The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

KINK, the 500 watt AM radio for the South End, recently received its FCC certification to broadcast as a bona fide public radio station. The station manager, Rhonda Bodley, made a short introduction yesterday morning at 8 a.m., something to the effect that finally the South End had its own voice. Course, for the last two years, that voice was intermittent, coming as it did from pirate broadcasts. If you happened to turn your AM dial to 490, you would have thought the Dark Ages had come to a crashing conclusion, that the rock had rolled off our cave entrance and that finally we had joined civilization. Never mind that podcasting had rolled the rock back.
Wolfman Chuck volunteered to be KINK’s first DJ. Well, the first legitimate disc jockey, spinning platters of his favorite old stuff, Jefferson Airplane and B.B. King, Van Morrison and Bonnie Raitt, all the albums and 8 tracks he’d listened to stoned out of his head, at least any that were now out on CD’s. The first song to hit the South End airwaves was White Rabbit which he introduced as ‘our theme song’. “If you remember where you were when you first heard this,” he declared, “you didn’t hear it in the 60’s. Those memories were all … ERASED!” Wolfman would laugh his psycho laugh, usually ending in a coughing jag interrupted by another song.
Wolfman’s program is called Radio Free South End. “Where the truth comes to die.” Wolfman likes to announce it as four hours of Not-So-Easy-Listening, which is true, not so much for the music format as Chuck himself. He tends to ramble between songs, reminisces about the Golden Age of the sixties, extols acid rock and waxes nostalgic over everything from the Peace Movement to Timothy Leary, all in a sleepy stoner baritone punctuated by embarrassingly long pauses. He screws up the song credits, mangles syntax and punches wrong buttons for station ID when he meant to hit a public service announcement.
But … as Wolfman likes to tell us every few hours, “They pay me exactly what I’m worth. Nada. Zilch. Zip and zero. Speakin of which, this next tune is a million dollar winner … Cripple Creek with our own South End String Band!”
Like the man sez: not so easy listening.

Those were some good times in the plantation mansions of Dixie before the War ruined everything. Manners, gentility, mint juleps, ballgowns flowing, pickaninnies cavorting, cotton harvested, banjos playing with cicadas thrumming accompaniment and happy Negroes dancing. What’s not to love? What’s not to feel nostalgia for? Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben in the summer kitchen, preparing dinners for Massa, I know it makes my pea pickin heart yearn for the antebellum paradise lost after those Yankee invaders burned Atlanta and most of the rest of the Deep South.

And now they want to take down the statues of fallen heroes, ban the movie with Vivian and Clark, purge the sweet potato memories of good old boys from Georgia to Virginny. Oh, the horror, the horror! They even want to remove that last vestige of the Confederacy from the flag of the great state of Mississippi! Is there no shame, you carpetbaggers, you Union jackals, is there no limit to the perfidy of you and these protesters and their pals?

You never really surrendered, did you? You never gave up the dream of owning other people, maybe not outright, but as sharecroppers, indentured servants, minimum wage earners. You never believed those Africans were people like you were, just folks beneath you, beneath your bootheel. You didn’t believe they should be emancipated much less given the right to vote. You don’t want your kids going to school with their kids, you don’t want them living in your suburb, you don’t really want them living in your country. When one of them, a half black man, was elected President of your conquerors’ United States, you didn’t accept that any more than you accepted Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. You still believe in the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation, the Posse Comitatus. If the police kill an unarmed black man, no big deal, just cops protecting your property rights, right? Black Lives Matter? You don’t think so, you never did.

So now the country is finally waking up to you, finally staring at the redneck face of racism. Hell if I know where they’ve been, watching too much TV maybe, binging on internet, too busy to notice that you never really gave up, just kept suppressing votes, kept fighting against segregation and civil rights, kept going to your pretty steepled churches. But they seem to be paying attention now and they want your statues taken down, your flags relegated to the moths, your Jim Crow sent packing. And oh my, how you wail, how you cry. Well, frankly, my dears, we don’t give a damn.

“The president does read,” (Press Secretary)McEnany responded. “And he also consumes intelligence verbally. This president, I’ll tell you, is the most informed person on planet earth when it comes to the threats that we face.”

Earth to Kayleigh, Earth to Kayleigh, please check your GPS, you have the wrong planet. I live on planet Earth. I was born on planet Earth. And you, obviously, have never visited planet Earth. What celestial body you are talking about, the one where Donald Trump is literate, the one where he receives intelligence reports and is more informed about threats to his minions, may not even exist in this solar system, possibly not even this galaxy? If you mean the planet Trump Tower, okay, that we might believe. Smarter than Jared and Ivanka, Don Jr., that other mouth-breathing kid of his, sure… Probably not the doorman, though.

We all watch these press conferences, whether it’s Kayleigh or Mike the Veep, and the embarrassment factor is off the charts. Reporters develop skin rashes just being in that kind of proximity to idiocy. The most informed person on the planet? Seriously? The man who won’t wear a plague mask? The guy who can’t read an intel briefing report, the goof who prefers Fox and Friends to Cabinet meetings, the dope who thinks the coronavirus can be eliminated with ingested hand sanitizer and ultraviolet probes? C’mon, Ms. McNinny, this is one of the most clueless, ignorant, narcissistic chuckleheads from here to Alpha Centuri. It isn’t that the Emperor is missing his clothes, it’s that he’s missing a brain that functions. Even his admirers are catching on to the ruse lately.

