The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The other day I was trailing behind a 40 foot RV trailer, sort of a McMansion on wheels, reading their bumper sticker that announced:  SPENDING OUR KIDS’ INHERITANCE.  Pretty hilarious stuff.  I bet the kids fall over laughing when the folks come rolling in for a month to visit.  $200,000 for the camper.  3-4 bucks a gallon times multiple crisscrossing of America.  Yah, I’d say the joke has some real mileage.  Great punchline.  Put another sticker on the SUV they’re towing, you got a bellybuster.
I know these people.  They think they’re taxed like a Roman peasant.  They think government is mostly the real enemy, spending their hard earned money on welfare and food stamps and mental health clinics and emergency relief and worse, wasting it through inefficiency and bureaucratic ineptness and just plain graft and greed.  They think minimum wage should be lowered and taxes eliminated.  They got theirs and good luck to the rest of you suckers.  The road they’re riding can crumble into blacktop sand after they sail by.
They know the country is in trouble, big debt, bad balance of trade, recession, all that economic mumbo jumbo.  But they’re not going to help get us out of the mess they helped put is in.  The bumper sticker they got, they could slap on the White House or Congress or any county courthouse.  They got the union jobs before unions were corrupt.  They worked for the government sector before government was evil, they fought for tax breaks for the rich once they were rich and if you missed out, tough luck.
I know these people.  They’re my friends and my neighbors and I can even see them in my own bathroom mirror.  They don’t believe in sacrifice … or the common good … or downsizing  … or that the American Dream is supposed to be for all of us.   It was for them.  The rest, the huddled and tired masses, the immigrants, the poor, the weak and the infirm  —- they got some hard news for you.  They’re spending your inheritance.  Ha ha ha, ho ho ho.  Get the joke?  Do ya, huh?  It’s on you!
My generation will maybe be remembered, not as the most selfish sonsofbitches on the planet, but as those whacky comedians at the End of the American Century.  By then, of course, nobody will be laughing.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/got-urine.mp3[/podcast]CLICK TO HEAR —got urine

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I got a buddy who’s required to take a drug test before he’s hired on as a consultant for an oil consortium.  He worked ramrodding the construction site for the same oil companies for decades up at Prudeau Bay where part of his job was making sure the riggers stayed drug and alcohol free through long days and longer nights.  Sorta like Wyatt Earp asking the cowboys to stick with Coca-Cola Saturday nights, if they wouldn’t mind….
So now that he’s retired and going back for consulting, I guess the Big Boyz are worried he’s fallen into decadence and drugs along with the rest of us South Enders.  The required test is given in Bothell so my pal dutifully makes an appointment, navigates the I-5 bumper car gauntlet, arrives with a full bladder of freshly filtered latte which he desperately wants to unload ASAP, but, unsurprisingly, is told to wait.  Short time later, long past that anguished outcry of a Guernsey with 10 gallons of unpasteurized backed up past an udder while the farmer is out drinking with his Scandihoovien reprobate buddies, the secretary comes in with the bad news that the urinary nurse in charge of the drug testing doesn’t come in on Fridays.  Yah, shure, you guessed it — it’s Friday.  Can I leave you the sample? he asks through clenched teeth, bent over in pain and growing anger.  And … well, shure, you guessed right again and no, sir, that would be against the rules.
My buddy is almost 70 years old, drug free as a priest, a loyal employee and now he’s made to stand hunched over, practically peeing his adult diapers and trying to come to grips with What Is Wrong With This Picture?  Do they suspect him of Viagra dependency?  Do they merely want him to understand his real place in the corporate hierarchy?  Are they testing for latent homicidal urges, maybe see if he’ll snap in the lab offices where only a contract worker will be sacrificed, not a VP of operations?
All I can say is, my buddy must really want to avoid retirement to endure this kind of knee-jerk, low brow humiliation.  The rest of us on the South End … well, let’s just say the drug tests down here are only for quality control.

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When I was a hothead radical in the 60’s, I thought the government was killing Black Panthers, spying on civilians, letting industry and corporations foul our air and poison our water and lying to us about the war in Viet Nam.  Turns out most of that was true.  My old man said if I didn’t like it here, I could move to the Soviet Union.  Four decades later the Soviet Union is broken up and I still live here.  The government still lies about wars, still spies on civilians.  And my old man is now the one sputtering about the damn government, never mind that he worked all his life in the public sector for the U.S. Forest Service.  The Republicans, now in full battle cry, denounce the EPA, the Post Office, most all government agencies as evil incarnate.  I guess this is the American version of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.  Round up the bureaucrats and send them to Dakota to farm sunflowers.

Social Security is now called a Ponzi scheme.  Regulations on businesses are job killers.  Taxes are a pox on the body politic.  Politicians, except the GOP, are liberal bloodsuckers.  We have moved a long haul right of Richard M. Nixon.  And compromise, once the cornerstone of American democratic prinicples, has become a white flag of surrender to the anti-capitalist Democrats.
Hot talk radio, misinformation from the internet, corporate consolidation of the media — who the hell knows what is true or not anymore?  Demagoguery is winning.  Maybe it has already won.  I get my father’s e-mails of patently false vitriol, week after week, forwarded by his pals to millions.  They believe what they want to believe.  And they want to believe the president is a Muslim, is a terrorist, is a communist and a traitor and a foreigner.  They want to believe the government is responsible for their unhappy lives.  They want to drink their Kool-Aid, turn on and tune out.  The Times, they aren’t just  a’changin, they’ve reversed polarity.  Oh, and Dad, if you and your cronies don’t like it here, why don’t you move to China!

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/CLICK-TO-HEAR-spud-spirit.mp3[/podcast]CLICK TO HEAR — spud spirit

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