The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

“Start the hearings, alert Fox News, file the subpoenas, investigate the cover-up!!! Niger Niger Niger! Where was the Sec. of State and what did he know and when did he know it??? Why couldn’t the President remember that dead soldier’s name? What’s he hiding? Who is he shielding? Look at the evidence, it speaks for itself. Niger! Niger! Niger! Lock em up, these people who are responsible, LOCK EM UP !!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Clyde is on a tear down at the Pilot Lounge in the Yacht Club. He just ordered his 3rd pint of microbrew and half the bar is telling him to shut up. The Pilot Lounge is not known as a bastion of liberal radicalism since most of the time, if there’s no local sports game on the 3 TV’s, Fox News offers us patrons their fair and balanced opinions. Clyde tries some days to get the televisions turned to CNN, but he’s spitting into a serious gale. Best we can hope for is Al, the usual bartender, turns them all off so we can drink in peace. Al is off tonight and his replacement is Benny, a taciturn old friend of the owner’s who subs in emergencies.

“Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi!” Clyde hollers, not once but three times in a voice that drips sarcasm. “They couldn’t get enough of that, but Niger, where’s the outrage, where’s the investigation, where’s their justice for those dead soldiers?”

Benny drags a bar rag across some spillage, grabs the TV channel changer and finds a sports station, then turns the volume up past Clyde’s. The assembled drinkers cheer and clink glasses. None of us know much about hockey, but hockey it is tonight.

Politics has ruined too many of my evenings down here. If we had another watering hole within driving distance, I’d switch taverns. But I suspect it’s the same up north and the drive back through the sheriff’s prowl cars isn’t worth the gamble. So hockey it is tonight. At least until I finish this half a pint and head for the sanctuary of home and hearth. “Niger Niger Niger!!” Benny is singing softly to himself when I drop my glass on the bar he’s still wiping up. I know I’ll be humming it too all the way home. Where the hell is Niger?

Tea Party Ted moved away from what he called the Socialist Union of the South End back when that commie Obama was elected President of the still United States. He and his angry wife packed up kit and kaboodle and moved to Scottsdale, Arizona where the weather and the politics were more to their liking. Some of the scalawags in the Flatheads, our vintage car guyz, still get virulent e-mails from Ted, sometimes ten a day, that they’re kind enough to forward to the Enemy. That would be me.

I’m not sure whether they think I’m some Fence Sitter that can still be swayed to the Trump Camp before the gulags are instituted by some imagined regime that will ‘cleanse’ the South End’s radical heresy or if they just find Ted’s wild e-mails amusing in a whackjob sort of way. Amusing is not how I receive them, but then again, I don’t discourage my pals from passing on posts from the alt-right.

It’s important — or so I tell myself — to keep a finger on the pulse of these fire breathers in order to understand what makes them so damn angry. Ted was a government employee at the top of the pay grade system. Meaning, he gets a near six figure a year pension and total medical coverage, what us South Enders refer to as Made in the Shade. He doesn’t like government, he wants Obamacare killed, he hates the welfare system, food stamps and Medicaid for the poor. Taxes are theft, people who disagree with him are elitist boobs, the Federal Reserve is a plot to kill capitalism and white genocide is ramping up.

I won’t even mention his opinions on immigration, minorities, women, gays and transgenders. He’s a white guy. An old white guy. And it pisses him to the gills that his white Caucasian nation is morphing into a polyglot melting pot mess of people not much like himself, people who are inferior, potential terrorists, job stealers and poor. He wants these others gone. He wants his country back. He wants to make America great again.

All I know for sure is he helped make the South End, if not great, one small step better. By leaving. Arizona, you’re welcome to Ted. And his mizzus. And all the other Teds on his e-mail list. You know, except my buddies and me. And Ted, keep those cards and letters coming in. Maybe some more folks will come down and join you.

The President recently tweeted that the American public is finally wising up, high praise for us dweebs out here in the hinterlands. He’s talking about a survey that shows how few people believe the news media is truthful. You know, media like the New York Times, NBC, the Washington Post, CNN. Wow! I remember reading Orwell’s 1984 as a kid in high school and being chilled by Big Brother’s revisionist history. The Ministry of Truth needed entire departments to rewrite past events to make current events fit into what preceded them. “It’s a beautiful thing, the Destruction of words. …. Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?” Easy, just change history.

