The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Techno Tom was morosely stirring half a pint of sugar into his coffee, no doubt figuring the sugar blast would quadruple the jolt from the Diner’s caffeine.  Freddie Fairlane, one table over with the other Flatheads, the vintage car guyz, watched for awhile then moseyed over to sit at Tom’s table.  “You seem a little down in the mouth, amigo,” he said.  “Lose your best friend?”

Techno didn’t even look up, just kept stirring that coffee he was apparently never going to drink, maybe just let it congeal to a cold pudding.  “I didn’t lose my best friend, Fred, but I’m losing my shirt … and maybe my marriage too.”  Freddie grabbed his plate of half eaten heart attack, chicken fried steak, greasy potatoes, side of four eggs and made himself at home beside Tom.  He wolfed down a couple forkfuls, then, mouth crammed with cholesterol, asked him what the hell he was talking about.

“I put most of my retirement funds into bitcoin, that’s what I’m talking about.  Seemed like a sure bet at the time … not so much now.”  Fred swilled his coffee, took another shovel load of breakfast, then asked what was bitcoin.  Techno Tom put his head on the table next to his undrunk coffee cup and made a whimpering noise that attracted attention from most of the Flatheads, men who had known defeat themselves at the hands of rusted bolts and impossible to diagnose electrical problems, defeats they mostly kept locked inside their garages or simply expurgated with howls of rage out of hearing from their fellow enthusiasts.  Misery may love company but most of us aren’t looking for an invitation.

Fred had quit chewing his chicken fried steak.  The spectacle of his seating companion head down on the formica table top made eating, even for Freddie, an unhelpful remedy for whatever problem Tom was unable to cope with.  He looked back at the table of his automotive pals who were all staring at the strange tableau before them, one that even in the notoriously eclectic Diner seemed a bit out of place during a quiet breakfast.  Fred put down his fork and raised an eyebrow to the onlookers before shrugging helplessly.  “Any of you guys know what a bitcoin is?”  Tom, without lifting his head, quietly groaned.

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If you were to ask your neighbor how he or she or them thought the country was doing these days, it probably wouldn’t surprise you if they replied Terrible.  Covid still menacing us, monkeypox making the news, abortion banned in most of the states now, mass murders by deranged gunmen, war in Ukraine, Supreme Court threats to bypass precedent on more personal liberties, voter suppression, the resurgence of racism, a deadlocked Congress, income inequality, gas prices at record highs, apathy toward the January 6^th insurrection, humongous forest fires, surging home prices and surging rents, Biblical floods, inflation running amok and a recession on the horizon, social media disinformation, did I mention Global Warming and Existential Threat?  What, me worry?

You’d be forgiven if you thought maybe we’d lost our way.  The problems that plague us seem beyond the ability of our politicians to find common ground much less solutions. W.B Yeats maybe had it right:

 Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.  The best lack all conviction, while the worst
are full of passionate intensity. 

Half of us, maybe more, no longer believe much of anything outside the kooky crap they dial into on their internet sites.  Nothing is too deranged to be considered beyond the pale, as if the world of National Enquirer, aliens among us, babies with the face of Elvis, mutants on Mars, Jews shooting laser beams at the sequoias, the love child of 79 year old Joe Biden, all that tabloid idiocy was now more believable than the evening news.  Walter Cronkite would be laughed off the air now.  Moon landing?  Give me a break, all just staged, just like those purported mass killings.  Actors, false flags, misdirection, up is down, black is white.  Cannibal Democrats beneath the pizza parlor, Jesus circling the globe in a spacecraft, makes perfect sense to a large part of the population.

You think you’re living in the End Times, maybe you are, the End of Rational Thought.  You think you’re trapped in a funhouse with warped mirrors, brother, you are.  You think folks might come to their senses, I got a bridge to the South End I’ll sell you, easy terms, low interest, act now and I’ll sell you two, just add shipping and handling.  And as an introductory bonus I’ll throw in an autographed photo of Jesus in his spacesuit.  Operators are standing by.

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Prior to Trump the Republican Party was about 85% normal conservatives, fiscal devotees, less government types and about 15% John Bircher, radical Tea Party, full blown paranoids and complete whackjobs.  The percentage now is reversed.  Qanon, Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, White Nationalists, Freedom Front, the list is long and their legions march in lockstep.  Whatever happened to the middle of the road GOP is something for historians to analyze for decades.  Blame it on Donald, blame it on hot talk radio, blame it on Fox News or blame it on the lady with the alligator shoes, the truth is that Republicans have embraced authoritarianism, conspiracy theories, anti-vaxx, anti-science and moved into their own version of the Dark Ages, superstitious, half crazed and apparently convinced government, technology, big business, all are conspiring to enslave them.  Reason with them?  Not at this point.

Let me offer an illustration from the Georgia Senate race where Herschel Walker is in a statistical tie with current Senator Raphael Warnock.  When queried about climate change, the ex-football star made his position abundantly clear.  “Since we don’t control the air, our good air decided to float over to China’s bad air, so when China gets our good air, their bad air got to move,” Walker explained. “So it moves over to our good air space. Then now we got to clean that back up.”

