The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Something weird is going on down here on the techno-challenged South End. Something troubling and as yet unexplained. The weather, for one, but I don’t think this is causative. Although, since none of us believe in science anymore, the possibility is there that it could be. Make up something, anything, or better yet, imagine some conspiracy, then forward it to all your ‘friends’. Post it on your social medias. Hope the Russians amplify it on who knows how many websites. When it shows up on Fox and Friends, you know it’s probably true. Fair and balanced, at least. As good a test as any so far as the President is concerned.

We used to play a game in grade school called Telephone. At least I think it was called Telephone. Or maybe it was Gossip. Who cares, make up a name of your own. You start out with a sentence, something like: Tomorrow if it snows we’ll get out of school. The first person who gets this turns to the desk next door and whispers it in the ear of another student who then passes it on to the next and so on. By the time it gets back around after about 30 iterations, it was amazing what sausage emerged from the grinder. Nothing like the beginning and of course the whole point to us little munchkins in 4th grade was how distorted information got the more folks passed it on.

Course in our modern computerized times, the message is pretty much just copied and pasted or else forwarded whole. Not much room for message evolution. But what we got instead is all this phony baloney information being disseminated by … someone. For some unknown reason … For what nefarious purpose? The Russians pick it up, amplify it with all their phony websites that look semi-legit and voila, half the stuff you get on Facebook or Yahoo news or Twitter is really Fake News, just what the President keeps saying about anything which seems negative about him. You don’t know WHAT to believe anymore and so, in this miraculous Age of Information we live in, we have filled our brains with digital poop. Most of which makes us angry and polarized and ultimately Cynical. Which I suspect is the whole point. We don’t believe the media, we don’t believe the President, we don’t believe politicians, we don’t buy Science, we don’t believe in much of anything other than Facebook. We might as well drag our cellphones and laptops into a cave and go back to cooking with fire. If we still believe in fire.

But … and lest I’ve digressed too far from the original point, something weird is going on with this little blogsite. In less than two days its number of visitors (let’s call them Curious Minds) has spiked beyond anything reasonable. Ten times the usual and curving skyward. Hell if I know why. I suppose I should be pleased, but I’m mostly baffled. Oh sure, probably these posts are suddenly scintillating and incisive, no doubt the result of my … my … well, who knows? Maybe the Russians know.

Maybe you do.

Anyway, hopefully any day now the advertisers will be knocking on my door and I can quit my day job, just pound out this moonshine wisdom and wet powder wit until my retirement fund is full. For those of you who have made this possible: спасибо Comrade Putin!

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Maybe you’ve heard the internet chatter to run Oprah for president. Aiiee Carumba! I guess I need to watch more TV. Seems to me we’re looking for politicians who are popular television personalities now. Reagan, Trump, now Oprah. Dr. Oz for Vice President. Dancing with the Stars winners for cabinet posts. Maybe we’ll like government better if we fill it with our favorite stars of screen and TV.

On the other hand, maybe we should just have a National Lottery. No skills needed, just luck. A lot of luck, the kind that might take a person a long ways with trade negotiations, arms deals, welfare reform, tax reductions, Supreme Court nominations, health care fixes, all those decisions we thought took professionals with expertise and experience. I guess we don’t need that now. We need someone with ratings. We need someone with luck. That’s all we need.

Civilizations fall. Greece, Rome, the Mayans, the Incans, Aztecs, American Idol. Way of the world. Somewhere along the line the droughts hit, food becomes scarce, plagues decimate the population, the neighbors wage war, leaders become too corrupt or too inbred or too inept. Ratings go through the bottom.

Always something as we say on the South End, yet another lost civilization. Why not take a run at TV game show hosts running the machinery? Jeopardy or Wheel of Fortune. One luck, one trivial pursuit. Spin the wheel, pick a door or a curtain, go for the Daily Double. Sure you could lose it all on a single roll, that’s the fun for us in the audience. I’ll take the Middle East for $600, Alex. “What is the 6 Day War?” No???

The Oprah brand is as vast as Trump’s. As president she can recommend books, offer magazine subscriptions, dole out sympathy. We can struggle together with her weight issues, follow her tabloid accounts. We can hope she heals the country. I’ll wager $2700 on U.S. Government, Alex. “What have you got to lose?”