These days we don’t change history to match our beliefs, we just say facts are lies. Ignorance is Strength. War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Faux news, fake history. Trump and the alt-right have managed to convince the public the truth is whatever they want to believe. Fox News, fair and balanced. Facts? We don’t need no stinking facts!! The President is a liar but plenty of folks think the press is fabricating stories to defame him. He would like to pull the broadcast license of NBC. He’d really like to shut down most of the news media and replace it with the Ministry of Tweet. Big Brother is in office right now.

If Big Brother had a real agenda, we’d be in a sinister world of trouble, but thankfully the Donald is only interested in self-aggrandisement and increasing his brand’s net worth. If he had any ideas or ideals, we’d be in deep doo-doo. He’s no neo-con and he’s not much interested in policies. One day he’s against this, next day he’s all in. Only a craven empty suit could flip flop one hundred and eighty degrees then announce that he always believed the flop. Newspeak for Dummies. Rather than change yesterday’s headlines, just convince the proles the headlines were lies, a helluva lot easier. Ignorance, once bliss, is now strength. Truth, once the thing that would set you free, is now a shackle.

Back when I first got off the Mayflower south of Utsalady, I hitched my fortune to an unlikely looking piece of bottomland which had a shack, a large shed (or small barn depending on your agricultural perspective), a chicken coop, doghouse and a pen for some rabbits. Better than raw land, I figured. But not by much ….

Those early years I mostly hunkered down and tried to stay warm. Some folks would just look at this and shake their heads. Can’t say I blame them, but looking back now 35 years, I’m glad I bit it off. Occasionally I’d get friends coming up to see the estate. We were all pretty much layabouts from our days driving school buses in the Big City, not big dreamers, just slackers getting high on getting by, or so the song goes…. We were an aimless bunch, lacking in ambition and drive, plenty short on cash, but optimistic the future would play out all right for us. Why? I couldn’t say, just that a good positive attitude might, in the end, carry the day. I guess we drank the Kool-Aid —- or if we hadn’t, we were more than willing.

Some of those weekends, come nightfall, we’d load up the VW bus and motor into town, figuring to catch some Stanwoodopolis night life. Rudy the Banjo King played every Saturday night at the Hotel, but once was plenty and so we went to the other side of town to see what the Sportsman and the Sundance and the East Side had to offer a half dozen of us thirsty revelers. First tavern up, the Sportsman, we ordered schooners of tap beer. A minute later every barstool was empty and we were alone with the scowling bartender. Couple of beers, some pool, we moved next door. Our absentee barstool pals were all there, waiting, I guess, for us to bring the party.

We bellied up to the bar, ordered pitchers and watched our fellow revelers finish their beers and head for the door, about half a dozen fellas exiting. Was it something we said? The bartender took our money, but offered no clues. An hour later we were at the East Side, little shotgun of a place, shuffle board half its width. The locals kindly gave us their stools, tipped their hats and left. Once again.

Some places the drinking establishments are lively, a democratic conviviality. Alcohol has its negatives, but for loosening up inhibitions, it’s tried and true. I’ve lived here now 40 years. I’ve been to every drinking establishment that’s come and gone, lived and died. The mizzus says you can’t judge a town by its saloons … and she’s a historian … but I say you can. I could live here longer than Methuselah on scotch and soda and I tell you what, it’s way more fun to drink alone. Which is what we got in spades down here on the South End.

Some of us farmers down here on the organic South End are alarmed at the news Coca-Cola is making milk. They claim they’re making it better. God is going to be heartbroken to hear this. Probably thought She’d pretty much perfected it after all these millennia. Course God neglected marketing, something the labs down at Coke sure didn’t.

I’ve been getting milk down the road from my friend the Goat Lady. Pure, unadulterated, no growth hormone, no antibiotic, free range goat milk, unpasteurized, really creamy stuff. What we South Enders call ‘natural’, Coca-Cola would characterize as raw, meaning it’s pre-manipulated. They’re planning to separate that into sugars, proteins, carbos and fats, all its component parts, then reconstitute it. I’d tell you the formula, but it’s a secret, no doubt the hangover of those first Coke recipes that used cocaine before the pharmacologists and food scientists realized sugar and caffeine would be cheaper and less criminally suspect.

Science, a powerful tool. And … if you can’t trust your food to a soft drink corporation, who can you trust? It’s not as if they’re a cigarette company, chopping tobacco into its component parts, making a slurry, then adding 200 ingredients known to the state of California as carcinogens before rolling the goop into a totally addictive product for the consumer. Not like that at all! Besides, we got the FDA regulating food, right? Right??

The future looks grim for us farmers is what I think. Reformulated broccoli candy bars, reprocessed pea popsicles, endive gum, bush bean twists. But … when the chemists are done, what an improvement on that stuff growing in dirt and you-know-what. They’ll take that out first step in the centrifuge.

