The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I been listening for the last year or more this growing drumbeat against public service employees, social security entitlements, health care run by the government and, well, damn near everything run by the government.  You’d think teachers were communists and firemen were Marxists and anybody who wasn’t working for themselves or for a
corporation were leeches on the body public.  We suddenly got ourselves a debt crisis and some folks believe the only
solution is to shrink government down to a size they can flush in a toilet.

I used to be a school teacher way back in the Paleolithic.  And I don’t mean Sarah Paleolithic.  I find it troubling that public employees are the bad guys now.  That somehow they don’t contribute to the wealth of America.  The Ayn Randians think the corporations are the only way to restore the nation to its former glory days, but I’m not sure what glory days they mean, although probably any time before last year would do.

We got a lot of folks out of work right now who can’t pay taxes if they don’t make a living.  And we got a Congress with a lot of senators and representatives who want to cut government jobs some more.  Because, I guess, they aren’t real jobs.  Don’t pay real taxes.  Don’t buy real groceries and cars and television sets.  Don’t pay into social security.  Don’t get loans or put their phony money in banks.  I guess.  These senators and representatives, it should be pointed out to them, don’t have real jobs either.  And lately, most of us might at least agree on that point.

What I don’t understand, being a communist on the South End, is how we watched the banking industry and the Wall Street boys and the hedge fund managers and all the heroes of Ayn Rand take us down a subprime mortgage meltdown and nobody seems to think anyone is to blame but the government.  Call me stoopid and paint a clown face on my hat, but something is terrible wrong with this picture.  Something’s upside down and inside out and distorted like those old funhouse mirrors at the carnival.  Why aren’t some people in jail for gaming the system?  Why aren’t laws being passed to keep it from happening again?

I’m not a Bolshevik just because I want to lock up thieves who were supposed to be capitalist heroes, am I? I just want somebody to tell me how it is we think one job is more valid than another, why a private construction worker is more
important to the economy than a government construction worker the FAA laid off the last few weeks, why we should want a private agency security person instead of a municipal cop, why we think a corporation beholden to its investors is
more honest than an employee working for us, the people.

Course, I’ll have to admit, in full disclosure, most of us down here on the radical South End, aren’t too much interested in jobs.  Any jobs.  Work, I hate to admit, isn’t high on the value chart.  And here’s something for the Sarah Paleontologists:  you won’t find too many communists here either. Everybody’s supposed to work under communism. That isn’t gonna fly down here.  We got a few better things to do than work.  Maybe we should’ve run for the Senate.

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CLICK TO HEAR —- monitoring the liquored vote

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I was in the beer depot the other day with a couple purchases of adult beverages when the checkout lady asked to see my ID.  I don’t take that as a compliment anymore now that I’m 40 years past legal.  It’s the law and I am as law abiding as the next fellow down at the South End, meaning, I try my best even if I fall short more than occasionally.  She noticed my ID was a driver’s license from another state since I was in a liquor store in Wisconsin, not that I usually make my beer runs that far from home, no matter how good their local beer is.  She looked at it a lot longer than I was accustomed to, which is maybe ten seconds longer than a cursory glance.  June, 1950, she said.  My bank likes to tell me my birthday too, I guess to make me feel like we’re all family down there at the old First National Gouge and Steal that is my lending institution.

She finally handed me back my ID, which even has a picture of me in the same weatherstained cowboy hat I was sporting at the time, so she knew it must’ve been yours truly, but when I paid for my purchases, she asked suddenly, springing it on me, what year was your birthday again?  Trick question for the feeble minded or the counterfeiter trying to buy legal liquor with a bogus ID. This is the state that requires drivers license photo ID for the ostensible purpose of ensuring
that voter fraud is kept to a minimum.  Some folks think its real purpose is to keep students and minorities from voting since they’re more likely not to own a car OR a license to drive one.  Me, I’m cynical so you can probably
guess how I stand on that.  But I wasn’t in the liquor store to vote, you see, although she might have figured maybe that’s where I was headed next, probably after drinking my illegal purchases.  They got a big recall vote out here in a couple days and everybody and their mother is wound tight as a cheap alarm clock.  Who knows, maybe I was on a dry run, see if my phony ID would work on beer, then use it to vote
back in the folks who were voted out for wanting to let my vigilant checkout lady form a labor union for better wages and maybe some benefits.  Or maybe she just was mistrustful of some immigrant from a state she wasn’t sure was in America or Mexico.  The price of ignorance when you don’t bother with the GED.  Nevertheless, you can’t be too careful in these polarized times. Especially in a state where it’s now easier to get a concealed weapon permit than one to vote.