Good try, but sorry, that is not the answer we’re looking for, Skeeter. That leaves you with only $100. Thanks for playing Jeopardy!

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You got to love the NRA. In the wake of another mass killing they roll right into the Conservative Political Action Conference, which they sponsor oddly enough, and accuse the folks who want to maybe do something about mass killings of exploiting the tragedy. Now, I love blaming the victims as much as the next whacko, but this time it feels a little like they are protesting, methinks, too much. When the kids who survived the shootings last week began to knock on legislator’s doors and organized rallies, the conspiracy theorists hit their Facebook sites with accusations that they were paid actors. Nothing is really too insane or too low for these folks. Pretty nearly all the lawmakers were in conferences and unavailable for meetings. Welcome to Democracy, kids!

Wayne (Give me a Gun or Give me Death) La Pierre, the front of the barrel of the National Rifle Association, accuses Democrats of a liberal agenda to destroy all our rights. Ban a bumpstock to make a semi-automatic rifle into a machine gun, well, that’s an equivalency of the government busting in private citizen’s doors for speaking their minds. They want to terminate with extreme prejudice their God given right to carry a firearm, their 2nd amendment rights and then it’s just a nano second away from all the Bill of Rights being taken too. The answer, says Wayne, is to arm the schools’ teachers, teach them how to use a Colt .45 Peacekeeper, give them concealed weapon permits and let them gun down any would-be bad hombres. Works in the movies!

A legislator in our area, not saying he gets money from the NRA lobby, fumed yesterday that more mass killings are done with knives than guns. He used a fictional account of a Norwegian slaughter of schoolkids by blade. Why not be more creative? Grenade murders or slaughter with swords. Murder by pesticides. Killings with trained rats. C’mon, man, if you’re going to lie outright, why not make it a doozie? And yeah, we elected this idiot.

The kids are asking the question we all should’ve been asking all along. How much is the NRA PAYING you??!! What amount of money did it take to buy you off? What are you going to do to make our school and this country safer? Or as one kid vowed, ‘I can’t vote right now, but when I can, I’m voting YOU out!’

Kid, I’m with you.

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I hate a smarty pants as much as the next dumb guy. You know the type, climate scientists, Middle East experts, folks who collect data on everything from global temperatures to gunshot deaths. Who needs em? The world is tough enough without complicating it up with facts and statistics.

That’s why we got the Right Man in the White House. Facts? He don’t need no stinking facts. In fact, he doesn’t believe facts are facts. Doesn’t have to, he’s President and the rest of you are the lying media and the left wingers and those stuffy Ivy League college snobs. You want a Harvard professor for a neighbor? Correcting your bad grammar? Showing off with his command of the, ho ho, facts? Didn’t think you did. I sure don’t. Jeez, give me a guy who I can drink a beer with while we look under the hood of his vintage Chevy trying to figure out why it won’t start.

I just read today that the Commander-in-Chief has stopped reading the daily briefing reports, all that hokum the State Department and the military brass and the economic councils throw together and condense down for the President to read every damn morning. Like he doesn’t have something better to do. Fox and Friends, just to name a few. Get all he needs right there, you ask me. And if you don’t believe me, go ask him. Daily briefings? C’mon, that’s why he has advisors. And cabinet members. Experts in their fields.

Okay, they’re not experts, but hey, that’s my whole point. We’re sick and tired of these college trained, east coast, liberal smartasses. That’s why we got Rick Perry running Energy and DeVoss running Education and old Doc Carson running Housing. Tillerson runs the State Department. You think he knew anything about State Department crap? They can reinvent these departments. Move em into the 21st Century. Get rid of the pointy headed hombres who’ve been there practically since 1776. Deep State. Gonna make it shallower, that’s the whole point. Get rid of em altogether, be okay with me and Donald.

All you crybaby losers who said America would go to hell faster than you can say Woman Abuser, wake up! The economy’s doing gangbusters, unemployment is way low, the corporations are going to have a banner year. You want someone to read those daily briefings, be my guest. The rest of us have better things to do. Me, I’m going over to Roy’s next door, see what’s under the hood for problems today, maybe have a beer or three. You let me know if anything Real Important shows up.

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