It’s a brave new world and maybe we better put on a brave new face. Hey, if nothing else they’ll take the sting out of our nettle crops. Sales might go back up to pre-Recession and the good times might return. Plus we won’t have cows tromping around pooping in our fields now that they’ll be confined to laboratories. Thank you Coke! But … wasn’t your slogan a few years back ‘YOU CAN’T BEAT THE REAL THING’? So why try?

I read the other day that 81% of Republicans still support Donald J. Trump. Loyalty is a laudable trait usually, but c’mon, this is beyond the pale. That, or I’m one of those snowflakes (whatever the hell that is) who gets indigestion and migraines whenever I open up a newspaper or read a newsfeed. Yesterday the Liar-in-Chief told the press that he hadn’t called the latest fallen soldiers’ families with condolences and that most presidents, especially mentioning Obama, didn’t do that. He’d get around to writing a note later. He joked that his vice president wanted to hang all gays and had asked smugly those who had been to see Pence if he’d made them pray with him.

It’s hard to keep up with this guy’s outrages. Course, maybe that’s the point. One outlandish act on top of three others, which one you gonna pick? And then toss in the Iran nuclear deal backtrack, slip in the Affordable Care subsidy withdrawal, slide in the Korea threats, demand that Mueller end that Russian collusion investigation, toss in the Melania vs. Ivana soap opera, call out the NFL for not firing those unpatriotic sonsofabitch players, defend the Confederacy and its generals, mix it all up with attacks on McConnell and Company, withdraw from the global warming treaty, slather on the Bannon hotsauce and who could possibly stay focused on any one outrage?

The man wants to pull the broadcast rights on NBC one day, declares he won’t allow cameras into the White House briefing room another, defends the Russians over any accusations they meddled in our elections, admires dictators, the list never really ends. If you think you know what’s in his orange hairy head, you haven’t been awake the last few months. He contradicts himself, reverses himself, changes opinions constantly. Why would anyone believe anything he says? Last week he attacked McConnell. Yesterday he had a meeting with Mitch and told reporters they were best pals. Believe what you want, believe in the Tooth Fairy, it doesn’t matter anymore, it’s all faux news now.

And 81% of his Republican voters apparently think this is fine. If that doesn’t scare you half to death about the future of democracy in the Land of the Free, you apparently picked the right guy for Halloween fun.

Now here’s an idea whose time is long overdue. Murder insurance!! You got a house full of guns and maybe shoot the mizzus, thinking she was an intruder and next thing you know, the neighborhood is critical, the lawyers are gunning for you and the whole world seems to be against you. What’s a gun owner gonna do?

Well, the National Rifle Association is there for you. They’re now offering insurance policies to protect you against those litiginous victims, what else! For a small annual fee you get peace of mind. Nobody needs to be wondering in those wee morning hours when the noise from the backyard invades your sleep, whether to take the safety off the AR-15 and risk losing the advantage over your would-be attacker because you were worried it might be the neighbor’s kid coming home late after a party. No, you need to be Ready, you need to be Focused, you need to be Alert and you definitely need NRA insurance!

You have insurance for auto accidents, why not gun accidents? Isn’t a little peace of mind worth the small price of the policy? Accidents happen every day in an armed America so why become the victim too in those unfortunate but understandable events? One victim is plenty, no need to martyr yourself to some ambulance chasing lawyer’s attacks. Take the anxiety out of home protection! Sign up today! And for a few dollars more, they’ll insure the entire family. Guns don’t kill people. But sometimes you might. Don’t leave yourself defenseless when you have an arsenal. Murder Insurance. Because you have the right to kill without worry!

There was a study recently — I know, who believes those anymore? — where college students were tested with smart phones on them, with smartphones in their packs and with smartphones left in an adjacent room. Nobody used them, nobody answered calls, nobody googled anything, but in the end the kids with phones on their person scored worse than the ones with phones in their packs. The highest scores were those of the students whose phones were left in the adjoining room. I would’ve loved to know how kids — if there are any left — would score if they had never owned a smarty phone at all. The conclusion the researchers reached was something on the line that smartphones make us dumber. Since I don’t own a smartphone, you can well imagine my pleasure at learning this. Or, if you’re a slave to the device, you’ll say I’m full of shit and the study was faux science.

I got a buddy, Computer Carl, who was the first guy I knew who bought a GPS. He visited us with it proudly mounted on his dash and we all listened — in amazement — to the female voice in perfect enunciation — command us to turn left, proceed point six miles, turn left again, or if we screwed up, recalculate and order new revised instructions. Carl, being a techie, gleefully obeyed her every edict.

