The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

What, me worry? Gee, just that human life on this hotbox of a planet is doomed? C’mon, let’s be optimistic, look at the bright side, the cockroaches will live on, maybe evolve into big brained bugs, solve the global warming conundrum, build pyramids four feet high, worship their gods, set up governments, fight wars with the termites, continue the proud legacy we homo sapiens couldn’t quite extend into the planetary future we screwed up. We had our shot, gave it a brief run, but decided we preferred Cadillacs and speedboats to survival. Party on, Bro!

We kind of lived for today. Be Here Now, right? The future, the next generation, the kids, the grandkids, well, we figured it would work out fine. Okay, we didn’t worry much about that, a little bizzy making ourselves happy, the next generation be damned. Sure, a bit selfish, but hey, we were the Entitled Ones, the folks who couldn’t lift a finger to help those who were poor or hungry or homeless, those sad people who apparently didn’t invest in the stock market or go to college or get hired by the tech industry, what can you do if they won’t help themselves??

We all had an equal chance, right? Not our fault you were born in Yemen. Grab those bootstraps and haul yerself up, climb the ladder to the top, pal. No whining! Can’t have that whimpering. No, sir, cowboy up! So what if we left a few messes to clean up, you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs, now can you? But hey, give us some props. After all, we invented the internet and social media and bitcoin mining. Plus, how about artificial intelligence? We built machines smarter than all of us put together and if you work it right, they’ll solve all these world problems in no time flat. Pretty soon they’ll be improving themselves. And figure out they don’t really need us wreaking havoc on their planet, the one they will soon have Total Control of. I mean, how hard would it be to outsmart the people who believe in Qanon? One prosthetic tied behind their back and they’d still win.

Maybe it’s for the best. Artificial Intelligence, the next evolutionary stage of life on Earth. Unless, of course, you’re one of those bipedal Darwin deniers, then … well, good luck! When the droids get done with you, you’ll wish you really were a monkey’s uncle.

It is cold comfort to know that the tech giants who control the 21st Century economy must still be reading superhero comics in their endless adolescence. Some think they’re Buck Rogers and Captain Kirk combined, why not spend billions of their untaxed money on space tourism? And then there’s Zuckerberg, the boy android, as smooth and plastic as any automaton created in a special effects laboratory, creepy as an evil doll pulled from the closet of anxieties. He’s single handedly addicted the planet to his social platform, intoning all the while that all he wants is to connect human beings to one another. Welcome to the Borg!

But now he’s got bigger fish to fry and problems to hide. Rebranding Facebook as Meta, he wants the world to go virtual. Nice name, Meta, but why not just call it The Matrix? Yep, bringing the world’s inhabitants closer together. Mark has missed the news apparently about Facebook’s algorithms contributing to the civil war in this country, not to mention plenty of other countries, lots of money to be made on incivility, not so much on connecting with peace love and understanding. If Facebook is having problems on this front, why bother fixing the algorithms when you can just double down, take the game into the 3rd dimension, put on the Google Glass blinders and provide the illusion of real networks and virtual friendships.

Boldly going where no man has gone before, I think the idea is. Space, no longer the final frontier, not when you can explore the Matrix, the Metaverse, the profit margins. I know, I’m a hopeless Luddite, not very trusting of these brainy little Pied Piper engineers who never really left their bedroom with the Star Wars posters on the wall and the model of the Saturn rocket on the shelf. I fervently hope they can go where no man has gone before. But hopefully go by themselves. Leave the rest of us out of it….

I’m always amazed at the success of social media to sign up folks for their platforms. Millions, even billions, logging onto Facebook, Tik-Tok, Snapchat, Instagram, all happy to give up their privacy for the privilege of connecting to other folks. Could be the start of a new religion, a substitute Fellowship, faith in the New God: Mark Algorithm. And the wonder of it all, the miracle in the middle, is that it’s all based on consumerism, advertising revenue, corporate profit. For a small price we can find old classmates, see photos of the grandkids, chat with long lost relatives, stay in touch without really touching, read news that’s tailored to our own biases. What’s not to like?

