The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

One of the dangers of moonshine wit is that the so-called humor will be misunderstood. When I write about the neighbors, they think I’m actually writing about them. That’s the trouble with shotgun humor, it’s imprecise. I was really aiming at the house next door, not theirs. You know that, I know that, but try to convince them last night’s pellet blast rattling off their trailer’s aluminum siding was inadvertent. Gives them the willies and probably bad dreams too. But a writer has to write and a jokester has to joke, collateral damage be damned!

The Flatheads, our vintage car club in these parts, I have it on reputable reporting from a buddy who is one of the happy wrenchers, apparently feel that the name is derogatory, not funny. Now if you’re not an old car guy, you possibly don’t know that a flathead is an engine block before the modern engines we have today. Before the overhead valve engine, the Wankel rotary engine, before the hybrids, before battery powered Teslas. Flatheads were in vogue from the 1890’s to the 1950’s. They had poor compression ratios, weren’t very efficient, couldn’t really rev up like modern ones. Just so you know….

I’ll quit boring you with the history and mechanics of flatheads. All I want to get across here is that calling the car guyz Flatheads is sort of funny, at least to me. Kind of plays off the real thing and hints at, well, maybe these fellows are … okay, maybe it isn’t funny to them. I get that. Two Toke Tom thinks it’s funny, that’s good enough for me. And he’s an unofficial member of the club with his 1966 Volkswagen bus, the one you see with the peace sign and the faded Grateful Dead logo on the front end. Course, Tom thinks most everything is comical.

The point is, humor is in the eye of the beholder and yeah, sometimes a finger too. Just can’t be helped. And no, I’m not pissed off the boyz won’t give my 2010 truck full membership in their exclusive ranks. Has nothing to do with why I decided to call them Flatheads. Really, it doesn’t.

A few of us South Enders were over at the Marina’s Pilot House lounge, a hole in the wall tavern claiming “The Best Burgers on the Island.” Maybe when there wasn’t another restaurant…. It was a Monday night Seahawks game and the few sports fanatics who didn’t subscribe to cable and ESPN were hunkered expectantly at our formica tables drinking bottled beer from the cooler next to the cash register and a table selling golf balls and tees.

Must’ve been a total of three tables, the sum total of cable-deprived islanders. Ralph was grumbling that maybe we should’ve driven the extra ten miles to a bar with TV’s bigger than his laptop screen, but the game had started and the rest of us weren’t all that die-hard a fans and weren’t motoring off island in search of some sportsbar with 16 TV’s mounted strategically so every seat was Front Row. We had a front row right here. The beers were cold, the 19th Hole had advertised the ballgame and we’d taken the bait. Even Ralph accepted the finality of the decision and grabbed another bottle from the trap.

What I think we’ve accepted, all of us, is that sports are king in modern America and football is more popular by far than politics or American Idol. Marx said religion was the opiate of the masses, but he never imagined 15 cable channels of every sport from soccer to ping pong, bobsledding to skateboarding, rugby to kickboxing. As more and more of us couch potatoes hunker down over our laptops and bigscreens, eschewing any and all physical involvement with the real world, we seem addicted to almost anything that smacks of competition, whether it’s football or ballroom dancing.

One of our buddies here at the 19th Hole, Harold, never misses American Idol. He secretly thinks he’s a crooner and I have no doubt whatsoever he imagines himself under the klieg lights on the neon-lit stage, belting out Sinatra to 30 million crazed viewers who plan to vote for him. He’s elbow down with his Bud Lite watching the halftime show. Our team is losing by a field goal and maybe Jerry at the far table is warming up his kicking leg in his private fantasy.

We’re all lost in those fantasies these days. Doesn’t really hurt, I guess, but I suspect a lot of what we used to call real life is only glimpsed on the crawlers at the bottom of the screen while we’re all dancing with the stars. Way of the world, nowadays, I suppose, just living vicariously, way more losers than winners in the Big Game of Life. Although …. we all imagine ourselves the winners. Harold is singing some jingle from the last commercial as he heads to the cooler, only slightly off-key. I decide to have one more beer too. Might as well make it a duet.

