The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Neil Young has always been a hero of mine. Great songwriter, curmudgeon extraordinaire, a guy who doesn’t mind stepping on toes. So when he got wind of Spotify paying 100 million dollars to Joe Rogan for an exclusive platform and Joe used his podcast to promote anti-vaccination guru Dr. Robert Malone, Neil issued an ultimatum to the company to remove Rogan or remove him. Spotify dropped Neil like a bad rash. 100 million dollars, in case you think inflation is out of control, is still a lot of moolah, enough to convince Spotify that a little misinformation about the pandemic and vaccinations really isn’t too big a deal. Course Neil thinks it’s potentially killing people.

A few dead Covid deniers really doesn’t add up to 100 million dollars, now does it? Be honest, how many would it take to convince you, if you were the CEO of Spotify, to drop Joe Rogan and his huge fan base? C’mon, a thousand? Ten thousand? We’re talking real money here, not chump change. If my little blog was on Spotify and I started spouting off that vaccines actually kill more people than Covid, you think they’d keep me on and let Neil stay? If you think that, I got some bitcoins I can sell you cheap….

And if you think money is always the primary driver in the world, keep in mind that Neil just gave up tons of royalties by dropping out of Spotify’s playlist. Sure, he’s rich and maybe if you were that rich you’d do the same thing. Maybe. Neil’s got an old song ‘This Note’s For You’ that mocks all those musicians who sold their songs to commercials. What’s wrong with rock and roll capitalism? you ask. Don’t ask me, go ask Neil. He’ll give you real thing. And it ain’t Coke.

Down at the Mabana Sunset Villa, our premier assisted living complex here on the aging South End, the Covid Lockdowns come along practically once a month. Help is pretty hard to find at the Villa, not just because pay is low and benefits are non-existent, but Covid has taken its toll on morale. Visitors are required to wear masks but we have plenty of folks who think — and I use the phrase loosely — that the Pandemic is a hoax, Fauci is a liar, vaccines are a government plot or … well, hell if I know what they’re thinking.

So inevitably the Villa has someone roll in, tests positive and the place goes into quarantine. After all, these are the folks with ‘underlying conditions’. If they die, of course, the anti-vaxxers will say they didn’t die of Covid, they died of underlying conditions. It’s like pushing someone off a cliff and saying, well, it wasn’t the shove that did them in, it was hitting the bottom. That, or some will say the vaccine they took killed them. So much for polio or smallpox vaccines these naysayers took as kids, lucky they’re alive, these yahoos.

My friend Janet works at the Villa. Over our weekly coffee together she unloads her frustrations. “We got residents who can’t see their kids or relatives or friends. Nobody but us when the Lockdown goes into effect. Half the time we’re in quarantine. Some putz on the staff who thinks Covid is phony baloney rolls in, tests positive, then here we go again. I can’t imagine working in a hospital anymore.”

Janet and I worked at the old Everett General Hospital, before Providence absorbed it. I was an orderly and she was nurse’s aide, what we never refer to as the ‘good old days’. But compared to what must be going on now, maybe they were.

“Strange times,” I say before we usually refill our cups. “Sad times,” she says, pouring the last of hers down the sink. I want to add something comforting, maybe even optimistic. Damn if I can think of a thing.

There WILL come a reckoning! The sun will rise once again and the tides will turn. The spineless cowards who sing the praises of Donald J. Trump, would-be dictator of America, will soon, mark my words, start to turn on him. In the next months the lawsuits, the investigations, the indictments will start as a trickle, become a stream and finally roar out of the sewer pipes in a tsunami of negative story after negative story. One by one the worms who thought it would help them to stay in power if they supported the Big Lie and the Big Liar will realize the man is an anchor tossed overboard they’d be wise not to cling to.