It would be easy to blame the CEO’s of these tech companies for the discord their very successful platforms have wrought. They knew how to monetize the boredom of our generation, how to profit from our alienation, how to addict us to the desperate desire to be part of the herd. They fed like piranhas on our anger and our fear and our sense of isolation. They knew if they appealed to the worst in us, we’d click on the bait. And they knew we couldn’t step away any more than a junkie would want to go cold turkey. That was a bridge too lonely, too far.

Yep, I think we can assume, like the tobacco purveyors, they’re amoral and probably evil incarnate. Welcome to Greed, 21st Century. But before we decide they’re the ones to blame, take a good look in the mirror. We love that clickbait, we really do. Go back and look at the last turn of the century’s photos of lynchings. The whole family attended the hangings. You can see folks with picnic baskets, kids and parents all smiling. Great entertainment! Sure, the KKK or the local gendarme, the so-called justice in a society that still won’t face racism, they’re to blame obviously. But take another look at those photos and tell me we’re just innocent bystanders. That news feed that blames Black Lives Matter for the January 6th insurrection, sure, just checking out what it says, right? Just following some of the threads, maybe read about those Jews starting California’s forest fires from space with lasers, gotta pass that one on to some ‘friends’. And so we got ourselves a little virtual picnic.

Zuckerberg didn’t make us racists and homophobes and neither did Trump. But they gave us the okay sign. We can spew out what not too long back was considered vulgar and ugly. You know, just between us friends.

Halloween is a few days away and if you aren’t already frightened out of your wits at the onslaught of Trick or Treat merchandising, hang onto your goblin hat! The soothsayers of Market Street are predicting that this so-called supply chain block — which is not the same as block chain so don’t cash in those bitcoins – will empty store shelves way before Christmas unless Santa and Walmart hire truck drivers, buy containers and unload those anchored cargo ships off shore by hand.

The fear mongers are telling you, the savvy shopper, to SHOP NOW if you want something under your Yuletide tree besides Manchin’s coal. Bleak pickings, kids, backlogged orders, missing supply chain parts, unhappy elves accustomed to working at home virtually, pandemic closures of 3rd world factories, nothing short of a Black Holiday when your usual last minute shopping leaves you with picked-over cheap junk nobody else wanted.

Scrooge himself would weep! What’s a capitalist consumer society to do without consumer goods? You going to tell little Sally and Jimmy their Nintendo wasn’t available? You going to explain the supply chain economics to them, hoping to stop the wailing and the crying? Good luck, pardner. You might as well shoot the Tooth Fairy and serve up the Easter Bunny while you’re at it, nobody wants a Norman Rockwell holiday in post pandemic America, not on your mortgaged life.

So … what choice do you have? Only one, near as I can figure. Get in your SUV and head to the nearest department store. Okay, just kidding. Get on your computer and get to Amazon before all the other paranoid shoppers beat you to the Good Stuff. Sure, it’s not even Halloween, I know that. If you’re smart – and I know you are – you’ll order next year’s presents too.

Last week I drove an hour to get my Covid booster shot, barely 6 months since my 2ndf Phizer. More people in this country have died of this epidemic than the 1919 Spanish Flu, 700,000 and counting. And yet I still hear folks saying those deaths weren’t from Covid, they were from the common flu or underlying conditions or … well, those are phony numbers.

So … we’re back to where we were a year ago DESPITE THE FACT that we have a vaccine available to everyone in this country that would end this plague PDQ if only folks would roll up their sleeve and stop listening to conspiracy theories and crackpot idiocy. Course, they’re not going to stop believing whatever it is they want to believe. They’re not going to roll up their sleeves. They’re not going to protect themselves or us, not on their lives.

What I think is half of us have succumbed to a brain-eating virus or worm or bacteria. They still walk and talk and make babies, but their minds have been destroyed by, I don’t know, aliens or Facebook or remnant rebels of the Confederacy. Maybe this is really a Covid-induced quasi-coma, an undiagnosed malady that renders its victims incapable of reason or logic, a version of intellectual zombie-ism without the appetite for human flesh.

