The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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You got to love the man, don’t you? For constant entertainment, if nothing else. Sure, he’s infuriating. Course he’s a total moron. And a liar. And a bully. And an egomaniac. But … it’s hard to turn away, isn’t it? The mad king is a total train wreck in motion. So what if we’re in the caboose and wondering where the tracks end and the wheels come off? Every day is a dose of idiocy spooned out with an adrenaline pill. It’s like being on speed with a bottle of Jack and you’re in the backseat with the guy you’ve been drinking with all night and now he’s smacking the radio maniacally and flicking the ashes from his joint out the open window while the night is alive with menace and electricity. You know it won’t end well, but hell, you paid for the ride, you might as well see it through. You got a victim’s point of view now….

Trump, being a man who thinks out of his box, is proposing a solar wall at the border. Why not generate some juice while we’re at it and make some money to defray expenses? I love it, an alternative energy subsidy at last. Save the Mexican government plenty when their bill comes due. Sunshine Superman!

Lunacy is the catchword of the year now. Every morning the world tilts further off its fragile little axis. Tomorrow we’ll have nuclear power plants on the border, the cooling tanks forming a thousand mile moat to keep the illegals from crossing unless they want to risk being irradiated on the swim. Plus, all that nuclear power!! We live in the Light Fantastic where facts are for fools and reality is anything the man tweets. The media is lying, off with their heads! Science is bunk. Obamacare is collapsing under its own weight, global warming is caused by skunks farting at night, the Russians are misunderstood and the Syrians, well, who knows where Syria is anyway.

When I was a young guy, we were the Ugly Americans. Now we’re the Crazy Americans. We’ve opened the doors to the Asylum and disgorged the nutcases to run the place. Day after day we get a bit more used to them. It may actually be their strategy. Reality is, after all, fairly malleable. We can only hope they don’t decide to lock us up, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

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Yesterday I was wandering the woods without too much direction, nothing particularly new, just meandering along the trails, another animal in its usual habitat. It’s usually fairly quiet around here if you ignore the lawnmowers and weedeaters and leafblowers down the road, but the noise yesterday was coming from a pack of crows screeching about something or other, enough to make me change course and go over to their squawk party.

Up in a Christmas tree we planted as a one foot tree back in the ‘80’s and now was 50 or 60 feet high sat a big fat great horned owl, tufted ears, huge green eyes. The crows were parked on adjoining limbs in the same tree and surrounding ones, all of them croaking and cawing as if the sheer volume of noise would drive that owl out of their territory once and for all. The owl paid absolutely no attention to them. It gazed down at me but wasn’t perturbed in the least by the presence of some earthbound human. Occasionally a crow would make a dive at the intruder, but it was tough navigating the thicket of boughs.

All day that murder of crows kept at it. I kept going back occasionally with a camera and noticed the owl had moved its perch slightly, but otherwise, it sat Buddha-like in that fir which gave it a good vantage on the garden and the open area around it where rabbits and mice might be unfortunate enough to venture. Later, though, I heard the crows fly back into the woods behind the shack so naturally I followed the herd to see where Mr. Owl might have flown.

He was up on a branch in a sugar maple we’d planted 30 years ago, a little too exposed, and the crows were joined by four or five robins plus a couple of hummingbirds and they all took turns making kamikaze dives on this poor owl who tried his best to ignore them. Until they began to hit him. The robins were the worst. They smacked him on the side, on his back, against his head. The owl quit watching me and turned his attention full time to these attackers and it wasn’t long before they drove him up to the woods next to the field and the barn above.

Nobody likes an owl in their vicinity, I guess. When we had chickens, they would go half berserk whenever one sat in a tree above their coop. Crows, they won’t tolerate one. Robins either, apparently. And the hummers, they don’t much like anybody. Owls, well, they sort of made their bed, being the predators they are. Hard to feel sorry for them, really. We got a great horny owl in the White House now. He and the kids feel like the world is against them, they just can’t understand the acrimony or the racket. So unfair! So sad! I suspect in the end we’ll drive that bird to the far field too. It is, after all, a jungle out there….