If ignorance is bliss, half the country is living in Paradise now. If the level of ignorance proves any indication, Paradise must have tiers of Happiness with the upper level a joyful mix of Qanon believers and anti-science yahoos all blowing bubbles from the soapsuds in their heads. Every day I read a news feed (from the lamestream media) that boggles my already boggled mind. Jewish lasers in outer space starting forest fires, government distribution of crack pipes for addicts in today’s news, and now Marjorie Taylor Greene, House Representative for the great state of Georgia sounding the alarm, warning us of the coming of Gazpacho Police.

Trust me when I say the last thing in the world any of us want in this besieged nation is Gazpacho Police unleased on us citizenry. Hordes of storm troopers checking our pantries for banned Campbell soups, terrorizing housewives and restaurant chefs, followed by … what? Stew Surveillance, Casserole Cops, Chili Patrols, Bouillabasse Swat Teams or the dreaded Chowder Corps? No, the time has come to put our foot down and say No Mas! Get government out of our kitchen! Bad enough government wants to be in our bedrooms, but enough is enough, leave our kitchens alone!

Marjorie T. has sounded the alarm and hopefully her many paranoid followers will take up the call and march, ladles in hand, to the steps of the Capitol for more ‘legitimate political discourse’ even if it means hanging Pelosi and Pence. This Gazpacho onslaught must not stand! All patriotic Americans must defend the galleys of freedom despite the cost, reason be damned! Beat the pots, bang the pans, throw spices to the wind! The time is now, the enemy is at the kitchen door! Be brave, comrades, and sharpen that cutlery!

Benghazi! Benghazi! Benghazi! Geez, how many times did we hear that chant by Trump and the GOP about Hillary’s role in Libya as Sec. of State? A million? Or more? Followed by Lock Her Up! Lock Her Up! She voluntarily sat for Congressional investigations for ten hours, patiently answering questions by hostile interrogators who assumed that using a personal server for her phone was tantamount to treason. And in the end it was all a tempest in a teapot, no charges to file, no apologies forthcoming. And those emails? Well, it cost her the election when James Comey who headed up the FBI opened up a new investigation right before the time to vote. Thanks, Jim. Job well done.

Now that we know the Prez-in –Exile used his own cellphone, destroyed logs and memos, calendars and meeting notes, where are those outraged Senators and Representatives crying Lock Him Up! Lock Him Up! The worm has turned but those worms haven’t. Hypocrisy seems to be the modus operandi of the day. Meanwhile the war drums keep pounding in Ukraine. Remember Ukraine? Donald told them he would withhold military aid unless they uncovered dirt on Biden’s boy, a quid pro quo that should have resulted in an easy case for impeachment but was thwarted a second time. You might think an omelette could be made from all those eggs on shameless faces but you’d be wrong. Russia may or may not be preparing to attack Ukraine — if they do, will anyone think back to Trump’s personal snit fit while the stakes have become incredibly high? If you think so, go to the back of the line.

The Teflon Trump may or may not get away with shredding and flushing evidence in what will no doubt become Toiletgate. Maybe only history will judge the man guilty, but unless you’ve been hiding in a fallout shelter these past years, you’ve been witness to a White House that ignores the law, flaunts morals, repeatedly lies, monetizes the office, rants and raves and threatens perceived enemies in a way that makes Richard Nixon look like a choir boy. Russia, if you’re listening, find his emails.

Suppose the Nazis came to your state for a rally. You remember the Nazis, right? Swastika waving skinheads who hate, well, everybody but white folks. And some white folks too. Gays, liberals, Jews, scum like that. And suppose the governor of your state came out and instead of denouncing this hate-group rally of Holocaust deniers, claimed instead that it was a stunt by the Democratic Party to embarrass him. Well, this is Florida and maybe your governor would rise to the occasion, not dig a deeper hole in his political basement.

