The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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There was a time, long long ago, when we could debate an issue and support our arguments with facts. A time when we based our beliefs on data or the opinions of experts. Now, of course, in the laughing gas atmosphere of the internet and Facebook, we’re all experts and our opinions and our ‘friends’ opinions matter at least as much, if not more so, as facts. This is a wonderful freedom for most of us, to be untethered from the nuisance of truthfulness and allowed to believe in absolutely anything we want. If most of our friends believe the Pope supported Donald Trump for President, we can too.

I remember, vaguely of course, when the internet was touted as the most democratizing force on earth, a place where each of us could turn to its vast aggregation of facts and data and with a few strokes of the keyboard, find the answers to almost any question. The encyclopedic range of its information, the speed of its algorithms, well, no one need live in ignorance any more. The future, my friends, looked to be enlightened.

I get e-mails daily from my dad who dutifully forwards most everything he receives to his small address list, one of whom is, unfortunately, me. Most are political diatribes, most are what I once, generously, referred to as misinformation, what I now label as outright lies and propaganda. My father believes most everything he reads. Why would his friends lie? He gets most of his information there and the rest he gets from the commentators on Fox News. He doesn’t like PBS, too biased, he sez.

Donald Trump, our president-in-waiting, declared that the New York Times is biased. Most Americans now think the media is suspect. Obviously, some of it is. But the question has to be asked: if we don’t believe the media, where do we go for the truth? And the answer, my friend, ain’t blowin in the wind. The answer is that we find it in social media. The algorithms dictate what we looked at previously and feed it back in an ever tightening self-generating completely closed loop. Information becomes a black hole where no light escapes the gravitational pull of our own biases. In the end, it’s little surprise Trump won. The real surprise is Kim Kardashian wasn’t elected. At least for now.

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The pundits and political scientists, the sociologists and the couch philosophers, plus half us yahoos will parse this last election til the cows come back to the barn that’s leaning into yesteryear. We’ll find bigotry, blame the Latino turnout, fault the woman candidate’s presumed expectation of presumptive victory, dig into Alt-Right and Fox News and Breitbart. We’ll find plenty of fodder to explain a Trump victory.

Jobs are going away, the middle class is shrinking, the gap between rich and poor — once a leapable ditch — is now a Grand Canyon. The white majority is gone and the immigrants are coming! The immigrants are coming! Terrorism rocks the Middle East and Europe and now here. A college education costs six figures and may not translate to anything but a lifetime of tuition debt. And to top off everything, monthly cable costs for a citizenry desperate for digital opioids, keeps going through the roof. What’s a poor white boy to do? Well, vote for the carnival barker selling snake oil, a panacea for all our ills, that’s what.

I know this, if nothing else: there’s a Disquiet on the land, an Unease out there in the Starbucked suburbs, a Dread covering the wired cities. Change is coming, scary as a Terminator who keeps getting up after being killed time and time again. The Terminator, of course, is the computer we brought into the livingroom, carry on our belt or in our purse, wired our house to, runs our car, plays our music, knows our habits and buying preferences, watches us constantly.

Future Shock. It’s here. It’s been here a few decades now, accelerating like a car we’ve lost the steering on. Half of us can’t program a Blu-Ray much less comprehend Implications. We just see the landscape blurring at breakneck speed. The Industrial Age isn’t closer than it appears in the rearview, it’s gone, nothing now but nostalgic longing for a past that ain’t comin back.

The social fabric is being torn apart. We are Borg now, getting our news exclusively from Facebook. Only 15 percent of the Facebook news feed folks look somewhere else. You read it on Facebook, it’s got to be True. So what if it’s just pablum and paid pandering? It’s all we need, right? We are morphing into the Hive and we know the relationships aren’t quite … what? Real? Deep? Meaningful? We don’t know, we can’t predict, we’re afraid of what’s coming next. Wait?! What’s that signpost up ahead? Naw, it’s not Rod Serling. It’s Mark Zuckerberg. It’s Big Brother.

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We’re at the bottom of Puget Sound this weekend, the mizzus and me, encamped in a milkhouse we rented next to an old barn not too far from Olympia. Just up the road is the old railroad bed that ran to a jetty five miles north out into Woodard Bay to haul out logs, load them on train cars and pull them to the Weyerhauser Mill in Everett. The barn, the railroad tracks, the wharf, the mill in Everett are all part of history now. So is this milkhouse, presently a cottage on AirBnB.

The farms out here have been parceled to five acre farmettes, mostly horse pastures, a few nurseries, some small gardens, a couple of McMansions and plenty of double wides and modest homes. The agrarian landscape has definitely been downsized, if not lost completely. Our milkhouse now sports Wi-fi and Blu-Ray.

We breakfasted in Olympia at a café I’d eaten at a quarter century ago, half restaurant, half tavern with a cigar bar at the entrance back then. The McMenamin chain has bought it now, refurbished it, prettied it up and charges outrageous prices for eggs and coffee. The hostess who found us waiting at the Please Wait To Be Seated sign five minutes after we arrived informed us we’d be seated in twenty minutes. I guess nostalgia won over impatience so we waited. The food was okay, the coffee was weaker than a 7/11 dispenser in a truck stop franchise. You can profit on history, restorations, reproductions, all that yearning for what has been lost to strip mall America, but it’s a thin veneer, slightly flimsy. Just costs a little more.

