The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

These are strange times and getting stranger by the minute and by the tweet. We take it for granted now that every morning we’ll rise and shine to a new law of physics handed down by the logic-averse White House and ratified by the toadies who, like Pence, smile their frozen acquiescence and wait their turn. To say Democracy hangs in the balance, well, maybe that seemed hysterical a year ago, but how about now? A buddy, a veteran of Viet Nam, asked me how I liked Nixon these days. Nixon looks pretty damn good.

The Trump Reality Show operates on the premise that the audience needs constantly new shocks and awe, otherwise we would turn our limited attention spans to a different channel. The sad truth is, the clown king is right, we crave the tension and the suspense. It’s a cliffhanger every day now, forget who won the ballgame yesterday, forget your kid’s birthday, forget changing the oil on your car. You got what short attention you can give fixed totally on the Next Tweetstorm. Today it was threatening Iran with Total Annihilation Unlike Anything Seen in the History of the Universe!! Does that grab your attention??

Well, not as much as it might’ve before he said the same thing to the North Koreans…. My worry is that the Trumpster has sense enough to realize that he can only ratchet up the rhetoric so far and then he’ll have to actually DO something. You know, maybe a small pre-emptive strike on a Balkan state who hasn’t paid their share of NATO dues. THAT should bring your attention back to sharp focus.

What most of us are focusing on these days is how we have a rogue President in the White House, a man uninterested in reading much of anything, not even a one page briefing report, and who has decided the only bright person in the room is the guy he admires in the mirror every morning. If ignorance is bliss, we can count our blessings here in the Yew Ess of Aye. But if it’s a prescription for error, hang on to your seats, the ride is going to get a lot rockier before we get rid of this narcissistic huckster.

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Lately this past year I’ve been going to a lot of funeral services. Too many and I guess a sign of my age. So it’s a bit of a relief to be down here in San Francisco to officiate a wedding for some young friends even if it is half a century past the Summer of Love and I’m not wearing flowers in my receding hair. The kids are here and they seem happy and optimistic facing what, to this old timer, seems a bleaker future than the one we faced back when.

Course, we had Viet Nam going great guns and the assassinations of King and Kennedy, Watergate, civil rights riots, so maybe they got reason for optimism. My old man once told us boys he thought he’d lived in the best of times. And he’d fought in World War 2 on a PT boat in the Pacific and the Mediterranean. Like Dickens said, these were the best of times, these were the worst of times. I guess they’re OUR times and the future isn’t.

At a dinner the other night I was describing to a Vietnamese woman our place up on an island in the Pacific Northwest. She grew more and more animated until finally she clapped her hands and cried, “You live in a dream!” I said , what? And she said, “I want live where you do!”

We take our lives for granted, I know, even though the mizzus and me try to remind ourselves how truly fortunate we are, how the paths we took might have turned out so much worse, how happiness itself can become banal and taken for granted. We do live in a dream, all of us, and the trick is to walk the fine line between the waking and the dreaming, not falling asleep. Today we’re going to marry the kids. They’re dreaming of love, of each other, of a perfect future together. They’ll have flowers in their hair and stars in their eyes and once again it will be the Summer of Love.

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The Prez has just nominated the guy who worked with Ken Starr’s investigation of Clinton’s Whitewater accusations to be the next Supreme Court justice. No, they couldn’t find any evidence of that, but they did find the stain on the blue dress and the House impeached him for lying about it. High crimes and treason back then.

Not so much now. The Cohen tapes are coming out now, conversations about hush money for a year-long affair with a Playboy model right after Donald’s wife gave birth to their son. The evangelicals apparently don’t mind this kind of infidelity and the Congress doesn’t mind the lies or the breaking of campaign finance laws. What was good for the Clinton goose doesn’t cut it with the Trump gander. What matters is preserving the Party. Respect for the law, respect for Biblical tenets? Just lip service. If you find fault with the Donald, his true believers will make you pay at the polls next time around. This is the quandary the Grand Old Party finds itself in for electing a boy-man without ethics or common sense. For a time, we might have gloated, but now he’s the madman in the middle of the room and the majority in Congress are frightened to death.

We should all be.

