The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Success is a tough word to define. Failure, not so hard. That old adage about not succeeding at first, so try try try again, I gotta tell you, that might be good advice for a third grader but I’m not so sure about us old guyz. Last winter I put my nose to the grindstone trying to build an acoustic guitar. The fiddler in our band, the South End String Band, builds violins and cellos professionally. He studied for three years at a luthier school in Salt Lake City. If you’ve ever been to TempleTown, you might have some idea how long three weeks would be down there, much less three years. Criminey, three days is an eternity. Salt Lake City is most definitely NOT Party Town USA.

A friend gave me a copy of Clapton’s Guitar, a great read about an Appalachian guitar builder who pretty much was self-taught and now is building masterpieces of luthiery for the locals and folks like Eric Clapton. To say the book was inspirational would be an understatement. I decided right then and there if this good old boy in the hills could do it, why not this good old boy in the nettle hollows? Determination, right? Pluck, correct? Desire and fortitude? Why, just last week there was a story in the news about a guy who built a rocket and launched himself into the sky nearly a mile and lived to tell about it. Building a guitar surely wouldn’t be as dangerous to my health. Would it??

Well, not counting mental health anyway. I gnashed teeth and bent wood and hacked away, read a lot of articles and watched a dozen you-tube tutorials, slept badly but finally finished my first guitar, the one I promised the mizzus would be my last guitar. It looked pretty, played all right, sounded okay. Not bad, I thought, you know, for a first guitar. Not so good for a last one, though. Thinking about all those mistakes a novice like me made on the first effort, I finally convinced myself I could learn from them. I could get better. I could, if I took my time, make an improved version. Like for instance, maybe not try to reinvent stuff, maybe look at a musical instrument less as an art object and a lot more like an audio device. It is, after all, meant to produce sound. And why reinvent wheels that have been rolling for centuries? Maybe learn from the Masters, not try to be inventive on the first go around.

So I’m back on the grindstone. Making mistakes already that no doubt will prove useful to future attempts, but not so much helping the current project. I suspect there is a truth to not letting failure deter a person. Perseverance, youngsters! Push on! The best is yet to come! And I certainly don’t want to be the cynical grouch who refuses to hang the kids’ drawings on the refrigerator with advice like maybe you should try something besides crayon art, sweetheart, and detour some future Picasso into shoe sales. But … I think the time will come when I have to tell myself, Clapton doesn’t want any of my guitars. Even if he does buy about 20 a year.

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Maybe you saw the video of over a hundred newscasters who work for Sinclair Broadcasting Group, the company that owns a big chunk of all the TV stations in America and wants to buy hundreds more, reading a word-for-word warning to their viewers about fake news. Their chairman of the board, David Smith, when asked about requiring all these independent stations to read from the script, said all stations do this. Meaning, all news stories are submitted to editors. The difference Dave omits, of course, is that those other stations have in-house editors, not Big Brother dropping edicts to its myriad minions.

The other difference Dave misses is that there are news stories and there are opinion pieces and it used to be they were kept separate and made clear one was not the other. Fake news, if you were to ask me and I know you didn’t, is synonymous with Fox News, those fair and balanced folks who wouldn’t know a fact from propaganda if you beat them with a National Enquirer. They blurred the lines intentionally the way Rush Limbaugh can twist the truth into a pretzel with hot mustard and call it a hamburger. Destroy the public’s faith in honest journalism, you can pretty much manipulate truth to your own ends. Donald Trump is living proof.

We tend to believe what we want to believe. With the internet and blogs, we can narrow our media right down to our selective viewpoint, reinforce our beliefs and live merrily in our bubble of ‘facts’. Right and left both. We all know there will be biases in reporting, selective editing that swings in one direction or the other. PBS will pick a story on the plight of immigrants while a Texas television station might highlight the illegal immigrant who killed a woman and got acquitted by a jury. One will cover the effects of global climate change while the other will simply call it a hoax and drag out some scientist in a different field who corroborates it.

There is, however, a huge difference in liberal or conservative bias in a news station and just calling everyone else liars and fake news. One is just human nature and hopefully a good media outlet will attempt to minimize that bias; the other is propaganda intended to mislead an audience. We have a President who attacks the media, sometimes by name and sometimes by individual, and we have a monopolistic broadcast group who is more than happy to help him.

Fair and Balanced? Fake News! Corporate Censorship? Monopoly Media!

