony was we had been talking about this very solicitor a few hours earlier, me still wound up about it, and now here was my tormentor calling back with her canned little speech about her crummy mother-in-law.

Maybe you’d have lost it too. I don’t know. Maybe you’re like me, cranky as that woman’s husband’s mom. But whatever … I barged in on her pitch to save breasts, half shouting to shut her up, and said “You called me two days ago with this stupid speech and when I tried to explain why I wasn’t going to give money you hung up on me. YOU HUNG UP ON ME!” And then I told her to, let’s not mince words here, I told her to go fuck herself. Aiiii….

I know. One small rudeness doesn’t necessarily deserve another. And worse, I regretted not trying to tell her how her first call sort of put a dark blot on my day and even the next day. Silly, sure, but it did. And how maybe in the future she could respect people who for whatever reason didn’t put a check in the mail by not hanging up on them when the money wasn’t forthcoming. Sure, all those things you think of … later.

So now I’m remorseful, feeling bad once again, a victim of myself, another Trump banshee flinging his own feces against the wall. Does it mean I should get Caller ID? Do I need anger management mediation? Should I quit answering phone calls, stop watching the evening news, cancel my subscriptions to the paper?? Should I, out of guilt, send money to the breast cancer people? Not like I know which breast cancer group called ….

I just don’t know. And now, every time the phone rings, you KNOW what I’m thinking. I’m thinking it might be that woman one more time. Telling me how nice it is to hear a voice that wasn’t as cranky as that last caller. No, not her mother-in-law, the one who told her to go fuck herself. Jeez, if nothing else I got her mother-in-law off the hook.

The South End Diner was electric this morning, everybody from the Flatheads to the Bible Study crew, all diverted from their usual meandering musings and cock-eyed conversations to a laser focus on the News of the Day. Not even a week after the State of the Union speech declaring victory over tax bondage, the Speaker of the House, evidently trying to one-up the President’s braggadocio, declared that the tax reform bill had already worked.

“How about you, Brenda?” Jerry Harden asked when Brenda came by with the coffee refills. “You get that big raise yet?”

“You talking about that secretary in Pennsylvania?” Brenda said breezily, “the one who probably thought she’d won the lottery after a buck and a half a week raise.”

“A raise is a raise, Brenda,” Jerry said, grinning and holding out his cup. I expected maybe Brenda would miss and scald Jerry’s hand up clear to his eyeballs.

Fairlane Freddy pushed his half eaten and coagulating plate of biscuits and gravy into the middle of the table like he was pushing chips on a bet in a high stakes poker game. “Speaker of the House said it would pay for her Costco membership.”

“I don’t have a Costco membership, Fred. Costs too much already without paying them to let me shop in their store. I’d be interested in what that secretary got for a salary BEFORE her big pay jump.” She topped off Jerry’s cup and moved to the Bible table, half a dozen men in white shirts trying not to splatter grease on their King James’s.

“Easier for a camel to squeeze through the eye of a needle than a rich man to get into the Kingdom of God,” Randall Morganstein intoned. He was a Jew for Jesus back in the big city, but out here in the boondocks, he joined up with the Little Chapel in the Ravine and rarely missed the Monday morning Bible Group session. “Be grateful for small blessings,” he added and that set Brenda off when her first impulse had been to keep her mouth firmly shut.

“That’s just fine, Reverend,” she growled. “If you’re a camel or a rich guy. The rest of us, we’re a little tired of that homily that we should just wait and we’ll inherit the earth. The earth is pretty much parceled up and sold for profits. How about some compassion for the poor?’

“Well, now,” Randall said, holding up a hand the way he might if he was warding off a blow. “I meant no disrespect, young lady.”

Brenda blew back a strand of her graying hair that had fallen across her angry face. “That’s all well and good, Randy, I guess I’ll see you at the back of the line at the Pearly Gates. I just hope there’s a quota.”

Bible Study yesterday was shorter than most weeks. Maybe it was the lack of coffee refills, who can say?

So the phone rings early this morning and since I don’t have Caller ID, I answer it with my usual Hello, no clue who’s wanting to talk at me. I know, I’m the last man in the industrialized nations of the world who doesn’t have Caller ID so you’re thinking I deserve what I get when I pick up. The price you pay for being a Luddite, I guess.

