The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

You’re probably, like myself, no economist. You’re happy if you’ve got money enough to pay for a roof over your head, food for the family, the monthly car payments and at least the minimum on your credit card debt. After that, well, let’s leave it to the folks who understand the intricacies of running an economy as large and complicated as the United States. After all, they did a good job … other than a few recessions and the Great Depression. Sure, a few folks fell between the cracks, but hey, we have more billionaires than ever. In fact, the President is a billionaire or so he claims. If anyone would understand how to run a complicated economy, it’s got to be a billionaire president.

We were all told as far back as grade school we have equal opportunity in the Land of the Free. If you’re white. And male. And it helps if you went to a prestigious school, say Yale or Harvard or Wharton. We all had that same chance, right? Equal opportunity, right? So if a lot more of us these days are falling behind on the mortgage, if we’re sleeping in our cars or in a tent under the freeway overpass, we had the same opportunities as the rich folks, we just didn’t play our cards right. We were dumb. We were losers. Nobody to blame but ourselves. Unless you think the game is rigged. Unless you think America is a sucker’s bet. And I know you don’t want to believe that…. You want to believe you have the same chance of becoming a billionaire, just like the former president, just like Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, the folks who doubled or tripled or quadrupled their worth in the last year. And if you have to do it by playing the Lottery, well, okay, buy the ticket, take the ride. There’s always a chance. You do not win, the gaming commission will tell you, if you do not play.

2020 and the pandemic kind of lessened the odds for most people, maybe not the rich. Jobs gone, rent due, credit card maxed. The economy stalled, except maybe the stock market, times look tough. The lesson most economists not in this Administration took from the Great Depression is government needs to spend like drunken sailors to keep the pump primed. Money in the hands of the bottom percentiles is money that gets spent. Shops get customers, cars get sold, rent gets paid, the economy keeps sputtering along. The first stimulus checks that went out did just that. Course, they put the lion’s share in the hands of the wealthiest among us. Seems fair. If you’re already rich.

The latest stimulus bill stalled over how much to give the little folks. Even Trump, blowing the negotiations to bits at the 11th hour, thought the poor ought to get more money. But the Senate howled, the Senate balked, the Senate cried socialism for the rich. Why give a family making 150,000 a year more money, they cried. Course, they could cap the income levels. They could hold back the largesse for the richest corporations. They could have done that back in the first go round. But they didn’t, they don’t and they won’t. Socialism for the rich, they say, and too big a deficit, they say, even though they gave tax breaks to the corporations once they had a billionaire president and control of the Senate.

I should have gone to Harvard Bizness School, is all I can figure, because none of this makes much sense to me. Why, I guess, I’m not a billionaire.

I had a cousin whose husband taught in an upscale private school outside of Chicago. Some of the parents hired him part time to do maintenance and lawn work on the weekends, no doubt tossing him crumbs to supplement the low salary he was paid to teach their debutantes. One of his benefactors, upon answering the front door when Fred first came to the job for hedge trimming, refused to talk to him, informing him brusquely that the ‘help’ were required to use the back door, then unceremoniously slammed the door in his face. Welcome to the caste system, American style!

Fred must have needed the money is all I could figure because he went to the back door, knocked once more, received m’lord’s instructions and went to work manicuring his hedges. I know what I would have done, but then, easy for me to say back then since I didn’t have a wife and a kid, a mortgage, car payments, credit card debt and the rest. But the story stuck with me. And not just because my cousin actually had been a New York debutante and was the daughter of a vice president of a national tobacco company. Maybe she understood the perks and privileges of the rich and famous, let her husband lick boots, that’s how it works.

I read today that Ivanka and Jared refused to let the Secret Service agents assigned for their protection use any of their six bathrooms in their upscale digs. For a time they had a porta-potty sitting out by the street for the ‘help’ to use during those long waits. Course, the neighbors took umbrage, probably what his and her majesty wanted after complaints that the Secret Service cars were taking up precious parking spaces in their tony neighborhood, so eventually the agents had to locate other bathroom spots, everything from knocking on neighbors’ doors to using nearby businesses to relieve themselves, then finally renting a latrine in a basement for 3000 bucks a months.