These are the times we live in. Trump came out this weekend at a rally to promise that if he were elected once again or the Congress flipped GOP, he’d pardon all those patriots who trashed the Capitol and screamed for Pence and Pelosi’s heads. The Commission to investigate the assault on the Capitol, he heatedly suggested, should look into the crimes of Pence and Pelosi. Then he claimed the Georgia folks looking into his so-called attempt to overturn the election results were really racist prosecutors . Needless to say the Prosecutor has asked the FBI for protection from potential harm from patriots motivated by this kind of accusation.

This would be sadly humorous coming from a man who is under assault from so many legal suits you can hardly keep up with them if it weren’t for the fact most of the Republicans in Congress seem willing to either ignore this stuff or else repeat it as truth. Stolen election, tampered ballot boxes, dead zombies voting, witch hunt witch hunt fake news witch hunt. And you thought it couldn’t happen here in the Yew Ess Aye. Well, it’s happening.

I thought Trump was a piece of work, a fluke who parlayed fame from a dopey reality TV show into a desk at the Oval Office. I figured he flim-flammed a lot of folks into believing he was a savvy businessman, a carnival barker with an ego the size of Mt. Rushmore. What I never believed was a whole lot of folks out there in the purpled majesty were just waiting for a bigot to roll out the red carpet for them to say and act what they’ve kept a little quiet in this oppressive political correctness that asks that we respect one another. You don’t respect people you hate. No telling if you might do what you always wanted to do. Just wait for the word. Just hope for Trump or another one like him. Yeah, it gives me the creeps.

As most of you careful readers know, political correctness down here on the partisan shores of the steamy equatorial South End is probably not one of our more valued virtues. Maybe because we’re all trapped down at this skinny dead end backwash cul-de-sac, we’ve learned — the hard way usually —- that if we want to get along without civil war, we have to disagree without resorting to a full blown arms race. And believe me, we disagree. On most everything. That’s why we all ended up down here at the end of a tilting island at the end of America on the edge of a continental shelf sliding herky-jerky under another tectonic plate.

This week the talk down at Jolene’s Beauty Salon and Boutique revolved exclusively around the passage of the same sex marriage bill. Scissors and tongues snipped and clucked, but Jolene says no blood was spilled. Ronald, her frothy new beautician, might have intentionally miscolored Mrs. Adeline’s silver perm a tad on the electric blue side when she made the comment that ‘gayness’, seemed to her, was a lifestyle choice, but mostly the banter was affable.

Rhonda Wilkins did wonder out loud if the bill’s passage meant she and her no-account husband Tom’s opposite sex marriage would be annulled now. “That’s wistful thinking,” Wanda blurted from two chairs away in the middle of a henna touch-up on the minister’s mizzus who steadfastly refused to be drawn into a curling iron showdown, and if Rhonda hadn’t been curled herself and heat-lamped into her chair, she might have stormed out, but by the end of the drying cycle she was cooled down and still unhappily married to the love of her life whose zenith of ambition was to reach retirement before cirrhosis.

So Valentine’s Day on the metrosexual South End this year promises to be a cross between Mardi Gras and a Pink St. Patrick’s Day. Maybe no parades by the Diner, but a lot of closets opened for an early spring cleaning. Believe me, the South End could always stand a little more love…. And just in case Mrs. Adeline is right, some of us should think about renewing those old marriage vows. On the outside chance there really might be a statute of limitation.

It is only rarely that I agree with our President-in-Exile but when I heard that one of his tactics to dispose of presidential memos, meeting records, calendars, love letters from his Korean buddy and anything else that might be used as evidence to indict him for various and sundry crimes, was to flush them down the executive toilet until a call to Roto-Rooter was necessary to unplug the paper mess that had clogged the royal crapper, I thought how appropriate. Better than saving them for the National Archives or the very empty Donald J. Trump Library. Good call, Mr. MAGA!

Folks are taping together some of the ripped up documents down at Mar-a-Lago for a return to the Archives after a summons for their retrieval. Undoubtedly no one will attempt a sewer search and we can say goodbye to the documents that were burned. Worst case: we can let historians piece together the shredded legacy of the Trump Presidency. Or hopefully let the Justice Department sort out the crimes.

