The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Folks are always a little surprised to learn that the South End is home to a school of higher learning, figuring, I guess, that a brackish backwash with virtually no commercial potential, with no public schools even, might be likelier to have a minimum security penitentiary than a college.  For awhile we had the Tucson School, an unaccredited mail order degree factory run out of Nate Benson’s basement for a few years before enough irate students complained to the state attorney general.  Nate did get his opportunity to attend a minimum security prison, but not around here.  He graduated in 3 years with good behavior and no one has seen hide nor hair since, but late at night I notice TV ads for university degrees that sound vaguely familiar.

The Elger Bay Institoot of Aesthetic Enlargement has been training young artists for nearly 25 years now.  Half the graduates end up staying here and some become instructors themselves.  The pay isn’t great, but considering the graduates who don’t teach are making far less, it beats the options.  President Otto Vermouth runs a pretty tight ship, near as any of us unwashed masses can tell and nowadays you can find art plastered everywhere from Tyee Store to Jolene’s Beauty Salon and Boutique.  Even the Marina and Bait Shop sports watercolors and bird sculpture.  It’s practically a Louvre down here, although sadly I won’t say most of us have really had our aesthetic consciousness blown up too large.  The Mabana Body Shop has an egg termpura of one of our more infamous graduates, Safari Jack.  Jack says it’s worth more than Roadkill Ronald’s 1964 Mustang convertible, fully restored, but right next to it is a 2003 girlie calendar Ronald must like as much as that egg tempura of the Clamdiggers.  Most of us like it even better, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder and Miss July 2003 fills the eye, believe me.

The Institoot has classes in everything you can want to study art-wise.  Right now they’re running Winter Classes.  I thought about taking something myself, stained glass maybe, but it cost a bit more for the supplies and anyway, I figured I’d lacerate a finger or an artery and my literary ambitions would be ruined.

Maybe in Spring session I’ll take Figure Studies, if they can squeeze another voyeur in.  Jerry Cochran’s wife models for the class.  She’s no Miss July, but it seems safer than stained glass anyway.  At least until Jerry finds out where she’s been moonlighting….

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When I was a hothead radical in the 60’s, I thought the government was killing Black Panthers, spying on civilians, letting industry and corporations foul our air and poison our water and lying to us about the war in Viet Nam.  Turns out most of that was true.  My old man said if I didn’t like it here, I could move to the Soviet Union.  Four decades later the Soviet Union is broken up and I still live here.  The government still lies about wars, still spies on civilians. The President himself is a liar’s liar. And my old man is now the one sputtering about the damn government, never mind that he worked all his life in the public sector for the U.S. Forest Service.  The Republicans, now in full battle cry, denounce the EPA, the Post Office, most all government agencies as evil incarnate.  I guess this is the American version of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.  Round up the bureaucrats and send them to Dakota to farm sunflowers.

Social Security is now called a Ponzi scheme.  Regulations on businesses are job killers.  Taxes are a pox on the body politic.  Politicians, except the new GOP, are liberal bloodsuckers.  We have moved a long haul right of Richard M. Nixon.  And compromise, once the cornerstone of American democratic prinicples, has become a white flag of surrender to the anti-capitalist Democrats.
Hot talk radio, misinformation from the internet, corporate consolidation of the media — who the hell knows what is true or not anymore?  Demagoguery is winning.  Maybe it has already won.  I get my father’s e-mails of patently false vitriol, week after week, forwarded by his pals to millions.  They believe what they want to believe.  And they want to believe Obama is a Muslim, is a terrorist, is a communist and a traitor and a foreigner.  They want to believe the government is responsible for their unhappy lives.  They want to drink their Kool-Aid, turn on and tune out.  The Times, they aren’t just  a’changin, they’ve reversed polarity.  Oh, and Dad, if you and your cronies don’t like it here, why don’t you move to China!

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Like about 23% of my fellow Americans, I watched the Democratic debates the last couple of nights. More of us interested than I thought since I thought maybe me and a couple of news junkies and most of the lying media would be the only ones interested enough to tune in. The rest, I figured, would just wait for the Russian trolling ads to waft through their Facebook feeds.

Interesting group of wannabes is my take-away. A third were women, one was gay, a couple were various races, some were very young and plenty were very old. What you’d call, for lack of a better word, diverse. Latinos, blacks, gay, straight, women, old and young, a pretty full rainbow of Americans. Kind of gave me hope for a country that lately seems dominated by white old guys. White old farts, really, who seem pissed off they don’t see themselves reflected in the American mirror. After all, aren’t they the fairest of them all?

The Supreme Court pronounced yesterday that they aren’t going to weigh in on gerrymandering. Go right ahead and use an algorithm to insure the Party in power can keep that power. McConnell probably threw a champagne party. All I can say is Democracy is still a dog fight. Money still talks and bullshit walks, as my old buddy Snooky used to say. But I’m heartened to hear folks talking once again about the poor, about immigrants’ rights, about income inequality, about something more compassionate than protecting the middle class, which is wall that I heard the last bunch of elections.

I’m not going to handicap this election. I’m not even going to predict which one of these 20 people might be the candidate. But I think I’m going to like just about any one of them for standing up for the poor, the defenseless, the downtrodden and the forgotten. Hopefully we’ve moved past the time when the beleaguered white guy is to be protected and the rich need more tax relief. Folks and their spokesman Trump will say the Democrats have moved left, that they’re now Socialists. I say about damn time….

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/audio-version-beauty-in-the-eye-of-the-accountants.mp3[/podcast]audio version CLICK ON THIS TO PLAY Read more »

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In today’s newspaper there was a groundbreaking study showing ‘beautiful’ people have significant advantages over ‘ugly’ people.  Better jobs, better chances for advancement, better salaries.  Likelier to be happy, likelier to get bank loans with lower interest rates, likelier to marry a highly educated and equally attractive spouse.  I double-checked to make certain it wasn’t a study funded by the Plastic Surgeons of America.  Needless to say they’ll be inundated soon by unemployed college grads so wattle-neck deep in student loans already that another debt won’t matter much.  A little liposuction might mean an extra 6 figures over a lifetime, so say the experts.

It came as a shock to me too that attractive folks have a leg up on us toads.  Explains everything from TV commercials to beauty contests to presidential primaries.  And here I thought brains and talent were my downfall all these years of unemployment, low wages and marginal socialization.  If I’d only know …. A nip there, a tuck here, some botox occasionally, I might have had a chance.  I coulda been a contender, not some chump sent packing to Palookaville’s South End.  But back then our fearless researchers hadn’t defined beauty yet, which I had sadly been informed at an impressionable age, was in the eye of the beholder, not a scale or a matrix or a scientific formulation.

The study even calculated that beautiful people will make $230,000 more over a lifetime than those with ‘below average’ looks.  I wish I hadn’t done it, but I took out a calculator and ran a study of my own, put my lifetime earnings up against the neighbors’, graphed out the disparities and concluded — scientifically — how really ugly I must be to make so radically much less.  And … that’s assuming most of them are extremely good looking.  If they’re not, I’m going to need a helluva lot more than some plastic surgery.

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