Invariably we’d be driving home down the island and the smarty pants GPS lady would tell him to turn left at the corner where we always go straight, no doubt calculating distance, not time, and Carl, who never remembered the route even after two or three dozen visits and one hundred trips, would turn left. No, I’d say each of those 100 times, go straight, but Carl trusted the GPS more than me, a 40 year resident, and — here’s my point — more than HIS own memory. This is what we’d call now, Google Brain. Why trouble yourself learning and memorizing (and possibly using) that stored information if you can just google it up?

Maybe when I have Alzheimers I’ll have a better answer for that. You know, if I can remember where I put my smarty phone….

I suppose if we voted a reality TV personality as our President, we shouldn’t be surprised that we’ve made the White House a running joke. Jerry Springer, where are you when we need you??This past week the wives of the Donald are mudwrestling. The mother of Don Jr. and Ivanka claims she is the true First Lady, has a direct line to the White House and would straighten up the Oval Office Daycare in a week. Ouch! Melania slaps back that this is all about Ivana drumming publicity for her tell-all book. And a breathless America, weaned on celebrity news gossip, waits for the next POTUS tweet. Now That’s Entertainment!!

Remember a few short months back when the pundits wondered if the President would adapt to the solemnity of the office and become, oh, more presidential. They don’t wonder now. And serious Republicans are realizing their dream of leading this horse to water and making him drink were fantasies and delusions. This horse won’t go near the waterhole. He’d rather splash in the toilet. He may have even hired whores to piss on the bed the Obamas slept in. We didn’t vote for Class, we voted for Crass and if some folks are disappointed, think how the rest of us feel. Because it’s worse, way worse, than we ever dreamed.

Every empire deserves one or two Caligulas, power-crazed psychopaths who steer the ship of state into the ditch. Great civilizations eventually succumb to corruption, hubris or greed, a form of shared insanity and decadence. Usually the populace rises up in revolt when enough is actually beyond enough, preferring anarchy to chains and abuse, neglect or subjugation. This empire, nurtured on violent pablum and prize-fueled game shows, happily voted in the man they’ll be just as happy to send to the guillotine. Rome wasn’t built in a day and it didn’t crumble in one either. But there are ways to speed it up.

Used to be Midlife Crises came when we were shocked to realize youth had lost its bloom and wouldn’t be coming back. Although … guys bought red sportscars and their wives dyed their grey hairs and considered plastic surgery. A new set of wheels or breasts usually didn’t work — truth was, what they mourned was the end of dreams. The corporate man was never going to backpack Europe or write the Great American Novel. And his trophy wife was not going back to college for a degree in sociology. Even if the kids were….

But I’m seeing friends who are going through a different crisis, the one where mortality is closing in and so is the realization that their life was mostly mortgaged, maybe even subprimed and now the equity seems puny and someone else may actually foreclose on it. They’re retired, time is not on their side and may never have been, and now the prospect of another hard winter is really bearing down. They think maybe a move might help. Go south, go back to their hometowns, look for a second childhood or adolescence, start over and see if the dice come up Lucky Sevens. They ask me: do you think I’m nuts to do this? And I say sure, (as if I got anything against being nuts)  but … if you’re not happy here, with what you got, with the life you made, I’d take a roll of the dice too.  Plus, it’s America.  We’re supposedly the adventurous, the brave, the pioneers.  We leave the known for the unknown.  We let optimism be our guide.  Complacency is the enemy.  Nothing ventured, nothing gained.  Go west, young man!  At least …. that’s what we tell ourselves.  Even if most of us have settled for a secure banality.

So it’s the winter of our discontent. Friends are dying, not a lot, but a start and our turn is in there somewhere. The community volunteerism isn’t working, the house has a leaky roof and the deck is rotted, retirement is surprisingly BORING, the walls are closing in and the trips to town are maddeningly uneventful. It’s as if the life we thought we’d built on sturdy foundations is sliding toward the bluff in incremental but steady tectonic lurches. We aren’t going to be rich and famous, money didn’t buy us love, religion was dumbed down to an embarrassingly blind faith devoid of anything resembling much more than a hope for another life in the after-world or prayers for winning the Lotto. We’re adrift, unmoored and untethered, and definitely uneasy.

I know. This is how I felt when I came here. For you pilgrims, be of cheerful heart! Sometimes the grass IS greener. Occasionally you CAN start over. Dreams DO come true in the once upon a times…. And happiness may actually be just over the next hill, the one you won’t find if you don’t go looking. Good luck!