The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

A study cited in the morning’s lying press showed statistics that kids were less likely to do drugs these days. The thesis these researchers had come up with was they were doping themselves on social media, a steady drip of dopamine pleasure, nearly constant in their waking, if somnambulistic, hours. Social media as narcotic….

You live down at the tail end of an island far from the tentacles of Facebook, you forget sometimes you’ve set yourself adrift from the continental shores of 21st century modernity, but as the riptides sweep you away and the land lines tear loose from the walls, those messages from the Mainland become fader and more indistinct, Morse code from telegraph poles rotting in the relentless rains.

For a confirmed xenophobe, this desire to stay in constant contact with strangers and family and friends is bemusing, like stuffing messages in bottles all day long and setting them loose on the tides. I had a buddy back in high school who was a ham radio operator tapping out code to other hamsters overseas and across the globe, who stayed up late in his room on the chance that meteorological conditions were ripe for some far away contact. “I talked to a guy in England,” he would tell me the following morning.

“Whadja talk about?” I’d ask. Invariably, nothing much, just name, serial numbers and rank. Where they lived. Age, maybe. I guess we just have this desire to make contact, to let someone know we’re out there, that we’re not alone. Same reason we send radio signals into space. Same reason we write blogs. Ironically, my buddy the ham radio operator slowly became afraid of human interaction of all kinds, what the shrinks call agoraphobic. I tried getting in touch with him some years after the last time I saw him, but he’d lost his job, moved away from his house in Missoula and now even Google can’t locate him. I imagine him holed up in some desolate place, tapping Morse code late into the comforting night, listening for an answer from folks he’ll never have to meet, all his bottles crashing onto lonesome beaches in places he’ll never see.

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Jeez, no sooner than the British start the process to exit the EU, those sneaky Spaniards make a claim for getting back Gibraltar. Brexit is a more slippery slope than the Brits thought, but if Spain thinks it’s going to annex the Big Rock without a fight, they’ve forgotten the Falklands. And the Falklands, with their herds of sheep thousands of miles from the English shore, well, they’re not the Rock of Gibraltar, trust me.

Here on the breakaway nation of the once 13 colonies, we’re starting our own withdrawal from globalism. Maybe we should worry a little about Hawaii and Alaska. The Russians feel pretty gypped by Seward’s little folly back 150 years ago and Pele, the volcano god, might feel the same. And let’s not even mention Puerto Rico and Guantanamo.

But that brings us to Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, all those territories we took after John Wayne lost the Alamo. Mexico would be crazy not to make a grab; after all, they’ve been slowly invading for decades, pretending to work low paying jobs without even getting social security, just biding their time until the day America, trying to be great again, shrinks its borders. With a president who understands the art of the deal, maybe the time is ripe for a fast negotiation, see what we can get for the Lone Star state since they want to secede anyway. Maybe trade for Cancun with Baja thrown in for good measure. We could easily toss in Arizona for good measure, let Sheriff Joe fight the cartels on their own turf, see how tough he really is.

Down here on the South End I’m licking my chops. Might be the exact right time to make a play for the northern section of the island, save us going the Kim Jong-un route and developing nuclear stockpiles. A peaceful resolution seems a lot more likely now that American expansionism has come to a crashing end judging by the Trump Doctrine: Talk loud and carry a small stick. Maybe my neighbors to the north will see the logic and economics finally in reunification. If not, well, let’s not start saber rattling just yet. Down here we still believe in peaceful negotiation.

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This morning in the mainstream lying press, I read about a UW professor who was tracking blogsites and twitter feeds to see if she could get a handle on where folks are getting their information these days. InfoWars. She was astounded that most people are reading – and probably believing— the alt-right and far left sites that appeal to their biases, not their reason. I listened this morning on the radio to an interview with a right wing talk show host who accused his interviewer and NPR of bashing all things Trump, just another example of the lying media.

Trump and his mentor Bannon of Breitbart have studiously planted the seeds of public doubt about the veracity of the Washington Post and New York Times. We are entering a techno-fueled Dark Age. I talked with a woman last week who said she couldn’t bear to read anything but the sites that bashed Trump. The entire nation seems to be pulling the covers over our heads and listening only to voices that agree with us. This tribalism bodes ill for Reason.

If I can summarize, the way to determine if something is faux news or factual news is this: it’s all phony. Everyone is lying. Truth is relative. Truth is what I believe, period. Walter Cronkite was a big fat liar, we just didn’t know it yet. Rush Limbaugh is God and he’s laughing at us. He killed the truth by telling people what they wanted to hear.

I don’t have the optimism I once had about the fate of a nation that loves its own ignorance. Like my old neighbor loved to intone: no brains, no headaches. Course, he went bankrupt three times, lost his wife and kids and his farm. My bet is he didn’t learn a single lesson from that. It isn’t that we no longer learn from history, we don’t even believe in history.

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Every year in the Pulitzer Prize nominated Crab Cracker, our local bastion of honest news reportage, we look forward to the one day when we can test our readers’ knowledge of alternate facts and verify vestigial funny bones. In the past we have run cutting edge, fast breaking stories about everything from whale sightings in the Stilly River to alpaca hunting season openings, from renaming the Mark Clark Bridge the Colton Harris Moore Causeway to the proposed 40 acre landfill on Camano’s South End.

Admittedly many loyal readers felt duped and some even canceled subscriptions … at least until they learned there were no subscriptions. It’s a free press in more ways than one, we informed our outraged gullible readers. But for the most part folks were mostly amused at our once a year antics. Those days, sad to say, are now gone. The Trump Administration yesterday issued an executive order via Tweet that henceforth, April Fool’s Day would no longer be recognized as a national holiday.

Reporters from the lying NY Times and Washington Post clamored for clarification, but White House spokesman Sean Spicer refused to accept questions from their faux news services. Fox News asked if rumors were true that the entire month of April would be designated Fool’s Month, but Mr. Spicer refused to validate those claims, saying the President and his staff would issue further information in good time.

“Isn’t it true, sir,” our reporter from the Cracker queried, “that Saturday Night Live is saying the entire year can now be declared April Fool’s Day?” which brought the press conference to a sudden conclusion when Spicer blamed the media and Hollywood for a profusion of phony stories like those. “You people twist everything!” he shouted before abruptly throwing down his microphone and walking to the door.

The Crab Cracker, no longer invited to further press conferences, if indeed there are more press conferences, was unable to verify rumors of a month-long holiday from truthful news, much less reports of a yearlong celebration of Alternate Facts. But … our investigation did reveal that Congress will soon introduce a bill in the Senate declaring May 1st National Truth Day. Watch for an update here in these pages.

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