The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Lately we’ve been playing a shell game called Vaccination, a sleight-of-hand magician’s trick of trying to figure out who, where, when our vaccine might be available. A few days ago after a tip from a friend it seemed as if we might get a shot over at our sister island, Whidbey, at some drug store in downtown Oak Harbor. We made a reservation, then got an email alert that residents here on the South End could go to a closer pharmacy in a county not ours because evidently our vaccines were going to help their county out. A few days later we got another email alert that our first reservation had moved back two weeks, the closer one seemed to drop us, but no matter, the first one moved the reservation we had just had put back two weeks moved forward a week. Okay….

Meanwhile friends were informing us that they had received their vaccinations at a local private health clinic only a few miles north from us, but when we tried to see if we might get an appointment, their website informed us their supply of vaccine had already been exhausted. Please stand by. Yesterday we got a notice from the first place we’d contacted, something to the effect that supplies were limited and running out but rest assured, we would keep our place in line.

If you aren’t confused yet, you will be soon. Unless you were one of those who somehow managed to navigate the labyrinth and find the moldy cheese at the middle of a berserk maze…. Now, I’m not one of those yahoos who blame the government for everything from my broken shoelace to my bad haircut, but I hafta say, this rollout for a vaccine that we have known was coming for months and, dare I mention, seems INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT to our national health, our economy and our futures, is a total mess. Apparently in this sovereign state of mine the critical information is relayed primarily by rumor and Facebook, which, to me, are essentially the same thing.

It’s a sign of the times, I guess, that information now is funneled through the lens of YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and now the right wing megaphones, monetized and uncorroborated, faith based social media. Sure, why not? We don’t trust government any longer. We don’t trust the news media. We wouldn’t believe in God herself is She came down with golden tablets to give us the facts.

But if the government wanted to use a social media platform to disseminate critical information, why not use the Skeeter Daddle Diaries blogsite? Good as any, better than some. If you don’t happen to be one of the readers of my fast breaking news blog, then I guess you won’t get your vaccination. Doesn’t seem fair, you say. Maybe if you’re lucky, one of the readers will email or call you to let you in on the latest developments where to get your Covid shot. Welcome to America, dude. And good luck. You’ll need it.

The soon-to-be-dedicated Trump Library is nearing completion in a decommissioned underground parking complex in downtown Scottsboro, Arizona, once a subterranean multi-level car station for upscale shopping before burst pipes in the upper areas turned the lower levels into virtual cesspools. Drained and rehabbed in gold tile over concrete, the Trump Library boasts more than adequate parking spaces for the throngs expected to attend the grand opening this summer.

Despite the fact that the notoriously unread and possibly illiterate President left few if any written documents, the Library will have a plethora of computer stations with a compendium of presidential tweets in easy access. Of even greater interest to future historians and the general public, video downloads will replay most of the rally speeches Mr. Trump made between his many golf outings on jumbotron screens at the end of each parking level so that visitors can enjoy even in their vehicles without necessitating entry to the computer stations on Level 7.

While other presidents’ libraries house letters, memos, emails and various other written documents, the Trump Library will have few if any of those since the President, on advice from counsel, rarely allowed possible evidentiary content to be kept despite legal requirements to do so. According to Jonathon Trubsky, head librarian, this lack of documentation provides researchers with a much simplified and preferred avenue into the thinking and rationale of the Trump Administration. “Mr. Trump was a man of impulse and instinct,” Trubsky wrote in an introductory press release for the grand opening. “He had a photographic memory, apparently, and eschewed written materials. As he told the public many times, he had a very big brain. Ironically, that very big brain meant that his library would be a very little library, something the staff appreciates greatly.”

The Grand Opening is scheduled for June 15, 2021.

Okay, let’s see a show of hands. Who thinks, like Donald J. Trump does, that he’s the greatest president in our nation’s history? C’mon, now, don’t be shy, we can’t see your faces, much less your hands. Who thinks Mt. Rushmore should have another face carved into the mountain even if we have to erase one of the other, lesser, presidents to get Donald’s face up there? Really? Nobody?

All right, put your hands up if you think the Trumpster was the worst president in American history. I got mine up, just so you know I’m not hiding my biases. And I’m smiling this morning after watching him board the helicopter and then Air Force One before jetting off to nurse his wounds and cheat at golf in Mar-a-Lago. It feels like a weight lifted off finally after four long years and maybe we can breathe easy again. Okay, okay, you can put your hands down now, both of them. Later we’ll tabulate the votes and get back to you with the results. Course, as you know, half the country will assume this poll was rigged. Probably by the Lizard People.

It’s been awhile since my high school history classes. It’s even been awhile since I taught history in 8th grade. Most of the presidents get pretty short shrift in those textbooks. I mean, how much do you know about Millard Fillmore? Not much, I’m betting, maybe not a bad prez, mostly just forgettable. Herbert Hoover left us with the Great Depression, but I’m not sure we can blame the guy for that. Not totally, anyway. Gerald Ford I do remember. Although, really, I can’t remember much, not that that makes him a bad president, just the poor guy who filled in when Nixon resigned instead of being impeached. William Henry Harrison was president about one month before dying of typhoid or pneumonia or god only knows what. Can’t really say he was the worst, just the shortest, which, considering who just left office, I’d say might have been a small blessing.

You go down a list of Presidents, you probably couldn’t rate them high or low or in the middle. Lincoln we like, Jefferson too, Andy Jackson some like but he wasn’t one of my favorites, sort of a proto-Trump, a raging racist, a bully, a man who didn’t care much for the rule of law if the rules got in his way. Which they did.

But Donald J. Trump. History will not be kind. Impeached twice, the king of emoluments, nepotist-in-chief, dog whistler, bully with or without the pulpit, liar extraordinaire, anti-media, a demagogue of a sort I don’t think we’ve seen prior and hopefully won’t see again. In the final days of his four year reign he pardoned cronies and crooks, refused to concede a democratic election and finally called for his faithful to storm the Capitol where a pitched battle ensued that resulted in people killed but not, as per the plans of some who breached the building, to take Senators and Representatives hostage, possibly even assassinate them. Oh, and did I mention the 400,000 dead from the virus he did virtually nothing to stop from wreaking havoc on his minions?

Does all this make him the worst president in our two and a half century history? I think we all know the answer. And no, it’s not the Lizard King.

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.