The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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The other day I was trailing behind a 40 foot RV trailer, sort of a McMansion on wheels, reading their bumper sticker that announced:  SPENDING OUR KIDS’ INHERITANCE.  Pretty hilarious stuff.  I bet the kids fall over laughing when the folks come rolling in for a month to visit.  $200,000 for the camper.  4-5 bucks a gallon times multiple crisscrossing of America.  Yah, I’d say the joke has some real mileage.  Great punchline.  Put another sticker on the SUV they’re towing, you got a bellybuster.

I know these people.  They think they’re taxed like a Roman peasant.  They think government is mostly the real enemy, spending their hard earned money on welfare and food stamps and mental health clinics and emergency relief and worse, wasting it through inefficiency and bureaucratic ineptness and just plain graft and greed.  They think minimum wage should be lowered and taxes eliminated.  They got theirs and good luck to the rest of you suckers.  The road they’re riding can crumble into blacktop sand after they sail by.

They know the country is in trouble, big debt, bad balance of trade, recession, all that economic mumbo jumbo.  But they’re not going to help get us out of the mess they helped put is in.  The bumper sticker they got, they could slap on the White House or Congress or any county courthouse.  They got the union jobs before unions were corrupt.  They worked for the government sector before government was evil, they fought for tax breaks for the rich once they were rich and if you missed out, tough luck.

I know these people.  They’re my friends and my neighbors and I can even see them in my own bathroom mirror.  They don’t believe in sacrifice … or the common good … or downsizing  … or that the American Dream is supposed to be for all of us.   It was for them.  The rest, the huddled and tired masses, the immigrants, the poor, the weak and the infirm  —- they got some hard news for you.  They’re spending your inheritance.  Ha ha ha, ho ho ho.  Get the joke?  Do ya, huh?  It’s on you!

My generation will maybe be remembered, not as the most selfish sonsofbitches on the planet, but as those whacky comedians at the Beginning of the 21st Century.  By then, of course, nobody will be laughing.

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Some of you fellow South Enders might be surprised — shocked even!! — to learn that there is a movement afoot to ban the teaching of banjo’s contribution to American Civilization. These folks think schools need to banish any and all books from their libraries that mention the role banjos played in our history. They claim their children are being propagandized, groomed to believe the instrument and those who played them were discriminated against. And worse, their children were being told they should consider it as their instrument of choice in certain ‘woke’ communities.

Critical Banjo Theory it’s called and it’s being taught — so they say — in elite eastern snob universities by left leaning faculties. It’s even filtered down into our high schools and yes! it has tentacles into our grade schools. So say these proponents of music purity! Bad enough we have rock n roll and rap. But banjo based music — it makes our students uncomfortable thinking the slave race brought these tools of insurrection and emancipation to our shores, not the happy melodies of our European immigrant ancestors. No, these were instruments of rebellion, a devil inspired percussive beat, a call-to-arms for what might have been a contented plantation worker, one who on hearing that heated jungle beat threw down his cotton picking bags to join in the revolution.

This, of course, undermines the sanguine history of our proud nation according to those who would delete the 5 string instrument from approved school textbooks. It undermines our nationalist need for an unblemished history. If a banjo isn’t a black mark, they argue, what is? A harmonica? No, the banjo conjures up slavery, Negro jazz, protest movements, Black Panthers … and so, for that reason, our youth must be protected from the discomfort such knowledge brings to their malleable minds.

These are dark times, all I can say. How could I know my banjo was a dark reminder of an America we desperately need to sanitize? Forgive me. Forgive me. My goal now is to make amends. To that end I will dedicate myself to mastering the accordion. Surely, at least I fervently hope so, it has no dark past.

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The writers and actors are on strike out there in woke Hollywood. Maybe you think they’re after more money —and maybe they are — but the real fight is about the moguls at Disney and Netlix and Prime planning to use Artificial Intelligence as a substitute for their human creators. Let the bots whack out a script in a nano-second, have the two leggeds clean it up, save plenty of money. Actors? Maybe you’ve been busy trying to decide between Threads and X, but AI can create totally realistic digital clones of Brad Pitt or Sandra Bullock, why pay them all those millions?