I know what I would have done, fertilized the Kushner’s flower beds, but then, I’m not a patriotic civil servant with a career at stake, am I? But … I am a little weary of this kind of snobby royalty totally lacking in any sense of noblesse oblige. Just like their papa, the guy who took a tour with the Secret Service in their SUV after testing positive for Covid. I think it’s time to show these folks the back door and ask them to use it on the way out. And don’t come back.

A few days after the storming of the Bastille, King Donald has barricaded himself in the bunker of the White House, no doubt rabidly occupied with binge-watching his favorite news channels hoping to gauge the pulse of a nation that watched with incredulity the spectacle of a President encouraging his minions to march to the Capitol and stop the certification of Biden. Some dare call it treason, some merely sedition, and most call it criminal. Even his pandering former Attorney General, picked to be his personal lawyer in the Justice Department, called it outrageous and said it was time to Go.

Social media has banned his tweets and rantings. Members of his own party are considering invoking the 25th amendment, the one that removes an incapacitated president from office, Congress is eyeing impeachment once more, Cabinet loyalists are resigning while major corporations are withdrawing funding and support for the legislators who backed the move to block counting the electoral college votes. The worm has turned. With less than two weeks remaining in his term the Donald is a cornered animal, dangerous to everyone and to himself. What he might do, nobody knows including the Donald. Nasty business, politics.

Let’s be honest here and quit sugarcoating this. Trump is batshit crazy. His narcissistic balloon that’s the size of the Hindenburg dirigible is about to go up in flames. The man is a menace. The folks who toadied up to him are abandoning ship now. Apparently, even for the most loyal, a line has been crossed. Up ahead, even they can see the signpost that reads Welcome to the Twilight Zone. For the rest of us, well, we can sit smugly watching the unraveling of this Administration, say I told ya so, but we all know those yahoos that rallied behind the Trumpster and scaled the Capitol battlements are a sizeable percentage of our neighbors and friends.

They want to smash government. They don’t care how. If they can’t do it at the ballot box, by god, they’ll do it with clubs. Trump may be hauled away in a strait jacket, jabbering like an amphetamine monkey, but these folks will still be here to warn each other of the Lizard People and the phony Covid. They could care less about facts or logic, those are worthless to them. The fall of Trump will just be another warning sign. The Apocalypse is nigh, the End is near. Insanity is contagious.

Somewhere deep in the bowels of the White House a caged animal paces back and forth, channel changer in clenched hands, howling for attention, howling for his twitter, howling hour after long hour. Imagine a prisoner held without food or water. It’s nothing, NOTHING, like the torture of this miserable creature denied access to Twitter where his every keystroke is available to millions of his minions. Hell has no fury like a Trump without tweets, bet your sweet biddy on that, buddy.

I feel for the man, I really do. No Geneva Convention can help him, no First Amendment will give him access to those lost and locked platforms, no Human Rights Watch will intervene. If this isn’t an enhanced interrogation technique, I don’t know what is beyond 24/7 rap music piped into his cell, drowning out Fox and Friends no matter how loud he turns the volume up on his big screen TV. If this is not torture, what is?

Well, maybe what we endured for the past 4 years. But shouldn’t that give us an enhanced empathy for what he must be going through down in his personal dungeon. The man’s oxygen is attention. He lives for the headline, the latest outrage, the gasps of disbelief. When the time comes for an accounting at the Pearly Gates, all those lies, all those illegal activities, all those attempts to undermine the Constitution will come back to haunt him, but for now, are we to be his judge and jury, no sympathy, no quality of mercy? Couldn’t we maybe let him on some right wing app for a few minutes, something to give him balm in his darkest hour of need? Oh, I know what you’re thinking, he separated parents from their children down at the border, why not give him a taste of that kind of horrendous severance, the man from his social media?

And yet … aren’t we better than some Old Testament eye for an eye revenge, and yeah, I know, it’s one of his favorite passages in his favorite book, but c’mon, we shouldn’t let ourselves descend to that low a level. I know he thinks waterboarding was just fine and it would be easy to inflict the equivalent. But we’re evolved beings, not fighting dogs, not CIA rendition operatives. Although … I would wager a month’s salary he won’t make it to the Inauguration Day ceremony with anything like a semblance of sanity. Not that I’m proposing an office pool. Just sayng…

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