The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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.

Statistics don’t lie but they fib a lot. I’ve been trying to recreate my glass biz website this past month after my evil host deleted all my data they’ve been entrusted with the past 13 years. Relax, I’m not going to reiterate the pitfalls of web design for beginners like myself. But in the course of noodling around the edges of my site I came across another site that, lo and behold, ranked mine according to all kinds of semi-useless statistics.

For instance, archibaldglass.com received an Alexa ranking of 858,808 in the world. In the world!! Now, this may seem to you like a ridiculously low ranking and for all I know there are only 858,809 websites in the world and I’m rock bottom, but … the surprising part to me was that it’s ranked at all. And furthermore, it tells me that the site gets 3500 visitors a day and 4100 page views and over 100,000 a month. Work with me here now. If we extrapolate — and statistics love to be extrapolated — that means I have over one million people checking out my glass every year.

Just like you, I figured these folks were trying to sell me something but no, they were just number crunchers and if anybody needs number crunching, it’s probably me and my sad little website. Of course once I sat down and stopped congratulating myself, stopped imagining the advertising revenue I could generate off one million hits a year, stopped fantasizing about a retirement in Rio, I got to thinking, there aren’t one million people interested in stained glass, no way, and certainly not my glass, c’mon, get real, probably hardly anybody. But … statistics don’t lie!

Or do they? So I went to this blogsite, skeeter daddle diaries.net, and wowee zowee, this site is ranked 714,233 in the world with 25% more visitors than the site ranked 858,809. I beat the socks off my glass website, no doubt a lot more folks interested in the South End than public glass art. But, let’s come down to earth here, not really very many.

What I realized is that the real money isn’t in glass or blog sketches, it’s in web design. I may finally have found my niche in life. Give me time and a few more websites to design and you bet I’ll break through the half million ranking. Eat my dust, web.com!

So you’re wondering what exactly the Metaverse will look like when you take that first virtual stroll into La-La Land. I’m here to help. Imagine you’re inside your TV. Okay, imagine you’re in your Laz-Y-Boy watching your big fatscreen TV, the one with the excellent surround sound and the bass. You got your hi def and you’re on the joystick. Okay, the remote. Mr. In Control, captain of your own destiny. Okay, not your destiny exactly, your virtual world. Close enough.

The Metaverse is the Matrix. A simulation, a construct, an algorithmic extrapolation of your present world. Think of all those blogsites you check on for Qanon updates, Bigfoot sightings, extraterrestrial abductions, vaccine caused deaths, Trump tweets … but in 3-D! Sure, you got to put on the google glasses, no big deal. Basically, see, you already live in the Meta. It’s the parallel universe you live in when you got tired of facts and ordinary reality. And … it’s way more exciting! It’s a better reality. Otherwise, why would you go there?

Plus, you get to be the hero in your own simulation. Go anywhere, do anything, be whatever you want. Course, you’ll probably stay with the conspiracy theory stuff, maybe hang out with the gaming crowd, mostly violent war simulations, bang bang boom boom. Not that you’d have to stay with that but c’mon, it’s what you do now basically, just better graphics once that 5-G is universal. You can pick your own avatar, better looking, buff, a real babe magnet. Or not. Your choice. You’ll be able to buy clothes for your virtual self. Shoes, combat outfits, weapons, the works. It’ll all be available in the Meta, count on it. And count on those pop up ads letting you know what’s on sale, what’s a great buy, where to get it, all on the virtual store’s inventory. Great! You got it covered, little buddy. A world of your making.

Okay, not quite. A world of high tech’s making, but … one you’ll definitely love living in. Better than the analog world, right? Right? Of course I’m right. Otherwise, why would you spend time in that universe instead of in the boring old world. Buckle up, you’re gonna love the ride. I know, you’re halfway there already.

I think if I hear one more news story about Covid or the omicron variant or vaccinations or mask wearing or social distancing, I’ll go out and overdose myself with horse dewormers . Enough is never really enough for the news media. Pandemic pandemic panfriggingdemic already!

So now I’m saturated with warnings about the coming war in Eurasia. No, wait, Ukraine. The enemy is massing troops on the border, the enemy is waging cyberwarfare. The enemy is staging war games in Belarus. The cold war is about to get hot! The war is imminent! There will be heavy sanctions if the enemy invades. The drumbeat is insistent, the drumbeat is getting louder, the drumbeat is driving me batshit crazy!

And we’re not even talking yet about Taiwan.. Well, we are, but the drumbeat of the Other Enemy drowns out the warnings about the Not-so-Sleepy Tiger. I swear, it’s enough to drive a man to drugs. Geez, yeah, there’s that opioid crisis too. And partisan politics. Don’t forget the January 6th insurrection or the voter suppression laws or the Roe v. Wade reversal coming. Book bans and critical race theory fights, the Big Lie and Republicans who are convinced Trump won by a landslide. I don’t want to get out of bed in the morning and I sure don’t want to hear story after story repeated endlessly. I think I got the Message already!!!!!