A buddy yesterday, a veteran no less, asked me, “Nixon looking pretty good to you these days?” And I had to admit, yeah, better every day. Give me Tricky Dick or LBJ over this creepy clown. I never liked these guys but I never thought they were unpatriotic, just working off a different set of values which weren’t mine. This new guy, c’mon, he’s beyond the pale. He’s not working for the America you and me live in. He’s not bringing back coal mining jobs and factories. He doesn’t care about anything but the Trump brand. Who knows what the Russians have on him, but he’s willing to throw the intelligence agencies under the bus to protect his self or his interests, whatever they are. He’ll be willing to do the same with the nation as he did with Melania right after giving birth to their son.

The terrible thing to watch, more frightening than the President’s actions themselves, is the apologists and sycophants who make this guy possible. Blame it on the Russian bots if you want, blame it on Fox fake news (and I do), blame it on a disgruntlement with Hillary and the Democratic Party, but the dirty truth is there are a lot of folks out there willing to turn a blind eye to a very scary demagogue in our midst. This autumn we are going to learn something about ourselves and it may very well be that this nation is not what we thought. It may be that we have elected the man we deserve.

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I guess I’ve lived on the South End long enough to see many changes in Crabbing Techniques. Down by us we still walk for the dangerous beasts, armed with only a potato rake and our wits. Obviously the crabs have a definite advantage…. If, as sometimes happens, the wily Dungeness gets the potato rake, well, the poor South Ender is rendered nearly helpless and few, if any, hear those anguished screams.

Some of my newcomer neighbors can afford traps and boats. Boats with motors even. They launch at high tide and bait the traps with caviar and special crackers from Trader Joe’s. They say they catch crab, but I suspect they eat the bait themselves later with lobster flown in from Maine.

In the olden days, when crabbing was a mainstay of South End maritime economics, we drove the great Dungeness herds north every spring to the stockyards of Utsalady and Stanwoodopolis. These were difficult and dangerous drives for the crab cowboys — and many a young wrangler never made it up the coast. Crab stampedes were a constant source of concern. Knee deep in the eelgrass with 10,000 head of the crustaceans clacking claws, the smallest motion would set em to running. Old drovers still tell the story of Mabana Mike, caught in the stampede of ’09 with a herd of barnacle crusted monsters whittling him down like a chainsaw speed carving contest. Old Stumpy, they called him after that at the Tyee Retirement Villa. Never the same. The sound of a denture clacking would set him off for days, the nurses said.

But when the crabs were delivered and the happy Crabpokes had money in their waders, you better believe Stanwoodopolis and Utsalady resounded to the whoops and cries of drunken drovers celebrating another successful drive to market. You see an occasional crabber in the Hotel now, a small reminder of those South End glory days when Crab was King and Crabboys were too. So when you’re eating high on the shell this year, remember you’re partaking in a bit of history. And be careful. Don’t want to hurt yourselves with those nutcrackers and picks…

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This past winter we holed up one night in San Jose, Costa Rica on the way back home. Miles of razor wire, concrete walls, security gates, metal fences. Not a place where you’d take a stroll after dark, maybe not even in the daylight. The motel we’re at here in Oakland reminds me of the barrio down south, ramshackle houses, razor wire, homeless encampments, a third world nation invisible to most of the 1%’ers who would gladly take welfare away from these poor and add it to their portfolios. It’s a land of equal opportunity, they like to argue, and these people squandered it out of laziness or because of drug dependency.

The America of gated communities, razor wired walls and security patrols is fast coming, a nation that blames the victims and champions a bully President and his toady minions. We will have walls within walls, walls at the borders, walls in the cities and walls in the prisons and detention centers.

In the land of really not very equal opportunity, the Ladder to Success is missing a few rungs for, say, someone of color, or a woman, or an immigrant than, oh, the son of an Ivy Leaguer. If you start at the bottom, you might hit a home run, but not one 1/100th as likely as the guy born on third base whose dad owns the stadium.

There will always be inequality in a democracy but let’s not call the attempts to minimize it ‘socialism’. Trying to shift the wealth to correct those income gaps only seems unfair to those at the top who don’t find a problem with lowering corporate taxes or skyrocketing CEO pay, or taxing stock portfolios as capital gains, not income. They know perfectly well how to redistribute wealth; after all, they write the laws. And from the looks of things here at street level, they want more and maybe they want it all. We’ll see how that works when they’re afraid to leave their walled kingdom without bodyguards they trust.

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