The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Just when the unemployment numbers look like they’re heading into Great Depression range, the Republicans are balking on handing out any more stimulus or aid to anyone but the rich. Big Farma just got some money to keep the milk and meat production going, okay by me, but when it comes to, let’s call them the Little People, hell no, they aren’t going to help those who didn’t help themselves. The Big Boyz helped themselves all right, snapping up small business loans like they were rewards for using their TARP money from the first recession to buy their own stocks rather than trickle anything down to their employees.

The latest chutzpah from the GOP is to float the idea that the Little People, the folks who can’t pay the rent, who are behind on their credit cards, who lost their jobs, who probably lost their health insurance too, they can use their retirement money early to help them out of a tough situation. Up to 10,000 bucks would be taken out of their Social Security payments, plus a little interest for Uncle Sam. This is the Republican equivalent of letting them eat cake. Their own cake. But you owe the government some frosting later.

Part of what triggered the Great Recession was refusing to throw money at the problem, just stand back and see how it shakes out. If no one has money to spend, nothing good shakes out, everything grinds to a halt. It’s why we study history, to learn from our mistakes. States are going to bleed money with this Pandemic bringing business to a standstill. Taxes won’t be coming in, rents won’t get paid, landlords will go broke, more homeless, more health care issues, on and on. If deficits were the problem, maybe we wouldn’t have voted in corporate tax breaks a couple years ago under the GOP, but now, oh yeah, deficits are bad once again. Deficits will drag us down. Deficits will cut into profits and CEO salaries. It’s the Deficit, Stupid! Why would we bail out blue states who couldn’t control their budgets? Let them go bankrupt, Mitch McConnell advocated recently, as if any bankruptcy laws cover states going broke.

Compassionate conservatism was a lie back when and it’s a joke now. Compassionate corporatism, you bet. Welfare for the rich, count on it. Trump in 2020? Bring back Marie Antoinette, why don’tcha? Well, actually we got Melania. If it takes a Depression to wake this country up, I say bring back the guillotine too. Heads ought to roll, I don’t care if there’s nothing in em.

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This morning in our fishwrapper paper there was a letter to the editor asking if all us citizens would rather see low taxes or would we prefer libraries and parks and concerts and art in our lives. She obviously wanted to raise taxes to support all those amenities that make life more ‘meaningful and aesthetic’. Being a so-called artist, and particularly one who makes his living from taxes that fund public art like mine, you bet your buttsky I want to raise everybody’s taxes. Even mine.

But I have to question the timing of this call to arms, you know, given that the Pandemic has wrecked the economy. It just feels a bit, oh, I don’t know, a little tone deaf asking for more money to fund my favorite things when folks are being laid off, quarantined, kids at home from their furloughed schools, health care no longer covered, worrying about paying next month’s rent or even the damn credit card minimum. I sure don’t want to Scrooge them, they got all the misery they can handle right now.

Anyone who thinks this post-Pandemic is going to be quick and painless needs to pinch themselves with a vise-grip. Hard. Wake up, the world is going to be a lot more dog eat dog than it was a few short months ago. People are scared, can’t you see that? They’re stocking up a lot more than toilet paper, let me tell you. They’re buying freezers and filling them with locker meat. They’re hoarding yeast and flour in case bread disappears on the grocery shelves. They’re buying guns down at the pawn shops and gun stores. They’re expecting something a little different than concerts in the parks or poetry readings down at the library. Despite the sunny assurances of their rich President that the economy will come roaring back soon, that the plague will end before you know it, that the good times are right around the corner, they can see this will be a grueling haul back to anything resembling normal.

Raise their taxes? Sweetheart, the government is throwing money at these people the way GI’s threw candy to the kids from jeeps and tanks in liberated cities during World War 2. Normal? In your dreams…. Meanwhile, let’s clean up the rubble.

The fallout from this little experiment in socialism to mitigate the plague’s disruption of lives and businesses, well, hold onto your hats, you haven’t seen nothin yet. I watched my public art dry up for years after the Great Recession when legislatures went into budget slashing mode so I can hardly wait to see what this Depression will do for the future of parks and libraries and arts. We’re going to find out what folks think is essential all over again. Somehow I doubt it will be me and my art. Unless I start making movies for Netflix….