The too cheerful voice on the other end starts right in with how am I today and I say I’m just hunky-dory and she says how glad she is I’m not the last person she talked to who was as cranky as her mother-in-law but before I can slide an answer in edgewise she’s off and running how she and the good folks for some breast cancer something or other are trying to do good in this miserable world, trying to save lives, trying to … I try my best to slip in and tell her we have our own charities we … trying to save the planet from disease and misfortune and would we help in some small way if they …. I make another attempt to … just send us a letter of commitment, nothing would be too small, anything would ….

Finally I just talk over her, fully aware that now I’M THE CRANKY MOTHER-IN-LAW FROM HELL WHO WON’T SAVE WOMEN’S BREASTS FROM THE RAVAGES OF CANCER!!, the curmudgeon who won’t write a check for some measly sum too small to pay for their stamps and letterheads even, who would rather give to some other less worthy organization, who …

And I realize in mid-apology for my crappy life … she’s hung up and moved on to the next name on her list. No more small talk, no appreciative mumbling how we all give in our own small way, no goodbye, just a phone gone dead. So now I’m not only feeling bad turning down what may very well be a legitimate organization dedicated to stopping cancer in its tracks, I’m pissed off. Great, just flippin great.

This isn’t the first time I’ve found myself in this position, feeling aggrieved and angry, but it’s going to be the last time. No more listening to solicitations from now on. No! I’m channeling the last caller’s mother-in-law from here on out. And unless I miss my guess, she’s probably a nice old lady….

I hear a lot of theories why Trump won a year ago, everything from Hillbilly Elegy to White Trash Backlash. Folks feel like Washington – a euphemism for the Damn Gov’t. – isn’t interested in helping them. That the rich run the show and the poor should have their Medicaid cut. So they voted for a rich guy who lies when he claims the media is faux news. They voted hoping he would shake up the Damn Government.

I don’t think they thought he’d bring back coal jobs — they just hoped he’d do something for THEM. For a change. Who wouldn’t cut deals with Wall street that cut them out of their slice of the American Pie. They’re sick and tired of the wealthy wanting their tiny slice too. And maybe they’ve never heard of the Koch Brothers and if they have, faux news!

I see a future of dislocation, retrenchment, isolationism, automation, Future Shock. Change is happening too fast for us to keep up or comprehend. We love our little devices, but we don’t understand that a digitized world is more and more incomprehensible. We don’t understand, but we sense it. We’re being left behind and it’s not just the hillbillies, although they may be the canaries in the coal mine. We can’t imagine What’s Next. Artificial intelligence, drones, social media, Big Brother, clones, Facebook, nano-technology, 3-D printing, who knows? There’s a disruption in the Force and we’re uncertain if we’re really prepared. The truth is, we know we’re not.

There’s an Anxiety in the land. A sense that the future isn’t going to be better, that the past was the zenith and the present is rolling down hill. The parents fear for their kids and their kids see hard times coming. The jobs aren’t coming back. Coal isn’t coming back. The good times are over. Debts are piling up and coming due. They were willing to try a huckster’s promises, but next time …. who knows who they’ll turn to. We should all be more than a little afraid.

Haven’t you ever wished you could go back and ask the guy who invented the spinning jenny if he had foreseen where that small invention would lead? Did he figure all those weavers’ lives would be made easier with the advent of a machine that would take the drudgery out of their lives of spinning? That the world would be a better place if he could automate those tasks and have those folks run the machines that would ultimately do their jobs? If he could imagine a future of industrial factories and cities teeming with assembly lines, clogged with workers and choking on pollution?
Maybe ask Galileo or Newton or Einstein or Crick and Watson if they envisioned the future their discoveries would eventually create? Could Crick and Watson imagine cloning? Imagine gene therapy ? Imagine Frankenstein? I don’t know, but I always figured Steve Jobs and Bill Gates changed the world because they could see the world they would change it to, visionaries who imagined the future they would whelp into existence.

So when Gates was interviewed recently regarding his views on Artificial Intelligence, I was all ears. What would the guy who brought us the Digital Age think about his Revolution? Had he imagined computers we carried with us every waking hour of the day? Could he have imagined our social media? Did he ask himself if androids dream of electric sheep? Where did he think Artificial Intelligence would take us?

