The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

“At some point, I’m going to be so presidential that you people will be so bored and I will come back as a presidential person.” Our President before he became President.

I think this about sums it up. Why behave like an adult if adulthood is boring? Why act wisely if wisdom will put the American people to sleep? Why be sane if sanity is no fun? Oh, sure, we could have elected a normal person. But why? To solve world problems and help steer the nation into the future? C’mon, that’s so Yesterday. So meat and potatoes. So yawn-inducing. You want position papers and statesman-like pronouncements, get a grip. This is reality TV, tweet-storming excitement.

The man gets up pre-dawn to tweet some new outrage for the lying media to devour. He’s pissed off and he wants some revenge, you don’t get that? You’d like to take it out on the folks who criticize you, wouldn’t you? You bet your toupee you would! He doesn’t give a damn about who gets knocked down, whose feelings get hurt, what cherished value gets broken — and wouldn’t we all love to be the bull in the china shop for once? Judging by the trolls out there in cyberville, I’d say there’s plenty of room for racists and misogynists and haters. They’ve waited their whole empty life for this opportunity. And now they’ve got their role model in the highest office in the land. Yee haw!

If I were one of those yahoos who think government is a bunch of stoopid jerks who screwed up my life, I’d love this guy. He’s a one man wrecking ball. Congress? Oh right, the dumbasses who can’t repeal that terrible Obamacare we all hate? Those guys? The ones who spent the past 7 years tearing their hair out but never put together the replacement plan? Those guys? That government? The one that couldn’t agree on what day of the week it is, much less what month? No, give me the guy who has the guts day in and day out to tweet what idiots they all are. The guy who will bring back coal jobs. The guy who’ll stand up to France and Germany. The man who isn’t afraid to admit he likes the manly Putin more than that dogface Merkel woman. The President who isn’t afraid to change his mind when the mood suits him, just like us! Yaw!!

Let’s just hope he doesn’t get so presidential we’re bored and becomes a presidential person. That’s when we change the channel….

The 4th of July is here once again, parades and fireworks stands, flags and patriotism, the yearly celebration of the birth of this experiment we call America. I admit, I’m not the most patriotic yahoo in the Land of the Free, certainly not the bravest. I didn’t volunteer to fight in Viet Nam, just watched my lottery number miss by 6 when I dropped my college deferment and realized I wouldn’t be moving to Canada any time soon. I criticized the war in Afghanistan, I sure didn’t like the Iraq War and probably there wouldn’t be any wars coming up that I thought were worth the blood and treasure to fight. World War Two, yeah, I’d have done like my old man and gone over to fight that one, but that kind of war is over now. I hope.

It’s not as if I thought America was that City on the Hill some folks want us to believe. We’ve played pretty dirty on the world stage, assassinated folks we didn’t want in power if they got in the way of corporate interests, overthrew governments for the same reason while at the same time offering up pablum that we were actually supporting democracies, all that stuff that casts doubts on our self-shined reputation as Leader of the Free World. We waterboard, we torture, we do the renditions, we keep Guantanamo open. These are more than blemishes, they’re war crimes.

But along comes this man Trump…. Our fearless leader now. No experience in leadership or governing, no sense that I can see whatsoever. A congenital liar, a bully, a cheap punk in a fat man’s suit with enough money to intimidate his enemies and ruin his competition. A loudmouth idiot you’d hope would get his come-uppance in some Bronx bar after offending the clientele. And lest you think we don’t deserve such a malicious clown, you need to remember we voted for him. America voted for him. America chose him to do … what? Fix the economic inequities that fuel folks’ anger from West Virginia to Arizona? Take care of that immigration mess? Drain the swamp?

Fat chance. You think people were disgusted with government before, get a grip on your hat, the blowback coming next will be a tornado. So when you got your favorite beer in one hand this 4th and a spatula on the hamburgers, ask yourself if this isn’t a great country or what? Me, I’ll be having more than one of those beers. America, you need to wake the hell up.

Give the boy credit. He says the tweet is the mark of a Modern President and noblesse oblige, well, it’s had its day. Today I watched a video of the President at the World Wrassling Federation taking down a man whose face was photoshopped to be CNN. This is what modern presidents do, they use their time to make violent videos as revenge on their media critics. You didn’t know that?

Well, his critics know that. The man is a TakeDown, SmackDown, KnockDown all around winner. If he can put a hammerlock on CNN’s logo, he can stick ISIS on there next. And don’t think for one New York minute those radical Islamists don’t know that too!!! A modern president doesn’t win wars with diplomacy, he wins em with photoshop tweets. You didn’t know that?