Well, I passed the pop quiz with, okay,  maybe not flying colors, and certainly not the answer she expected to hear.  Once I get a few beers under my belt, maybe I’ll get up the nerve to try voting here in the dairy state.  Right after I get that permit for a Luger.  If I do, I’m voting to keep her wages pegged right of minimum.  I figure a true patriot like herself ought to be willing to work practically for free.

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CLICK TO HEAR —- shoppers’ paradise

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I’ve been scratching my hatless head lately trying to get a handle on why on god’s green earth everyone I know is money crazy.  A decade or so back we had that day trading stock market frenzy, folks figuring they’d just sit home in their skivvies and become millionaires by selling short, buying fast and basically outthinking the Big Boyz.  They were like card-counters in Vegas, but no pitbosses to stop them when the winning streak started. Works great when the bubble is expanding, not so good when the bubble pops.

I had a friend who day traded back when.  Stuff was going through the roof.  She was pretty sure she was going to get rich.  To me she was already rich.  She explained to me, slow as child with a plastic teether stuck in my face, it was all relative.  Meaning, she didn’t have to tell me, I was neither bright nor rich.  She needed more.  Much more than me.  And by god, she was going to get her fair share.

Over the years the tech stocks plunged, the markets have ‘corrected’, the savings and loans have debacled, the silver bubble burst after we’d melted all our dinnerware down for cash, the great recession is still with us and today, a dark day on the market, the dow dropped over 500 points.  The rich got a little poorer.  And the poor?  Well, they’re like me, too stupid, I guess, to know the difference.  Or so the big boyz think.

I will say even the folks I know without portfolio, stocks or otherwise, seem to believe, deep down in their rumbling bellies, that riches may actually lie right over the horizon.  The kids in the ghettos think the NBA will make millionaires of them, with 5 carat diamond studs in their noses, and my friends in the hood here on the South End fantasize about their lotto winnings.  People are buying gold, silver, stocks and bonds now that the real estate bubble burst.

Up in Congress they’re taking knives to the budget, to government jobs, entitlements, to anything that remotely smacks of socialism to them.  Capitalism, they preach, is the only religion.  Let them alone, keep their taxes low and they’ll make so much money there will be plenty not only to trickle down but to rain on us like manna.  We sorely want to believe them.  Even disaster after disaster.  The only thing I know, the rich are doing okay. The rest of us, maybe we ought to quit thinking we’re going to outsmart the Big Boyz.  They made all the rules, so you know, the game is rigged in their favor.  How many times you got to roll snake eyes to figure that out?  They just want you to keep playing….. Me, I’m thinking of cornering the banjo commodities.  That, or audition for American Idol.  Not real good odds, but hey, they’re looking better than the odds of finding a job.

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CLICK TO HEAR —-making big money

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Folks sort of pity us South Enders down here at the remote dead end of the island.  They think our shopping options are pretty near zip, almost like living in Russia at the end of the Cold War.  I admit, Tyee Store’s shelves aren’t Trader Joe’s, stocked to the roof with multiple selections and competitive pricing.  But they don’t flood us with advertising and buying gimmicks either.

We’ve all been inundated with ads all our lives.  Billboards, TV commercials, junk mail, newspapers, radio stations and now a virtual tsunami on the internet.  Hardly a dark hollow you can crawl into you won’t get some shrill ad coming at you one right after the other.  No wonder people go into debt — we’re addicted to wanting things.  We’re hooked on consuming.  New car, new clothes, new hairdo, new electronics, new every damn thing in the world.  The whole country runs on it.  No wonder Christmas is the national holiday, goes two or three months now.  If we stopped buying down at the mall and did what us South Enders do, shop at the Thrift Store, America would go broke in about a week.  Hedge fund moguls would have to buy their suits used at Goodwill.  We’d drive around less buying junk so oil companies would slow down their drilling and car companies would make bicycles.  Food would get grown in gardens, not flown in from Tinbuktu or made in a factory.  Families might turn off their gigantic TV’s because nothing would be on after all the sponsors disappeared and maybe parents would eat their meals with their kids again.

People would get to know the neighbors instead of surfing the Web for good deals on replacing appliances that work perfectly okay now.  They might even repair stuff that broke instead of tossing it down at the dump.  Maybe we’d learn to read again instead of updating our Facebook page, maybe our attention spans would expand and flowers would grow lush in our yards and weather would improve and we’d be happier and paradise would spread across the land and we’d all laugh and play on our very own South Ends.

Right…..   Then again, we only got so much South End room left.  Sorry.  I’m afraid you addicts will just have to make do.  Go to the Mall and see what they got on sale.  Hey, and good luck to ya.  You wouldn’t like it down here anyway.  Bad selections for consumers.  It’s true, though, you can’t buy happiness.  If you don’t believe me, google/shop that.  Poor selection, no sale price…..

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CLICK TO HEAR—south end historical preservation league

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