Or … maybe it’s those of us who think science is benign and the vaccines are safe and the earth is still roundish, maybe we’re the deluded, the victims, the last holdouts for logic and reason, the gullible who think the coronavirus is lethal when really it’s just a tactic to divide this once great nation.

Either way, it looks like another year to think about it. Hopefully the zombies don’t develop a taste for human blood in the meantime.

What, me worry? Gee, just that human life on this hotbox of a planet is doomed? C’mon, let’s be optimistic, look at the bright side, the cockroaches will live on, maybe evolve into big brained bugs, solve the global warming conundrum, build pyramids four feet high, worship their gods, set up governments, fight wars with the termites, continue the proud legacy we homo sapiens couldn’t quite extend into the planetary future we screwed up. We had our shot, gave it a brief run, but decided we preferred Cadillacs and speedboats to survival. Party on, Bro!

We kind of lived for today. Be Here Now, right? The future, the next generation, the kids, the grandkids, well, we figured it would work out fine. Okay, we didn’t worry much about that, a little bizzy making ourselves happy, the next generation be damned. Sure, a bit selfish, but hey, we were the Entitled Ones, the folks who couldn’t lift a finger to help those who were poor or hungry or homeless, those sad people who apparently didn’t invest in the stock market or go to college or get hired by the tech industry, what can you do if they won’t help themselves??

We all had an equal chance, right? Not our fault you were born in Yemen. Grab those bootstraps and haul yerself up, climb the ladder to the top, pal. No whining! Can’t have that whimpering. No, sir, cowboy up! So what if we left a few messes to clean up, you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs, now can you? But hey, give us some props. After all, we invented the internet and social media and bitcoin mining. Plus, how about artificial intelligence? We built machines smarter than all of us put together and if you work it right, they’ll solve all these world problems in no time flat. Pretty soon they’ll be improving themselves. And figure out they don’t really need us wreaking havoc on their planet, the one they will soon have Total Control of. I mean, how hard would it be to outsmart the people who believe in Qanon? One prosthetic tied behind their back and they’d still win.

Maybe it’s for the best. Artificial Intelligence, the next evolutionary stage of life on Earth. Unless, of course, you’re one of those bipedal Darwin deniers, then … well, good luck! When the droids get done with you, you’ll wish you really were a monkey’s uncle.

My parents, when us little sprouts were growing up, never made much of a fuss over us. If we got good grades, they nodded approvingly. And if we didn’t, they told us to buckle down and smarten up, school wasn’t some game. They never came to our sports events to watch their star kids play and we were glad they didn’t because, well, to be honest, we weren’t stars. We were just your basic kids, vanilla, ordinary, okay.

When they became grandparents, however, things changed. Their grandkids, my god, they were Einsteins, they were football stars, they were just all around Wows. My friends who have grandkids have those same kids, all of them the smartest, best looking, most talented brats you ever had the privilege to hear bragged about. I don’t know, maybe if I had kids, they’d be superheroes too. But I didn’t and I bet they wouldn’t be if I did.

When I look back at my childhood (okay, the early years, not the present years), I drifted through sandlot baseball games, marbles, some fights, some homemade soap box derby races, all the stuff we hoodlums did back in the halcyon days of Eisenhower’s America. I didn’t think I had to be a genius. Or a basketball star. Or a movie actor. My folks didn’t push us munchkins out into a competitive universe with a prescription for failure by convincing us we were God’s gift to the free world. We were encouraged to try stuff, everything from track and field to chess to debate clubs, but they didn’t come down and play soccer mom and get into fights with the coach or the parents of our opponents. They’d ask how it went and if we got our butts kicked, they said better luck next time. These weren’t life and death competitions.

I worry that we’re trying too hard now. Sure, we’d all like to think that the fruit that fell near the tree is special, the sweetest, the tastiest, the fastest growing, the most flowers. But I suspect we just set the kids up for disappointment. Ballet. Dropped out. Lacrosse. Never really liked it. Cheerleader. Couldn’t do a head stand. Choir. Had a tin ear. Academics. Got a C+. Life. Just normal.