These are confused times, amigo, made more so by cynical politicians and corrupt media moguls. If the aim was to sow discontent and anger, they’re doing a great job. Fifty years ago the Jefferson Airplane wrote a little ditty called White Rabbit that perfectly captured those times when the liberals were the ones who were anti-government and maybe captures these times too.

When the men on the chessboard
Get up and tell you where to go
And you’ve just had some kind of mushroom
And your mind is moving low
Go ask Alice
I think she’ll know

When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen’s off with her head
Remember what the dormouse said
Feed your head
Feed your head

Damn good advice. But what are you gonna feed it?

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You maybe don’t watch as much Fox News as some sectors of the American Public so it’s altogether possible you missed Sean Hannity ranting and raving about Mueller’s overreach when he confiscated Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen’s personal files. Time to end the investigation! the Fox commentator yowled. Time to lock up the traitor James Comey! he growled. Time to end the Witch Hunt! he hollered.

Funny how things turn out in this Trump era. Up is down. Down is kind of the high point. So when the Trump Team lost its bid to have the Cohen trove kept secret, the name of the client who didn’t want his name revealed to the public was ultimately revealed. Surprise, surprise, as Gomer Pyle used to say. It was our favorite Trump apologist and bromancer, the fair and balanced Sean Hannity. So what does Mr. Hannity say to all this, you ask. He says Mr. Cohen was not his attorney in any legal sense of the term.

Like me you probably find that an odd parsing of words. Not my attorney in any legal sense of the word? Just an attorney in what sense, then. A fixer? An unpaid attorney? A pal? Methinks something here is amiss. You know, and I do too, the best is yet to come. Mr. Cohen knows where the bodies are buried, where the women have been paid their hush money are, who set up the meetings in Prague, why the President is jittery about Russia. If this were a made for TV series — and trust me, it will be if it isn’t actually one already — Monsieur Cohen would turn up dead in Episode 23. Can’t have him turning State’s witness. Add to that those tapes he liked to record, god only knows what jewels lay waiting in those ready to be uncovered.

Trump Fawlty Towers. It’s going to make Watergate look like a one season flop. This one’s got it all. Foreign intrigue, mob bosses, porn stars, Playboy models knocked up and paid to have an abortion, political gamesmanship, lies and more lies, one great big soap opera full of twists and turns, pathos and comedy. American Entertainment! Start stocking the popcorn, we ain’t seen nothin yet.

If I was writing this series, Sean Hannity would commit suicide before the rest of Cohen’s dossier comes out. Just a suggestion, of course, but he and the Fox Friends will probably see if they can weather the investigations. Good luck, Sean, and Good Night.

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Pity the poor Republicans. They stand stoic behind their President, grim smiles frozen on their faces as the cameras capture another of their profiles in courage, and you know they’re thinking, how did this happen to us? How did we elect a playboy reality TV star to be our Leader? A man so bereft of morals and decency, a president who we will soon be asked to impeach.

At a news conference with the purported purpose of discussing the American response to the Syrian nerve gas attacks, the Fearless Leader went ballistic instead about the FBI raids on his personal attorney’s office and home. Veep Pence and newly installed Pompeo sat stone-faced while Trump ranted and raved, castigating the FBI, Jim Comey, Hillary Clinton, Jeff Sessions, just about everybody but Assad. You know what they were thinking. Same as Rex Tillerson at the Boy Scout’s speech: here’s a fucking moron.

Maybe the same thing Adolph Hitler’s generals thought when Adolph took over the war planning and attacked Russia. Course by then Hitler was already Fuhrer and the machinery of fascism firmly entrenched. We’re not quite there yet, but if the Republican party thinks power matters more than morals, we’re on our merry way.

Paul Ryan just jumped ship. The Speaker of the House, 3rd in line for the Presidency behind Pence, took a curtain call. He didn’t call out the President, but he bailed before the midterms, proud, he said, of what he accomplished. A tax cut for the rich that will drive the deficit into the trillions. Cognitive Dissonance, I think the psychiatrists call it. Silver linings in the thunderheads. Today Trump pardoned Scooter Libby, the aide to Dick Cheney who took the fall for outing a CIA agent, what some would call treason. Even George Bush wouldn’t pardon the guy, but Trump is testing the waters for future pardons, including himself.

The Republicans so far show no shame, no blame for what will be a truly dark chapter in the history of this republic. Get off the boat, I say, leave this sinking ship while you can still pretend you had nothing to do with enabling this slide into totalitarianism. Maybe the rest of us can right the vessel when you’re gone. Take a life preserver, take a lobbying job, but take a swim. Don’t worry about the sharks, they’re you.

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