Now you do. The most powerful man on earth with the most powerful tools in his arsenal, the tweet and the twitter. His hand isn’t on the nuclear button, it’s on his cellphone. And the world trembles!! Who will he strike next? What faux media will he attack this morning? What policy will he smite before lunch, the one he campaigned for? Or the one his party was attempting to pass in the legislature?

You don’t know, do you? And THAT is the secret to his strength. We don’t know where he will lash out next. At who or for what or why. All we know, all we need to know, is he will tweet it. Be nervous, be alert, be afraid.

Melania, Melania, Melania!!! I thought, as did so many of us, you’d undertaken the fight against cyber-bullying out of some profound and personal embarrassment for your husband’s egregious behavior. He has called women Dog Face, he’s made reference to bleeding from you-know-where, he’s acted the Pig. Grab em by the pussy, he’s said, publicly, and they’ll do what you want. We felt awful for you, Melania. We felt what we thought was your pain….

Recently he called the MSNBC commentator low IQ and his cohort a woman who bleeds from her facelift. You defended him, saying he was only hitting back. ‘Stand by your man, Melania, tell the world that you love him …’ But don’t go on asking us to believe as First Lady you’d be a good spokeswoman for an anti-cyber bullying crusade. It’s like Molly Hatchet lobbying against the ax manufacturers. C’mon, lady, you’ve made yourself a national joke. You’re the Bill Cosby look-alike who was planning to run ‘town meetings’ to advise us poor men on the risk of being falsely accused of sexual assault even though he admitted he drugged those women and then had ‘consensual’ sex with them.

I know folks were stupid enough to vote for your husband. They’re still in denial … but not for long. We didn’t vote for Bill Cosby and we didn’t vote for you. Be a dear now and quit defending the indefensible. At the very least, find yourself another cause. Maybe something like Assistance for the Fashionably Impoverished. Thanks, Melania, for hearing me out.

You got to love the man, don’t you? For constant entertainment, if nothing else. Sure, he’s infuriating. Course he’s a total moron. And a liar. And a bully. And an egomaniac. But … it’s hard to turn away, isn’t it? The mad king is a total train wreck in motion. So what if we’re in the caboose and wondering where the tracks end and the wheels come off? Every day is a dose of idiocy spooned out with an adrenaline pill. It’s like being on speed with a bottle of Jack and you’re in the backseat with the guy you’ve been drinking with all night and now he’s smacking the radio maniacally and flicking the ashes from his joint out the open window while the night is alive with menace and electricity. You know it won’t end well, but hell, you paid for the ride, you might as well see it through. You got a victim’s point of view now….

Trump, being a man who thinks out of his box, is proposing a solar wall at the border. Why not generate some juice while we’re at it and make some money to defray expenses? I love it, an alternative energy subsidy at last. Save the Mexican government plenty when their bill comes due. Sunshine Superman!

Lunacy is the catchword of the year now. Every morning the world tilts further off its fragile little axis. Tomorrow we’ll have nuclear power plants on the border, the cooling tanks forming a thousand mile moat to keep the illegals from crossing unless they want to risk being irradiated on the swim. Plus, all that nuclear power!! We live in the Light Fantastic where facts are for fools and reality is anything the man tweets. The media is lying, off with their heads! Science is bunk. Obamacare is collapsing under its own weight, global warming is caused by skunks farting at night, the Russians are misunderstood and the Syrians, well, who knows where Syria is anyway.

When I was a young guy, we were the Ugly Americans. Now we’re the Crazy Americans. We’ve opened the doors to the Asylum and disgorged the nutcases to run the place. Day after day we get a bit more used to them. It may actually be their strategy. Reality is, after all, fairly malleable. We can only hope they don’t decide to lock us up, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

Yesterday I was wandering the woods without too much direction, nothing particularly new, just meandering along the trails, another animal in its usual habitat. It’s usually fairly quiet around here if you ignore the lawnmowers and weedeaters and leafblowers down the road, but the noise yesterday was coming from a pack of crows screeching about something or other, enough to make me change course and go over to their squawk party.

Up in a Christmas tree we planted as a one foot tree back in the ‘80’s and now was 50 or 60 feet high sat a big fat great horned owl, tufted ears, huge green eyes. The crows were parked on adjoining limbs in the same tree and surrounding ones, all of them croaking and cawing as if the sheer volume of noise would drive that owl out of their territory once and for all. The owl paid absolutely no attention to them. It gazed down at me but wasn’t perturbed in the least by the presence of some earthbound human. Occasionally a crow would make a dive at the intruder, but it was tough navigating the thicket of boughs.