January 6th revelations, election tampering in Georgia, grand juries, New York district court subpoenas, everywhere the fat man turns, more allegations, more disclosures, more indictments, a faucet of corruption and greed pouring out in the media day in and day out. The guy was a crook, the guy was a fraud, the guy was an admitted pussy grabbing creep surrounded by nazi-loving sycophants and apologists. And now the truth will come out.

Okay, it’s a nice fantasy, but a fantasy nevertheless. Chances are most Republicans won’t believe any of the charges against their fuhrer. Odds are even better that it will only embolden them to believe the conspiracy theorists. Stolen elections, Comrade Biden, left wing critical race promoters, pizza parlor cannibals, nano tracking vaccines, Jewish lasers igniting forest fires, Big Foot, Big Lie, a promulgation of insane beliefs in a country addicted to social media echo chambers, a country where nearly half of us are batshit crazy. Believe the stories in the New York Times??? Don’t make me laugh. Please!

The metaverse looks better and better.

Golly, you know about the last thing you need in these pandemic fueled partisan times, if you’re white at least, is to be made to feel uncomfortable with our racist past. Oh sure, slavery seems like it might have been a bit, well, old school and even a tad barbaric. Jim Crow and the KKK, kind of wish we didn’t have to remember those times now and do we really have to talk about segregation and the Civil Rights movement half a century later? C’mon, it makes us queasy. Some of us at least. Some, not so much.

Take Florida, for instance. They’re trying to pass a law that makes it illegal to bring up uncomfortable stuff from the misty past, stuff that would make a grown white man wince hearing about lynchings and native genocide and, well, a lot of history that just ought to stay buried, not brought out like dirty laundry to rub in our noses. Why should we feel guilty about the actions of our forefathers? Different times, different customs. Leave those skeletons in the closet, shut the door and shut up already. Nobody wants to be reminded, okay?

That old chestnut about those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it is hogwash down in the Sunshine State. Fact is, they’re probably repeating it now and really don’t mind. They just don’t want to be made to feel uncomfortable about it. Is that so hard to understand? We’ve all got events in our past that we don’t want to talk about, let’s just let sleeping dogs lie. The thing is, we white folks want to take pride in our white all-American culture and if it takes a little selective amnesia, well, that’s what it takes. Pride is what we want and pride is what we’ll demand, even it takes a law to shut up the folks who want to muddy our flag. Is this a great country or what? Don’t answer that if you don’t agree.

Historically the South End has been a place where the lumber companies cut down the forests and the developers sold off the scrub and slash that was left as ‘view property’.  You look around and times haven’t changed too much.  Except the price of a lot now is more than all the five acre chicken ranches of Mabana sold between 1910 and 1950.

Folks wonder why it took so long to discover’ the island you can drive to’ never knew our history as an exploited backwash.  The developers didn’t worry about zoning here.  Blast a bluff down with hydraulic hoses and call it Tyee or Tillicum.  Sluice down Summerland and build a rock jetty around it out into the bay.  Dig out a canal at the country club and double the waterfront.  It was wild west stuff, all right, where a man and his bulldozer could cut a wide swath without fear of government regulation or horrified neighbors.

Nowadays we look askance at dynamiting bluffs to make waterfront or dredging a lagoon to create lakeside gated communities or draining the wetlands to make quality 18 hole golf courses.  Judging by the agonized screams of the developers, you’d expect growth would reverse, forests woulde expand, housing starts would sit half finished, abandoned and rotting.  Oddly the juggernaut of gated communities and developments with names like South End Estates, Elger Bay Meadows, Tyee Vista all seem to be doing just fine with more on the way, thank you very much.

Clear Cut Cul-de-Sac, Blast Zone Barrio and D-9 Trailer Court are going to struggle, but the South End is gentrifying now that some of the trees have grown back and the chicken farms are broke and the Dot.com retirees are priming the pumps.  Won’t be long before we South Enders celebrate Back Wash Days and the rough and tumble no-holds-barred pioneers who carved out our civilization over the past century.  Thank you boys!