The fight is really, for the corporations at least, about money after all. For the artists, the writers, the actors, for the rest of us humanoids, it’s about choosing sides. You want an android world or you want one us hominids can call home? You worried about uncontrolled immigration, wake up! The new immigrants aren’t homo sapiens, they’re cyborgs, androids, bots, apps, algorithms, all quietly taking our places. They’re the pods under your bed in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, cloning you, becoming you, replacing you.

Sure, they can work way more efficiently, out produce us, save the billionaire class a ton of money, eventually leave us behind to scrape up the scraps. But not without a fight. Trust me, we’re gonna lose. The Tech Boyz have too much invested and it’s not for humanity. So root for the actors, the writers, the creators. Root for the humans! They’re fighting for the rest of us … whether they know it or not.

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My teachers and my parents and the TV shows of my youth kept telling us kids that the way to deal with bullies was to confront them, they’re actually, deep down, nothing but cowards. My family moved north from Georgia to Milwaukee when I was 13, a radical transition from semi-rural living to urban discomfort. My junior high school had the usual mix of cliques with one exception, the hoods, guyz who dressed up as gangsters to celebrate Valentine’s Day, the Massacre. Nice bunch, kept switchblade knives on themselves and guns in their lockers. Welcome to the city, Farm Boy!

At recess we played a game new to me called Foursquare, bounced a volleyball around from the four corners, nothing I remember about it 60 years later other than a couple of the hoods used to blatantly cheat at it and no one had the courage to call them out for it. One of my teachers who’d heard our complaints said it was up to us to put a stop to these guys’ cheating, not his problem, and anyway, the best way to end their bullying of the rest of us was to stand up to them, show them we weren’t afraid and more than likely they’d back down. Because … well, you know why. These thugs were basically cowards, that’s why.

So I decided to put an end to this cheating. Kind of ruined the game and we were required to play the stupid game. This, dear reader, is probably as good an allegory for life in these partisan times as you’re gonna want. Needless to say, the cheaters, once confronted, feigned courage. “Who’s gonna make us?” one of the gang said, and I said, well … you know what I said. Me. And then we ‘rumbled’ as they say in Milwaukee. I took the first punch to the stomach. I took the second punch to the face. After that I don’t remember what body part I slammed against my opponent’s fist, but I do remember the teacher who advised us to handle this ourselves, breaking up the slaughter and dragging us both to the principal’s office. Where we were given verbal lashings and detentions, both of which my coward bully laughed off in the principal’s face.

What I learned from this and a few other similar confrontations, bullies aren’t necessarily cowards, they’re just bullies. Creeps and sadists, brutes and users, I don’t know where my teachers and my folks got their psychology degrees, but from personal experience I have to say they should ask for a refund on their tuition.

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21 years ago the South End String Band got asked to Help Save the Grange. We’d played the Tyee Store parking lot once, the Elger Bay Store parking lot once, and we were still recovering from monoxide poisoning but we said yah shure, u betcha, why not? We put on a concert, had a spaghetti dinner with spumoni ice cream for dessert, held a raffle for goodies we’d had donated, charged 5 bucks a head. Even though it was a cold and rainy night in February, folks turned out and stood in a long line outside, so many that we had to ask two times for people to leave so we could get the next shift inside, after all, it was a fundraiser. In the end we managed to make thousands of dollars, folks signed up to join the Grange, hundreds of Camano Islanders rolled in to help.

Last night we played a short remix of that event long ago. Spaghetti dinner cooked by Mike Nestor, same guy who was chef in 2002. Pat Major collected 10 bucks for the dinner, still the Grange Master. And of course the Grange is still here. Bad bathrooms and all. After dinner the Band played our set on the same stage we used back then and the same one we used on quite a few benefits we put on over the years for the place. Made them a lot of money in 21 years and were happy to keep the Hall a community gathering place.

But … I’m not sure we can take credit for saving it. Although, I do know this: if you’re an upstart band and you get to play for hundreds of folks who came down to the South End on that cold rainy winter night, the Grange might have saved us.

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