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Sometimes in our quest to alleviate the pain of the struggling middle class or take care of the needs of the poor, we forget about the rich. The job creators, the builders of capital, the risk takers, the folks who made America what it is today: the wealthiest nation on earth. We take them for granted, we ignore them and when we do pay some attention, we castigate them for perceived sins of avarice. In sheer dollar amounts they pay most of the taxes in this country. Sure, they get a few tax breaks, they don’t have to pay the same rate on their capital gains as we would on wages and income and of course they can deduct private jets and yachts as business expenses. You think they got wealthy wining and dining clients in a suburban two story? C’mon, wake up.

You ever been around real wealth, you’d know it’s hard work being rich. Phone calls 24/7, teams of attorneys, tax consultants, travel to and from their vacation homes, multiple vehicles for transportation and attendant chauffeurs, countless investment strategies. Don’t kid yourself, you’d need a team of psychiatrists to handle your anxieties. And trust me, shrinks don’t come cheap. And then there’s the hidden expenses, small things like trust funds and private schools followed by Ivy League for the children. Vacation properties strewn across the globe. Who do you think takes care of those, eh? Who knew it would be so tough?

So while you’re lamenting the cutbacks coming in Medicaid and watching health care for millions suddenly out of reach again, take a pause in your criticism of the GOP led attack on Obamacare and think of the undervalued 1%. Don’t you think maybe they deserve a tax break on this new Republican Plan? Of course you do. The world is hard enough for these folks without us piling on too. Spare the rich!

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“I hear so many times, ‘Oh, I want my people to be smarter than I am.’ It’s a lot of crap. You want to be smarter than your people, if possible.”

I’m guessing that half of the American people voted for Trump hoping that a businessman, a CEO, a job creator, a billionaire entrepreneur, a captain of industry, might lead them out of the Valley of Death, or at least the ravine of income inequality. I figure they think the head of Boeing or Amazon would be the sort of bright, can-do person who could turn this country into an economic machine. So they held their noses over Donald’s, let’s call them his idiotsynchrocies, and cast a vote for a real estate developer turned reality TV host.

Why not? Some folks actually believe the country is going down the sewer. They see the world shape shifting faster than you can say Virtual Reality. They feel left behind, culturally, economically, politically, socially, you name it, they’re watching the future speed past them before they can even get a hitchhiking thumb out. Not that it would matter with self driving cars coming up from behind them. They want to make America great again. Meaning, they want America to be the myth they have in their heads, the one where they liked Ike and Beaver, that loveable white kid out in the suburbs who was always getting his ass in trouble, but in the end, he learned some valuable lessons and went to bed happy that in the morning his cereal bowl of processed and sugared grains would be waiting once again to fill his belly with empty calories.

Five months into this Presidency they still hold out hope that the Mogul of Manhattan will turn D.C. upside down and shake these swamp denizens until the loose change in their bulging pockets clatters to the base of Lincoln’s monument, then rolls down the marble steps and finally into their own bank accounts. If he lives up to his myriad promises, they’ll have free cable TV by Christmas. Yes, Virginia, there IS and he lives in the White House! When he’s not at Mira-de-Lago.

I happen to be one of those cynics who believes CEO’s are paid a hundred times too much. Call me an infidel and take away my passport, but you can’t tell me stockholders aren’t idiots for paying some yahoo in an Armani 50 million bucks to run their corporation. Course, it’s their money and they can fritter it away on mega-talent, but in the end, all of us pay for that, stockholder or not. The real price, though, is that we are fast becoming a society of peasants and princes.

We’ll see soon enough if the real estate developer king was worth the price. We’ll find out if America should be run like a corporation or a real estate office, if we can lean on the unions, bribe the politicians, coerce our enemies and bluster our way to greatness once again when the man at the top declares publicly he wants only inferiors beneath him. Little wonder he hasn’t filled all those hundreds of vacancies in his government. Hard to find folks that dumb.

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