Well, he thought probably it would be a benefit to mankind. For example, he posited, robots on the warehouse floor would be able to see spills that humans might miss. They would also, he said, notice if flesh and blood workers had on their hardhats, thereby preventing potential OSHA violations and industrial accidents. He went on to list a couple more banal benefits of Artificial Intelligence and I guess maybe he hadn’t given this a whole lot of thought, probably busy with his Foundation work, but Holy Hal, what it seemed like was this dude missed the last bus that was going to the 21st Century. I was hoping his bubbly interviewer might ask him a few probing questions, but no, the world was in good hands if our super intelligent cyborg pals could mop up a floor before someone human slipped on a spill.

So much for the crystal balls of visionaries. Henry Ford probably just wanted to sell automobiles. He could have cared less about future automation and humans becoming cogs themselves in an industrial machine. Gates figured out how to market a computer, make it smaller and smaller, more and more ubiquitous, keep the software proprietary and cut the legs out from under his competitors. The future is mostly unintended consequences, judging by Bill’s astute commentary. The bad news is we’re going to be slipping on all those spills he missed.

Happy Days! Amazon just opened its first grocery store that functions with basically no humans. Other than the shoppers. You just use the handy dandy app for your cellphone, let them know who you are, then a few hundred cameras track your every move from aisle to aisle, shelf to shelf, vegetables to fruits, meat counter to bathroom, noting what you pick up, what goes in your cart, what you put back, then bills you for what goes out the door. Let history note that this is where retailing started to lay off its human workforce completely. Let it also note that this is where we humans gave free rein to total and constant surveillance. If you’re okay with absolute monitoring in the grocery aisles, count on cameras pretty much everywhere.

Anonymity, thy name is mud. Stamp a number on my forehead and share my digital information, why not? We are a willing populace, I’ll say that. If it makes life easier to shop, what a small price to pay, this loss of privacy. You might even argue those checkout people who will soon be laid off can now look for more meaningful employment. Fat chance. They’ll be in the unemployment line with the taxi drivers, bank tellers, truck drivers, surgeons, CPA’s, fast food workers, half the present workforce. But hey, I won’t have to put down my cellphone and interrupt my conversations at the checkout line to some cheerful clerk who wants me to say hello or asks how my day is going. A little busy here….

The one glitch in Amazon’s master plan toward world hegemony is this: you still need to show your I.D. to a human being if you purchase alcoholic beverages. Yes!! Bubble gum in the gears, Bezos!!

So fellow humans, those of you who haven’t abdicated your gene pool, you may yet save our species from the robots, the Artificial Intelligence advocates, the corporate Big Brothers, the Damn Government. Buy Beer! Everyone buy beer and wine!!! The future of Homo Sapiens is at stake here. So what if the result is epidemic alcoholism? To paraphrase Patrick Henry, Give me beer or give me death. Fight for Humanity. Amazon … go away.

Killing Tarantulas with a Machete

Things go bump in the night. Iguanas are scrabbling on the roof and geckos scream intermittently all night long. The howlers don’t wait for daylight to announce dawn and a lot of birds and insects apparently never sleep. I guess they don’t expect us to sleep either. There’s no shutting the windows — we use screens to cool down at night so the nocturnal cacophony is ours to share.

Last night a rhinoceros beetle the size of a VW hit our bamboo shade in the dark wings beating the slats like a drummer OD’ing. Trust me, you come out of your dreamy slumbers ready for combat. Only to turn on the light to find a 3 inch bug catatonic on the shade. I found him next morning where I tossed him, dead, I thought, but no, just resting up.

I would hate to wander the trails here in the dark. Odds are good you’d run into something poisonous, toxic, dangerous or malevolent. Trust me, nettles seem rather benign from my vantage here, compared to a fer-de-lance or a scorpion or a crocodile or a tarantula. Let’s don’t even mention ocelots, jaguars, snapping turtles or coral snakes, poison toads, boa constrictors, boar peccaries or the well named vampire bat. Back home I don’t fear much of anything unless it’s on two legs — down here I feel like food, no doubt why we clear jungle, drain swamp, clearcut the wilderness. The denizens give us the creeps.