All day that murder of crows kept at it. I kept going back occasionally with a camera and noticed the owl had moved its perch slightly, but otherwise, it sat Buddha-like in that fir which gave it a good vantage on the garden and the open area around it where rabbits and mice might be unfortunate enough to venture. Later, though, I heard the crows fly back into the woods behind the shack so naturally I followed the herd to see where Mr. Owl might have flown.

He was up on a branch in a sugar maple we’d planted 30 years ago, a little too exposed, and the crows were joined by four or five robins plus a couple of hummingbirds and they all took turns making kamikaze dives on this poor owl who tried his best to ignore them. Until they began to hit him. The robins were the worst. They smacked him on the side, on his back, against his head. The owl quit watching me and turned his attention full time to these attackers and it wasn’t long before they drove him up to the woods next to the field and the barn above.

Nobody likes an owl in their vicinity, I guess. When we had chickens, they would go half berserk whenever one sat in a tree above their coop. Crows, they won’t tolerate one. Robins either, apparently. And the hummers, they don’t much like anybody. Owls, well, they sort of made their bed, being the predators they are. Hard to feel sorry for them, really. We got a great horny owl in the White House now. He and the kids feel like the world is against them, they just can’t understand the acrimony or the racket. So unfair! So sad! I suspect in the end we’ll drive that bird to the far field too. It is, after all, a jungle out there….

Sometimes in our quest to alleviate the pain of the struggling middle class or take care of the needs of the poor, we forget about the rich. The job creators, the builders of capital, the risk takers, the folks who made America what it is today: the wealthiest nation on earth. We take them for granted, we ignore them and when we do pay some attention, we castigate them for perceived sins of avarice. In sheer dollar amounts they pay most of the taxes in this country. Sure, they get a few tax breaks, they don’t have to pay the same rate on their capital gains as we would on wages and income and of course they can deduct private jets and yachts as business expenses. You think they got wealthy wining and dining clients in a suburban two story? C’mon, wake up.

You ever been around real wealth, you’d know it’s hard work being rich. Phone calls 24/7, teams of attorneys, tax consultants, travel to and from their vacation homes, multiple vehicles for transportation and attendant chauffeurs, countless investment strategies. Don’t kid yourself, you’d need a team of psychiatrists to handle your anxieties. And trust me, shrinks don’t come cheap. And then there’s the hidden expenses, small things like trust funds and private schools followed by Ivy League for the children. Vacation properties strewn across the globe. Who do you think takes care of those, eh? Who knew it would be so tough?

So while you’re lamenting the cutbacks coming in Medicaid and watching health care for millions suddenly out of reach again, take a pause in your criticism of the GOP led attack on Obamacare and think of the undervalued 1%. Don’t you think maybe they deserve a tax break on this new Republican Plan? Of course you do. The world is hard enough for these folks without us piling on too. Spare the rich!

“I hear so many times, ‘Oh, I want my people to be smarter than I am.’ It’s a lot of crap. You want to be smarter than your people, if possible.”

I’m guessing that half of the American people voted for Trump hoping that a businessman, a CEO, a job creator, a billionaire entrepreneur, a captain of industry, might lead them out of the Valley of Death, or at least the ravine of income inequality. I figure they think the head of Boeing or Amazon would be the sort of bright, can-do person who could turn this country into an economic machine. So they held their noses over Donald’s, let’s call them his idiotsynchrocies, and cast a vote for a real estate developer turned reality TV host.

Why not? Some folks actually believe the country is going down the sewer. They see the world shape shifting faster than you can say Virtual Reality. They feel left behind, culturally, economically, politically, socially, you name it, they’re watching the future speed past them before they can even get a hitchhiking thumb out. Not that it would matter with self driving cars coming up from behind them. They want to make America great again. Meaning, they want America to be the myth they have in their heads, the one where they liked Ike and Beaver, that loveable white kid out in the suburbs who was always getting his ass in trouble, but in the end, he learned some valuable lessons and went to bed happy that in the morning his cereal bowl of processed and sugared grains would be waiting once again to fill his belly with empty calories.

Five months into this Presidency they still hold out hope that the Mogul of Manhattan will turn D.C. upside down and shake these swamp denizens until the loose change in their bulging pockets clatters to the base of Lincoln’s monument, then rolls down the marble steps and finally into their own bank accounts. If he lives up to his myriad promises, they’ll have free cable TV by Christmas. Yes, Virginia, there IS and he lives in the White House! When he’s not at Mira-de-Lago.