The days of secret recordings in the Oval Office probably ended with Nixon and Watergate, the poor guy hoping to burnish his legacy with an audio tape revealing to future generations the profound wisdom of Tricky Dick. Instead it revealed a crooked and paranoid President that even his Republican compatriots abandoned. Trump, well, unless you’ve drunk the Kool-Aid of conspiracy media, you don’t really need tapes or taped together memos to reveal a sinister and criminal thug bent on destroying all evidence that might be used against him in a court of law or the court of public opinion.

The future Trump Library, fittingly enough, should be a simple billboard with the words: CLOSED FOR PLUMBING RENOVATIONS. OPENING DATE UNCERTAIN.

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The hot news on the Future Shock front is that Amazon has opened its first Amazon Go grocery stores in select cities across this Great Grid we call America. You walk in their futuristic A&P, grab yourself a cart you still have to drive yourself, load it with all the goodies you want and then sail out the door to your Tesla. No checkout, no waiting in lines, no self-check, all done for you and by the time you make it home, your credit card will have been charged. No fuss, no muss.

Amazon claims there will be no facial recognition software used to track you through their store. Just cameras everywhere covering your every move, no big deal. According to the company, they’ll use instead computer vision, deep learning algorithms and sensor fusion to manage the store, you know, stuff like that. How the hell they know your identity, much less your credit card information, I couldn’t tell you, but I suspect they use the nano trackers from your vaccinations or something similar, nothing to worry about, all good, all for making your life a bit easier. Isn’t that what we were promised in the digital information era? Time saving? Computers doing your chores? Sure it is. And how is that working out for you? Your life less stressful now that you’ve got access to the internet? More time for those hobbies or for reading a book?

The Olympics are opening up over there in Beijing this week. All the athletes are required to use special apps that can monitor their every tweet or conversation. And no, Amazon didn’t have a hand in this Chinese version of Big Brother. They’re a little bizzy using Artificial Intelligence to monitor your every move in their grocery store, the one coming soon to a neighborhood near you. If you’ve got nothing to hide, why worry? Shoplifting should be a thing of the past along with criticism of your government. Kind of a neat trade-off. Now if only we could get an android to help load and unload that cart, life would be nearly perfect.

The Republican National Committee today censured Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for participating in the congressional hearings on the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol, alleging that the actions of those in the protest were ‘legitimate political discourse’. Maybe the RNC didn’t watch the tourists scaling the walls of the Capitol, smashing in doors and windows, calling for Pelosi and Pence to be hanged, stealing laptops and documents, threatening the Capitol police and causing bodily harm to some. Maybe they missed the deaths of a few of the officers. Maybe they witnessed a different attack on the Legislature than I did. Some other footage maybe from some 3rd world country.

The RNC doesn’t need an investigation. The RNC has decided that the folks who invaded the halls of Congress were simply protestors exercising their right to disagree with the election results that declared Donald J. Trump the loser in the 2020 presidential election. What’s the big deal? Nancy and Mike weren’t lynched. No legislator was castrated or raped. Nobody was killed or mutilated, so why make a federal case over this? Go home, everybody, nothing to see here. No need to conduct a sham investigation into what preceded this happy tourist event, right? Just some good American citizens smashing their way into the Capitol to register their disagreements. What could be wrong with that?

Call me a Liberal Stooge and slap me with my battered hat, but c’mon, Legitimate Political Discourse?? Maybe if I was an Oath Keeper or a Proud Boy, but this is the Republican National Committee we’re talking about here, not the Neo-Nazis. Or … maybe we are. At some point we have to take a good hard look at these people. If you quack like a duck, if you smell like a duck, if you defecate like a duck, well, maybe, just maybe, you are a duck. Legitimate Public Discourse?? You sound like a Nazi, you smell like one and by god, I suspect you might just be one. The Republican Party just crossed a line that I can’t see a way to forgive. That was no tourist protest January 6th. That was a putsch. Quack quack.