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My old man just turned 97. He still lives alone in his own house, still cooks for himself, watches way too much television, still drives his car to the grocery store, doesn’t go out much, grows a garden in the backyard. He strictly keeps his routines, likes a bowl of ice cream every night and cookies after every meal and has pretty much given up on politics. If you were to ask him about the Pandemic or Trump or the coming elections, his answer, now a mantra, is invariably the same: Crazy World.

It would be easy to suggest that his lack of interest in the world of current events is primarily the result of short term memory loss or merely boredom with the nonsense of our politics these days. But … I prefer to think maybe he has hit on the Correct Attitude, one that might help him make it to 100 without the stresses we politically involved –or political junkies, more accurately — have weighing on our daily grind. Possibly, I think hopefully, there comes a point in the affairs of men where the ugliness and the vicissitudes of the world recede into the background, just another commercial before the next episode of whatever TV mini-series he’s watching any particular night on his too complicated to operate big screen.

Crazy world. Yah. Even with this Pandemic raging, the petty politics rear their heads. Folks are dying in unheard of numbers, at least in my short 70 years, and more are going to follow. Fear has been unleashed on the land and those that fan those flames are blowing hard with all their might. My father fought on a PT boat in the Pacific during World War Two, an 18 year old kid with a mounted 50 caliber machine gun on the bow, saw plenty of what war buffs like to call ‘action’, and came home to a fairly long run of peacetime. I suspect the vagaries of our partisan political shenanigans seem a bit less earth shattering to him than to me and my pals. Korea,Viet Nam, Iraq One and Two, Afghanistan, they all pale compared to his war. The Pandemic? He remembers polio. Folks want to throw open the restaurants and the movie theaters, he could care less. Folks want to re-elect Trump? Crazy world, he’ll say. Who among us would disagree?

There are days when I can hardly wait to get old.

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I’ve been busy lately, something I recommend to any of you who spend half the day following news feeds about Trump or Trump and the Coronavirus or more Trump until you think the world has gone mad or has become toxic or, actually, both. If you find your walls closing in and you begin making a placard with something like OPEN THE STORES or LIBERATE MY STATE, you can be sure you’ve been infected with Trumpovid-20. Symptoms are a raging brain fever, sweating from the tongue, chills at night and tasteless dinners. There is no cure at this point. No real tests. No antibodies either, which means if you avoid the news for a day or two, chances are the next Trump Tweet will bring on further symptoms.

I cannot stress this enough. You must get yourself busy. Otherwise the temptation to scroll through the horror that is the internet these plague days will overcome your willpower. Distract yourself. If it means building a musical instrument you have no skills to construct, that’s okay. It will occupy your mind with total frustration, if nothing else. It certainly did mine. The danger, of course, is the longer the plague rages … or Donald Trump rages … the chances are you will end up, like me, with a house full of musical instruments. I recommend you stop at two or three then take up a different hobby. Learn a language, preferably something like Mandarin, incredibly difficult, hopelessly so if you’re my advanced age. All the better. If you’re my dad’s age, learn a program on the computer. All he can do is get and forward e-mails. The rest of the machine is basically useless other than a couple of google sites my brother set up for him. I recommend Photoshop or a CAD program, but practically any will suffice in frustrating and confusing you to a degree that all other incoming information will be shut out.

Do not, I repeat, do not go back and watch old World Series games, past tennis matches or any sports events that occurred in the past. This is a reminder of what has been lost in the Pandemic. You do not want to be reminded of anything that was the world pre-Trump or pre-plague. If there is a difference…. Focus on the task you have set yourself. Do not learn the Mandarin phrase for Dump Trump. It will not help you no matter how satisfying it might feel at first. You will end up learning only Mandarin obscenities. And no, they won’t help either. They are a Dead End. You need a detour. A new highway. An impossibly hard hobby.

If you are reading this, I hate to tell you, but you aren’t BUSY ENOUGH!! Read a book instead. Or better yet, write one. War and Peace, something similar spanning generations with too many characters to keep track of. Despite the temptation, do not make Donald a character!! It is not cathartic, trust me. Okay, forget the book writing. Mandarin, start with that. By the time you learn to say ‘hello, I want to visit your beautiful country’, the plague might be over, the election might have removed you know who from office and life can return to some kind of normal. Trust me, you need to stay busy until then….

祝好运
Zhù hǎo yùn

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