I happen to be one of those cynics who believes CEO’s are paid a hundred times too much. Call me an infidel and take away my passport, but you can’t tell me stockholders aren’t idiots for paying some yahoo in an Armani 50 million bucks to run their corporation. Course, it’s their money and they can fritter it away on mega-talent, but in the end, all of us pay for that, stockholder or not. The real price, though, is that we are fast becoming a society of peasants and princes.

We’ll see soon enough if the real estate developer king was worth the price. We’ll find out if America should be run like a corporation or a real estate office, if we can lean on the unions, bribe the politicians, coerce our enemies and bluster our way to greatness once again when the man at the top declares publicly he wants only inferiors beneath him. Little wonder he hasn’t filled all those hundreds of vacancies in his government. Hard to find folks that dumb.

Jared Kushner, the Mad King’s son-in-law, is taking time off his busy domestic schedule and his real estate business to head to the Middle East, see what he can do with this Israeli/Palestinian mess. You and me might’ve sent someone with diplomatic cred instead, but hey, this is a New Paradigm. Historians will no doubt look back at this era in slack-jawed open-mouthed wonder. Wheeler Dealer! The Art of …

Goodness gracious, great balls of fire! Let’s send the kids over to solve the world’s most pressing problems, why not? This kid is Jewish and as far as I can tell, that’s his only resume for something as complex and historically impossible as this. Many presidents and their ambassadors and their state department experts have thrown their shoulders against this wheel, but they have come up with nothing more substantive than torn rotator cuffs for their efforts. It’s a tough rock to move, a hard nut to crack, pick your own metaphor, it’s a bastard of a problem.

So send in the clowns, let Netanyahu and Abbas see we’re serious. About letting the status quo simmer on high. When Jared resolves those issues, he can hop right over to Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Afghanistan. A one man diplomatic corps. Course he has to get back for that meeting with high tech CEO’s, something to do with corporatizing America, making it safe for entrepreneurs once again. It’s a high wire act that few would take on outside the Wallendas, but he is, after all, the son-in-law of the president who has already accomplished more in half a year than his predecessors managed in their entire terms. Except maybe FDR, who had more advantage than our Caligula will due to presidential term limits, sad!

No doubt Peace, World Peace, is finally at hand. Well, after Jared deals aces over there in Pyongyang. Let’s just hope he doesn’t get tired. We need him to be strong, savvy and wide awake. I’m counting on his youthful energy to win the day.

I’ve been cooling my heels in the Tire Shop in town getting a flat tire fixed. Sitting here in the communal waiting room I got pulled into the crackerbarrel talk with a few fellow customers when the palaver turned to government excess, corporate greed, pharmaceutical warnings, health care costs, pretty much the gamut of modern grievances in this dystopian world we now live in.

Did YOU know, for instance, that the government was dropping chemicals into the atmosphere to halt global warming? No? Or that John Wayne’s lung cancer was caused by nuclear testing outside Las Vegas where he rode his horse? You could see the mushroom clouds from your hotel room on the Strip.

Did you know that arthritis was the result of wheat harvested after being sprayed with Roundup, that gluten intolerance was actually chemical poisoning? No, you hadn’t heard that? Did you realize the EPA Superfund cleanup of the Duwamish River in Seattle got hauled a few miles north and dumped off Magnolia? You didn’t?

I bet you also didn’t know the oyster farms up north were so polluted they couldn’t grow baby oysters. No? Actually, it’s partly true, but not because of pollution, it’s because of acidification of the ocean. Bet you the ‘chemtrail’ is causing it. Along with celiac disease, irritable bowel syndrome, autism and presidential neurosis.

My tire repair didn’t take long, but enough time to cover some fairly major conspiracies, from government experiments on us rodents to ‘Deep State’ cabals. My new friends didn’t trust anybody or anything. Although … they did like their health care which cost way too much, but it was better than what Trump and his pals were going to do. If I had said I liked rainbows, they’d have told me they were oil sheens reflecting off the atmospheric poisons, a sure sign I would have rheumatoid arthritis in a month. The world was a mess and its leaders were evil. We were doomed, that was pretty much the gist of things. One guy said he was spending his grocery money to get the struts on his Honda fixed, had to do all four, cost a fortune. Damn car companies anyway! Damn tire place too!

My tire guy saved me finally, said he’d put my spare back up under the truck bed if I showed him where I’d hidden the gizmo that hoisted it up. I said I’d do it when I got home but he said he might as well do it, save me crawling on my back later. When the spare was in place, I asked what I owed. “On the house,” he said. “No charge, sir.” You know and I knew too after listening to my new pals in the waiting room, some kind of tire conspiracy was at work. I’m still trying to figure out what their game is.