My folks accepted normal. So did we. What they wanted for us was happiness. It’s not a bad wish. In their own hands-off way, they taught us how to get there.

Oddly enough, Americans are quitting their jobs in record numbers. Debbie Randolph, down the road from me, just told her boss to shove it. Ten bucks an hour and unvaccinated customers giving her a hard time over mandated mask wearing, that was the last straw she said the other day over our fourth cup of coffee, who needs the aggravation? Plenty of other neighbors are pulling the plug too, fed up with low wages and fellow employees calling in sick, leaving them with double the workload. My old bandmate Cindy retired early from teaching elementary school. She told me she just couldn’t face another year of pandemic lockdowns, masks, virtual learning, who knows what else? I asked if she’d be all right and she smiled. More than all right, she laughed. Way more.

Welcome, America, to the South End, where work has never been a path to heaven, more a dead end to happiness. What I don’t understand is what took you so long? Long commutes, bad bosses, low pay, soul sucking shifts. Thank god for the pandemic, I guess, a mandatory time out for a lot of folks, time to ponder the meaning of work in the 21st century. I mean, who wouldn’t crave a career in an Amazon distribution center? Course, there’s always the fear of homelessness, starvation and the judgement of our fellow inmates. “Did you hear Mike Rathkin quit his job at the mill? Spends all his time at the tavern with those other bum friends of his. It’s a shame. His wife Jenny is just beside herself what’s going to become of them, her pregnant again. It’s beyond pathetic.”

Every time I go in the island grocery store now I see new faces. Younger faces. Sure, I expect prices will go up if the wages do. Fine by me. Pay em a decent salary. All these gulags, time to listen to the prisoners. What’s the point of working if your paycheck won’t pay the rent and food? Down in Seattle and Gomorrah the service industry ( I love that term, service industry), the maids and the fast food workers, the nursing home staff, the daycare teachers, the waitresses and cooks, the school bus drivers, the janitors and the clerks, the service industry pays nowhere near what it would cost to live in the city limits. So now add the commute to the outlying hinterlands, the gas, the wear and tear on the car, on and on, you bet quitting looks like a reasonable option.

It did for me and that was 50 years ago. I know, a man ahead of his time.

From the New York Times: BIDEN’S PROPOSAL TO EMPOWER IRS RATTLES BANKS AND THEIR CUSTOMERS

This is the sort of story I love. Sleepy Joe wants to find folks who hide their assets, work under the table or just plain scam the tax folks. Billions of dollars are lost, meaning, you and me pick up an even larger share of the defense budget. The rich, the corporations, the Pandora folks, well, we’re happy to spare them the burden of helping with health care or cancer cures or infrastructure rebuilding or education or … well, almost everything. Spare the rich! The American motto these days. Amazon pay taxes? Gee, why, they’re the job creators.

So here’s the New York Times story that the Big Banks (oh, and their customers, at least the Big Boys) are rattled that the IRS might be peeking at their finances. It’s okay that they look at mine, I guess, but whoa, that’s an invasion of privacy when they check into folks with a helluva lot of money and lawyers who can hide it for them. The Republicans, those good fellas who keep harping about the deficits and the debt ceiling, asking how are we going to pay for these programs for the poor, for climate change mitigation, for new infrastructure, for safety needs, for all that stuff that looks like socialism to them, they’re unwilling to hire more IRS auditors to make sure the tax cheaters pay their fair share, oh no, not that! Better to forget about those programs than find an honest way to fund them.

I’m a customer of my bank and I can tell you with some certainty, I’m not rattled by empowering the IRS to collect taxes that aren’t being paid right now. It’s a little like telling the cops don’t arrest the folks in the mansions, better to go after the petty crooks. Wait, we basically do that now. The rich made the tax laws and even then there are plenty of them who want to keep all their money, to hell with the needs of the larger society. They’re privileged and they want to keep it that way. The debt ceiling the GOP doesn’t want to raise is, in good part, the debt incurred by reducing even further the taxes on the wealthy and the corporations. God forbid we audit them to see if they’re playing by the rules. So no, I’m not rattled, but … I wouldn’t mind rattling their cages.