This is the current state of the GOP.  No doubt breathing the mixed up air circulating on the troubled currents of Sino-American atmospherics causes this sort of muddy thinking.  Any sentient human older than eight years old would listen to this mumbo jumbo and decide the person espousing this was unfit to hold a job, much less public office, but the good folks of Georgia, half anyway, plan to vote for a man who obviously took too many blows to the head on the gridiron.  At least Herschel has an excuse.

I don’t pretend to understand what has happened to the Grand Old Party.  A virus maybe, bad air, reality TV, onset dementia, lasers from other galaxies, nano-trackers in their bloodstream, who knows?  But obviously whatever the cause, this is viral and spreading faster than monkeypox.  I seriously doubt another mask mandate will prevent its spread.

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I got a call today and yeah, I know, who the hell picks up a phone these days, especially when you don’t have caller ID, but okay, I picked up.  Hello? Hello?  I usually wait a few seconds before hanging up, but this time I was expecting a call from the mizzus so I gave it a few seconds longer.  Finally this low volume, sad sack lethargic voice comes on the line, Hi, I’m Sam, do you want to sell your place?  Occasionally I like to stay with these calls, see where they lead, maybe learn some skillsets I can use to market my own stuff.  Sam, I admit, didn’t seem promising for sales techniques.

I said sure, I’m dying to sell the place, what you offering?  Sam, a little delayed in his response, finally asked if I had a price in mind.  Sure do, I said, but I’d rather hear your offer.  Long pause.  Real long pause.  I said, hey Sam, buddy, you still with me here?  You awake or should I call 9-1-1 for that overdose antidote for fentanyl.  Maybe give me your address.  Sam eventually returned to the semi-living, wondered how much I might want to sell my hacienda and land.  How about 2 million dollars, Sammy, how’s that work for you?  You know where I live, what the place looks like, or is this a cold call?

Sam, no last name, just Sam, seemed to be pondering this.  Finally, wearying of the fun, I said, hey, Sam, wake up, you need to up your game a little, show some enthusiasm if you want to scam the unwary, you can’t be drifting off into your own ozone between dialogues.  And here’s another suggestion: lay off the drugs or at least tweak the meds down a bit, you’re scaring us potential clientele.

Whether Sam was with me on the last minute of his sales pitch, who could tell?  All I know is I missed a great opportunity to make two million dollars.  Maybe the next call….

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You tell me how a political party that welcomes immigrants, LGBT’s, Moslems, minorities, the disabled, the poor, the blue collar folks, how a Big Tent party like that can lose to folks whose main appeal is racism, xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny and religious intolerance, a party of the corporations and the country club rich.  How the party of Wall Street can manage to stay a viable political force by trotting out wedge issues like abortion or church and state separation or the right to own assault weapons?  C’mon, something stinks in Denmark here and it isn’t the caviar.

I know, I know, it’s called the United STATES, emphasis not on the united but on the states.  The Founding Fathers, those demi-gods of yore, the ones who owned slaves and huge tracts of land, they managed to unite the squabbling states by compromising to give little Rhode Island the same power as New York.  Fair?  Democratic?  Not really, but who said America was fair?  Women couldn’t vote in the United Colonies elections.  And don’t even mention the slaves.  In fact, don’t even teach that stuff anymore.  The Wise Men, the ones who wrote the inviolable Constitution, give Wyoming with its meager population, the same number of Senators as California.  Don’t talk to me about fair.

So now we have a country divided.  Red states mostly rural, mostly western or southern, poor, religious, aggrieved.  And blue states, coastal, wealthy, educated, urban, aggrieved.  Not to generalize too much.  You could almost divide the country by urban vs rural.  Washington, Oregon and California, cross the Cascades or the Sierras you got rural red.  Coastal side, blue urban.  The suburbs, call them purple.  The South, the Confederates, almost all red.  The Yankee states, all blue.  The vast territory in between, the Dakotas, Kansas, Nebraska, Idaho, Montana, Utah, call it the Big Empty, huge expanses, not too many people, red red red.

And we have a Congress that rarely compromises.  Democrats vote in a block, Republicans vote in a block.  How the devil do we solve problems if nobody meets the other halfway?  It’s all or nothing, do or die, any bill that needs passing requires 60% and with Congress equally divided, 60% might as well be the moon.  No wonder polls show most of us think the country is on a handbasket ride to hell.

With social media driving the wedges deeper and deeper, how do we find common ground anymore?  How do we hear the other side, their concerns, their fears, maybe even their hopes and dreams?  Maybe the chasm is too wide now, the animosities too deep.  If we’re not united, why not accept it?  Maybe we should rethink the Civil War.  Let the South go.  Re-establish the Confederacy.  Let the states decide which country they’ll join.  It may be time to consider the unimaginable.

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