And don’t even think about bringing up Global Warming or Climate Change. Let’s just agree that those whackjob goobers who think Armaggedon is tomorrow, welcome it in fact, well, okay! The anti-Christ is on his way, the End is Near, the Time is Now, I get it, I live in an insane asylum and I no longer assume I’m the sane one. Happy?

Let’s just say it’s time to turn the damn dial. Time to put on some music, read a good novel, play a banjo and take a walk on the beach. Time to check out for awhile, listen to the tide turn, wait for spring. I got fruit trees to prune, a garden fence to build, wood to split and bring in for next year, a life to live. Gotta start somewhere, maybe today. I want two plus two to equal four again. Is that too much to ask?

Neil Young has always been a hero of mine. Great songwriter, curmudgeon extraordinaire, a guy who doesn’t mind stepping on toes. So when he got wind of Spotify paying 100 million dollars to Joe Rogan for an exclusive platform and Joe used his podcast to promote anti-vaccination guru Dr. Robert Malone, Neil issued an ultimatum to the company to remove Rogan or remove him. Spotify dropped Neil like a bad rash. 100 million dollars, in case you think inflation is out of control, is still a lot of moolah, enough to convince Spotify that a little misinformation about the pandemic and vaccinations really isn’t too big a deal. Course Neil thinks it’s potentially killing people.

A few dead Covid deniers really doesn’t add up to 100 million dollars, now does it? Be honest, how many would it take to convince you, if you were the CEO of Spotify, to drop Joe Rogan and his huge fan base? C’mon, a thousand? Ten thousand? We’re talking real money here, not chump change. If my little blog was on Spotify and I started spouting off that vaccines actually kill more people than Covid, you think they’d keep me on and let Neil stay? If you think that, I got some bitcoins I can sell you cheap….

And if you think money is always the primary driver in the world, keep in mind that Neil just gave up tons of royalties by dropping out of Spotify’s playlist. Sure, he’s rich and maybe if you were that rich you’d do the same thing. Maybe. Neil’s got an old song ‘This Note’s For You’ that mocks all those musicians who sold their songs to commercials. What’s wrong with rock and roll capitalism? you ask. Don’t ask me, go ask Neil. He’ll give you real thing. And it ain’t Coke.

Down at the Mabana Sunset Villa, our premier assisted living complex here on the aging South End, the Covid Lockdowns come along practically once a month. Help is pretty hard to find at the Villa, not just because pay is low and benefits are non-existent, but Covid has taken its toll on morale. Visitors are required to wear masks but we have plenty of folks who think — and I use the phrase loosely — that the Pandemic is a hoax, Fauci is a liar, vaccines are a government plot or … well, hell if I know what they’re thinking.

So inevitably the Villa has someone roll in, tests positive and the place goes into quarantine. After all, these are the folks with ‘underlying conditions’. If they die, of course, the anti-vaxxers will say they didn’t die of Covid, they died of underlying conditions. It’s like pushing someone off a cliff and saying, well, it wasn’t the shove that did them in, it was hitting the bottom. That, or some will say the vaccine they took killed them. So much for polio or smallpox vaccines these naysayers took as kids, lucky they’re alive, these yahoos.

My friend Janet works at the Villa. Over our weekly coffee together she unloads her frustrations. “We got residents who can’t see their kids or relatives or friends. Nobody but us when the Lockdown goes into effect. Half the time we’re in quarantine. Some putz on the staff who thinks Covid is phony baloney rolls in, tests positive, then here we go again. I can’t imagine working in a hospital anymore.”

Janet and I worked at the old Everett General Hospital, before Providence absorbed it. I was an orderly and she was nurse’s aide, what we never refer to as the ‘good old days’. But compared to what must be going on now, maybe they were.

“Strange times,” I say before we usually refill our cups. “Sad times,” she says, pouring the last of hers down the sink. I want to add something comforting, maybe even optimistic. Damn if I can think of a thing.

There WILL come a reckoning! The sun will rise once again and the tides will turn. The spineless cowards who sing the praises of Donald J. Trump, would-be dictator of America, will soon, mark my words, start to turn on him. In the next months the lawsuits, the investigations, the indictments will start as a trickle, become a stream and finally roar out of the sewer pipes in a tsunami of negative story after negative story. One by one the worms who thought it would help them to stay in power if they supported the Big Lie and the Big Liar will realize the man is an anchor tossed overboard they’d be wise not to cling to.

January 6th revelations, election tampering in Georgia, grand juries, New York district court subpoenas, everywhere the fat man turns, more allegations, more disclosures, more indictments, a faucet of corruption and greed pouring out in the media day in and day out. The guy was a crook, the guy was a fraud, the guy was an admitted pussy grabbing creep surrounded by nazi-loving sycophants and apologists. And now the truth will come out.

Okay, it’s a nice fantasy, but a fantasy nevertheless. Chances are most Republicans won’t believe any of the charges against their fuhrer. Odds are even better that it will only embolden them to believe the conspiracy theorists. Stolen elections, Comrade Biden, left wing critical race promoters, pizza parlor cannibals, nano tracking vaccines, Jewish lasers igniting forest fires, Big Foot, Big Lie, a promulgation of insane beliefs in a country addicted to social media echo chambers, a country where nearly half of us are batshit crazy. Believe the stories in the New York Times??? Don’t make me laugh. Please!