I hear tell there’s a hunger in the land to Make America Great Again. Maybe you know what that means but I haven’t got a clue. Bring back the timber? Bring back the salmon runs? Bring back those coal mining jobs, the textile mills, the steel factories? Bring back the family farm and the industrial age? They’re gone, I hate to tell the folks who pine for a new Gilded Age. Go ahead and drive a restored Packard but don’t think Detroit is going to tool up to assembly line them again, I don’t care how much Kool-Aid Trump doles out to the yearning masses.

We’re packing up to leave in an hour. Going back to our old 1915 shack and our hand built twenty-five year old house. Going back to re-imagine our own piece of America. You ask me what made America great once — and I know you didn’t — it was our imagination. It was our optimism that the future could be shaped by that faith in ourselves to transform the world in our image, to create new art, new literature, new music, new dance, new architecture, new businesses, new inventions, new visions. To go boldly forth where none have gone before, to trek the stars. You want the old America, go to a museum. You want America to be great again, stop looking backwards. Turn off the TV, start using your imagination. And for godsake, everybody, stop the whining, stop blaming the other party, stop pointing fingers. Believe in yourself. Think bigger, dream larger, be your own hero and start painting your own life. It may not make this country great again, but it’s a good start.

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Here’s my To-Do List for today:

Zip, Nada, Zilch, Nothing

The mizzus and me are going to idle awhile, then we’re going to follow our noses down a few primrose paths, see what the day brings. Yesterday we found a trail down to near where the Sound ends at Budd Inlet and Boston Bay and watched the sun disappear and the moon come up. Herds of ducks were taking flight at dark, headed to some marsh maybe, no longer home.

Most of the world is migratory. The creatures of this earth travel sea to sea, continent to continent, in search of food, of nesting grounds, all following some primal urge to move, to Go, to follow some celestial command to change location. We may not move to the Bering Straits or Tierra del Fuego, but I suspect we’ll shuffle around some. You know, after a few cups of coffee I’m brewing right now, after a little reading, maybe a after a few songs on the guitar I brought along.

We’re not sure when we’ll go home. Maybe tomorrow, maybe not, but when we do I suspect it’ll be ever so slightly different, hopefully a lot different, more like when we came to the shack almost 40 years ago, nervous but adventurous, naïve but ready for something new, more exiles than pioneers, strangers in a strange land, in love with the island, in love with owning our 7 acres of nettles and woods, in love with going back to the land, in love with the beach, in love mostly with each other. The world wasn’t our oyster, it was ours to create. I think, post election, it’s time to do that again.

No, we didn’t create America. And we didn’t elect the first woman president. But I’m not going to plant bitter seeds in our garden, either. Not sure yet exactly what we want to grow next, but we’ll rejoice that we can, that we will, that we’ll harvest a bounty of, if nothing else, love. Don’t ever think that’s the least a person can do.

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I’m down in the South Puget Sound taking a little breather from the post-election introspection. Took a walk this morning in the fog-shrouded Mima Mounds. The Mounds are these strange mysterious giant gopher hills nobody really understands how they came into existence. Sure, you could see them as a metaphor about a bigot’s victory, strange upcroppings in the Body Politic, but … let’s not. Let’s just take a walk.

I’m in here by myself, just me and a couple of raptors hovering over their prey in the mist. Sure, another metaphor but for me it’s just a hawk and a some poor rodent who didn’t pay enough attention. When I finally finish off a few miles through the mounds, a sheriff’s cruiser sits parked near my rig, engine running, the deputy sitting with his window down. Just me and the Law now. Sure … but let’s don’t.

Like a lot of you, I may need a 12 step program, but first I’m going to try a 10,000 step one out here on the trails. When a hawk is just a hawk and a mouse is just an unlucky snack, I’ll know I’m on the road to political recovery. Okay … apolitical recovery. What do the AA folks recite? God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

I graduated college with a degree in sociology in 1972 so it’s hard for me to let it go. A friend sent me the lyrics to a John Prine song after the election. “Blow up your TV throw away your paper. Go to the country, build you a home.” He and I once left civilization behind and moved awhile to the country together. Didn’t build a house but we hobbled together an outhouse. I think back and realize we maybe were leaving Nixonian America behind then too. Neither of us really went back … but, we aren’t living in Timbuktu either. Still, there’s another song I remember from back then, Joni Mitchell’s ‘Woodstock’.

Well I came upon a child of God, he was walking along the road
And I asked him tell me where are you going, this he told me:
Said, I’m going down to Yasgur’s farm, going to join in a rock and roll band.
Got to get back to the land, and set my soul free.

It’s a hard road to travel, I do believe, but a good destination. I’m going to try to get myself back on that road. This election, it’s just a bump in the path.

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