We don’t necessarily need Einstein as President, Kayleigh. But we need someone who can listen, read, process information, gather advice, analyze, reflect, then make a decision based on, oh, more than what he feels in his gut. Decisions based on Big Macs and fries? Not gonna cut it. All those adults in the room are gone now, fired or quit. The Daycare only has tots in cribs now. The man is impervious to facts, reason, clear thinking, intelligence reports and just about anything approaching rationality. He orbits the gravitational field of Fox, listens to the advice of Sean Hannity over his generals or his advisors or his Cabinet. He left the atmosphere of Planet Earth long long ago. And pretty obviously he’s not planning to return. Godspeed Donald Trump, please go where no man has gone before….

Two Toke Tom asked me the other day why in holy hell do I write these stories. “Live in the moment, Skeeter,” he advised. “Let the past be the past.” Two Toke is a disciple of Be Here Now, living in the Eternal Moment. I could make the argument — and I do — that I’m just allowing the Past to live alongside the Present, but T.T. isn’t buying. To him, the past isn’t prologue, it’s just prolonged, at least by guyz like me.

He’s got a point, but I long ago stopped looking for Enlightenment. The world is a mystery to me and so be it. I guess I have a fondness, though, for what came before. I keep my old shack, I preserve my old stories. I figure nobody much cares, but history means something to me. The newcomers to the South End see the mizzus and me now as Old Timers, anachronistic pioneers on an island where the pioneers vanished long ago. Who cares who lived in the old Nesje house? Who cares if the little building south of us was the Bucklin Store? Who gives a damn if Bernie Road was named after Bernie Dallman and Dallman Road was too. The man is dead and gone and so what if his kinfolks are still here? It’s not like he was a famous war hero. Just a name on some roadsigns to the newcomers.

But there are ghosts among us. There are, I tell Two Toke after the 3rd or 4th, ripples in the continuum. Toss a stone in the pond and it eventually comes back. Tom smiles his Cheshire Cat smile and chuckles from across his kitchen table. We go back a long ways, Tom and me. We go back to when we both first came to the South End, two drifters looking for a future. I guess Tom found the present … and me, I found that too. Time is the great Trickster is what I think, but Tom and I both found what we were looking for, we just took different paths to getting there.

Two Toke says, late in another evening, “I do read your stories, man.”

I give him MY Cheshire grin. “I know you do, Tom. I write em for you. So you won’t forget.”

Tom’s eyes twinkle, they’ve grown so moist, and the light from them is like stars light years away, no telling how long ago, just a sparkle that arrives right now. “You’re a crackup,” he says in a voice I’ve heard before, a voice not so very far away.

The Vice President came out yesterday for a national update from his Covid Crisis Center, the one his president used to give every day until the blowback got too wild for his hairspray to handle so he just declared the war on coronavirus a victory, told us to go back to work, go to church, go celebrate in a bar, fuggetabout wearing a plague mask. We did. Well, Republican states did. Course they’re now in full backtrack, their contagion statistics approaching total panic, 9000 yesterday in Florida, 16,000 the past three days in Texas, 40,000 sea to shining sea, hospital units approaching overload. Trump sat this update out, let his #2 come out to give faint praise.

I’m all for sunny optimism. Give a pep talk to the troops, offer hope, offer prayers, offer stimulus money, all fine and candy. But sunny optimism when you’re standing in a rainstorm that’s about to become a flood? Ignorance is bliss to some, but when I see all these folks down at the grocery store declaring their freedom, their god-given independence, by refusing to wear a mask because their fearless leader won’t wear one, it makes me wonder what brand kool-aid or light beer I need to avoid. Like the plague. Pence commended his boss multiple times. Things would have been so much worse without his valiant leadership. The sadness of watching a moron praise an even bigger moron is beyond words.

The kids are testing positive for the virus and the kids don’t die as easily as us old coots. That, said the perpetually smiling Mr. Pence, was real progress. Forget about these youngsters spreading it far and wide. Forget that the deaths in the Land of the Slave, Home of the Screed are the highest in the world. By far. Forget that the simplest of preventions, wearing a mask and avoiding close contact, would make all the difference in the world but these yahoos ignore scientific evidence and hope that shutting their eyes and saying I Wish It Were would restore a free-falling economy back to pre-pandemic levels. Stupid is as stupid does.

They tell me an election is at hand. A referendum on leadership. Now that our President has defeated the virus, he has turned to themes of Law and Order, Illegal Immigration, Voter Fraud, all those divisive tactics that landed him in the White House in the first place. Folks were so tired of government, or what they were told was government incompetence or government conspiracy, they rolled the dice on a huckster who said he would drain the swamp, little knowing he would just fill his swimming pool. It’s raining in America and this guy has made sure the government is hampered and constrained. No umbrellas for you! He wants ratings. He wants you to love him. He wants all those without doing one damn thing for you. Asked what his agenda would be for a second term, he doesn’t have a single item on a non-existent list.

What he said was ‘experience’ is an important word, a very important word. Almost as important as ‘talent’. Both very important, maybe impossible to tell which is more important. He sure couldn’t. And he sure couldn’t tell you why he wanted a second term. Here’s a word, a very important word he does understand, maybe more understanding than you can believe. FIRED. This apprenticeship was a bust. Go home, loser.