The metaverse looks better and better.

Golly, you know about the last thing you need in these pandemic fueled partisan times, if you’re white at least, is to be made to feel uncomfortable with our racist past. Oh sure, slavery seems like it might have been a bit, well, old school and even a tad barbaric. Jim Crow and the KKK, kind of wish we didn’t have to remember those times now and do we really have to talk about segregation and the Civil Rights movement half a century later? C’mon, it makes us queasy. Some of us at least. Some, not so much.

Take Florida, for instance. They’re trying to pass a law that makes it illegal to bring up uncomfortable stuff from the misty past, stuff that would make a grown white man wince hearing about lynchings and native genocide and, well, a lot of history that just ought to stay buried, not brought out like dirty laundry to rub in our noses. Why should we feel guilty about the actions of our forefathers? Different times, different customs. Leave those skeletons in the closet, shut the door and shut up already. Nobody wants to be reminded, okay?

That old chestnut about those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it is hogwash down in the Sunshine State. Fact is, they’re probably repeating it now and really don’t mind. They just don’t want to be made to feel uncomfortable about it. Is that so hard to understand? We’ve all got events in our past that we don’t want to talk about, let’s just let sleeping dogs lie. The thing is, we white folks want to take pride in our white all-American culture and if it takes a little selective amnesia, well, that’s what it takes. Pride is what we want and pride is what we’ll demand, even it takes a law to shut up the folks who want to muddy our flag. Is this a great country or what? Don’t answer that if you don’t agree.

Historically the South End has been a place where the lumber companies cut down the forests and the developers sold off the scrub and slash that was left as ‘view property’.  You look around and times haven’t changed too much.  Except the price of a lot now is more than all the five acre chicken ranches of Mabana sold between 1910 and 1950.

Folks wonder why it took so long to discover’ the island you can drive to’ never knew our history as an exploited backwash.  The developers didn’t worry about zoning here.  Blast a bluff down with hydraulic hoses and call it Tyee or Tillicum.  Sluice down Summerland and build a rock jetty around it out into the bay.  Dig out a canal at the country club and double the waterfront.  It was wild west stuff, all right, where a man and his bulldozer could cut a wide swath without fear of government regulation or horrified neighbors.

Nowadays we look askance at dynamiting bluffs to make waterfront or dredging a lagoon to create lakeside gated communities or draining the wetlands to make quality 18 hole golf courses.  Judging by the agonized screams of the developers, you’d expect growth would reverse, forests woulde expand, housing starts would sit half finished, abandoned and rotting.  Oddly the juggernaut of gated communities and developments with names like South End Estates, Elger Bay Meadows, Tyee Vista all seem to be doing just fine with more on the way, thank you very much.

Clear Cut Cul-de-Sac, Blast Zone Barrio and D-9 Trailer Court are going to struggle, but the South End is gentrifying now that some of the trees have grown back and the chicken farms are broke and the Dot.com retirees are priming the pumps.  Won’t be long before we South Enders celebrate Back Wash Days and the rough and tumble no-holds-barred pioneers who carved out our civilization over the past century.  Thank you boys!

I know, you’re wondering how all these people around you have decided logic is bogus, crackpot conspiracy theories are real, Donald Trump is still their President and climate change caused by billions of CO2 spewing humans in a greenhouse planet couldn’t possibly be happening. And the reason you’re still wondering who stole their brains is simple. You don’t listen to hot talk radio. No, you’re too busy tuning into podcasts and FM jazz on NPR, thinking here’s serious news and quality music. Let the buffoons listen to Info Wars for all you care, you got better things to do with your time.

The trouble is, millions of your fellow countrymen, your friends and family and neighbors, tune into the rantings and the ravings of the Glenn Becks, the Sean Hannitys, Alex Joneses, Laura Ingrahams, Dan Bonginos and dozens of other angry anti-vaxx, anti-government, deep state paranoids who feed on fear and resentments. You probably never even tuned in to Rush Limbaugh. But if you did back in those good old days before Trump, you might not have been surprised that the guy won.

There’s plenty of profits in pandering to fear. Forget about journalism, we’re talking entertainment for the aggrieved, for those folks who think the country has been sold down the river by immigrants and gays and people of color, by Hollywood or the elites, by Moslems, by outsiders, by communists or the news media. The Nazis used the same tactics, the Tutsis demonized the Hutus, it’s the same old story, find a scapegoat for your fears and anxieties, make them your enemy, rail against them daily, feed the beast, crank up the volume, stoke the furnace.

Folks listen to these demagogues all day long on their radio while you’re getting your unbiased news feeds or reading your morning newspaper, happy no doubt that you’re able to make rational judgements on the events of the day. Give me a break. These people are talking civil war, insurrection, putting Trump back in the Oval Office … and the ones who are paying attention are the politicians who fear opposing them. Better to be a hypocrite and stay in office. Better to subvert the Constitution, suppress votes, rig the system than to stand up for principle. The Culture Wars are here to stay. Whether they remain non-violent is a little less clear. Turn your radio dial a little further to the right some days. You won’t like it but it’ll give you some idea what’s happening.