I think we’ll emerge fairly unscathed, maybe even make a truce with our unseen predators. I’m told the ‘Ticos’, the Costa Rican natives, kill any snake on sight. When I asked why, I was told they were deathly afraid of them. A gringo here at Costa Rica Larry’s was helping clear trail by machete when a tarantula fell down his shirt front. In his terror he took the machete to the armpit the spider had crawled into, carving himself up like a Turkey dinner. Fear is primal. Nature, to most of us, is terrifying. I suggest we all put down the machetes before we hurt ourselves needlessly. Course, I don’t want my armpit to be the home of a tarantula family either. The chiggers there already are bad enough.

Even down here in Costa Rica, high up on the mountain, news of the Old World filters in. Trump referred to African nations as shitholes, we heard. I’m sure he would include a few Central American ones too, half of South America and probably a couple of blue states in Norte Americano. It raises the question: what actually constitutes a shithole?

I’ve been meeting a few ex-pats down here. One gave Costa Rica Larry an amusing roll of toilet paper with Obama’s face on every square. Hilarious, no? They seem to be fed up with high taxes. Or really, any taxes. Larry’s 18 acres and two haciendas cost him about $120 a year. The roads are shit, the parks have garbage everywhere, there is no army, police are few and far between even though crime is rampant and I have no idea what health care is like here and hope not to find out. School’s look primitive, but what the education is like inside, quien sabe? Although, Larry’s adopted daughter pays a small fortune for private school, so maybe that tells me all I need to know considering he’s as tight fisted an hombre as any I’ve known.

No one likes to pay taxes, but what matters is really how your government spends it. Costa Rica has no military to support. That alone would cut my taxes in half, okay by me. Leave a couple of nukes in place and go back to Don’t Tread On Me. I suppose we could go back to dirt roads, rutted and pot-holed, impassable in the rains, only one lane in places. Grade em every few years, save us a small fortune. Drop the welfare system, food stamps, go to Survival of the Fittest. Well, Survival of the Wealthy. Schools? Okay, some public ones, but if you want a real education, not a daycare K-12, private schools. Taxes going WAY down, I bet.

Be MY definition of a shithole country. A country that helps the rich but not the poor? Shithole! A country that refuses decent health care but wants more for the military? Meets my definition! A country that no longer believes in science but does believe most of the lies its leader spews out incessantly? Turd world nation!

Before I started calling nations names, I’d want them defined more precisely. If our pot is black, let’s leave the kettle alone, maybe clean up our own act first.

Costa Rica is a Hot Spot. The Word is out: cheap real estate, great climate, stable government, low taxes, tropical paradise. Half the surfers, the Nuevo hippies, adventurous snowbirders, disaffected Republicans who fled the Obama era, gold hunters and real estate hucksters, eco-tourists, bird watchers and yuppies in search of the Next New Place — they’re all here or coming soon.

After all, we’re here too. I have to say, I’m really glad we aren’t going to the main tourist sites — we’re hauling around Costa Rica Larry’s backroads, bayou bars and backwash villages. Se Vende signs are everywhere. For Sale. They’ll carve this country up from beach to mountain vista, Americanize it, sanitize it and monetize it. The first ones here, bottom of the pyramid scheme. Later … not so lucky, amigo. Time to move on to the Next Big Thing.

Call me cynical and step on my rose colored glasses. Yah shure, the grass is greener here, perfect greens on the 18 hole golf courses I see behind the concrete fences of the gated communities. Fairways lined with palms. Palms lined with money. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Here, the middle class gringo is rich.

The poor? I guess the jobs working for the gringo offer some greenery too. We bought America with beads and trinkets, then … well, it’s the story of the world, I guess. Ask nice, see if that works, if not … Ask the Hawaiians. Ask the Seminoles. The Cherokee. The Mandan.

Maybe you shouldn’t want to live in a place that’s paradise. They’ll pave it and put in a parking lot next to the casino/resort. The South End was undiscovered when I came, maybe the first wave of immigration. Now the wealthy have found the bluffs with views and the beaches. At first the natives built their homes — now they mow their lawns. We bought the house next door and rent it to the tourists. Who think they’ve discovered paradise. We’re paving the way….