The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Back in the dark days of a dying print journalism, the Shipley editorial team embarked on what, to most tired and cynical newspaper people, was a foolhardy, quixotic enterprise: to publish local news and local events and local yokels … and to pay for it all, not just with their meager savings and their kids’ college fund, but the Old Fashioned Way. With Advertising. The Walter Cronkites of the Stillaguamish Valley said Don’t Do It! Print has gone the way of the dinosaurs and the House of Representatives’ urge to compromise. Better just to blog. Better yet, get a real job!!! But don’t bankrupt yourselves.

Two years BEFORE Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for a quarter of a trillion dollars, Crab Cracker was launched, corny as it sounds, on a shoestring and a prayer. And now, many laces later, the gods of Gutenberg have spoken from On High and the little Cracker has crabwalked with claws clacking wildly into its 10th year. The Cracker, like the Big Lebowski, abides … while a flailing print medium dogpaddles in the turbulent waters of a digital ocean in expectation of being swallowed lock stock and crackerbarrel. I like to think their success is due to the savvy linkage of their Calendar of Events with local artworks, local poetry, local music and of course, top notch local literature. So okay, literature with a small ‘L’, maybe. All right, they did okay DESPITE these words of marginal wit and not much wisdom. Geez, whaddaya want? A refund?

No doubt the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, Le Monde, London’s Daily Telegraph and the Stanwoodopolis Gazette will rush to emulate the Cracker’s example of journalistic freedom and economic viability. Amazon and Bezos’ competitors at Google will no doubt make multi-million dollar offers, Facebook may put the ‘book’ back in for truthfulness, Yahoo may see the profit in using ACTUAL yahoos and the Cracker may someday succumb to the sweet courtship of corporate dating. But I suspect not. The Cracker is here to stay, a constant beacon of current fishing reports, local gossip, tide tables, upcoming auctions and concerts and events, interviews with new artists and the old farts too, all of it eminently suitable for late night reading and stove kindling later and fishwrap now, something digital and video journalism will never, not in a million megabytes, be capable of duplicating.

Philanthropy 101 might not have been on the list of classes at Trump University. But the man the university is named after has always declared he gave heavily to his favorite charities. Trouble was, at least according to the court settlement that found him and his bogus tax exempt foundation, his favorite charity was — I know you’ll be surprised — Donald J. Trump. But what was surprising was that in the end, he admitted guilt and agreed to pay the 2 million dollar fine. You might think this is a slap on the wrist to a man who’s a self-reporting billionaire, but then, you don’t know how much money means to Donald. He didn’t run for President out of civic duty, mister.

It’s comforting to know that the Leader of the Free World is really Scrooge. A man so divested of philanthropic impulse that the idea of giving to the poor or the needy or the downtrodden is completely outside the perimeter of his fiduciary calculus. He might as well toss money out the window of Air Force One. If the guy had any moral compass at all, which he does not, it would be Make More Money for Me. But let’s be fair, plenty of folks walk the streets of America with only a cash register for a brain. It’s just that they usually don’t see the Highest Office in the Land as a cash cow.

And they aren’t so shameless in their greed that they can’t imagine camouflaging it a bit. Or waiting to leave office to reap the rewards. Course, that was then, this is Trump Time. Emoluments shmoluments. No penny is too dull to leave on the sidewalk of potential profit. The old saying, Follow the Money, pretty much maps out presidential policies. The guy is even talking to executives about a sequel to the Apprentice … and the White House. You might think he’d be consumed with China trade deals, impeachment perils, Syrian fallout, North Korea, Iranian nuclear proliferation, stuff other Presidents considered priorities. But not Donald. He’s working on his favorite charity. Even got his kids on the board and on board.

Jared, for instance. Ever wonder why he’s the Go-To Guy in the Middle East? Follow the money. He needs financing for his New York high rises so underwater they could be the next Sea World. First folks Trump met in the Oval Office were the Saudis. They’re diversifying.

The bizness of America is bizness. You know that, I know that, the lady with the alligator purse knows that. But even Rockefeller, even Carnegie, even Gates know that philanthropy is good for business too. We even give them a tax break for charitable contributions. Easier than taxing them more heavily, just one more example of trickle down voo-doo economics. Donald Trump sees that as one more example of a sucker’s game. Better to give to yourself. Give until it hurts.

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I was cruising through the South End Pawn Shop the other day, scratching for musical gear the kids bought new and then had to sell to Jesse, the owner, for pennies on their dollar. The days of finding a vintage Gibson Mastertone pre-war banjo are so far back in the rearview, even the memory looks like week old roadkill, thanks to the internet and Antiques Roadshow. Takes about ten seconds to determine anything’s value. Jesse’s prices, though, are wildly inflated, but if you’re a good haggler, he’ll come down a long ways.

Me, I’m the kind who hates to go around on prices. Just put it on the tag and I’ll take it or leave it. In the course of my lifetime I’ll probably pay twice what everyone else does. But for peace of mind — and the lowering of blood pressures — I don’t care.

“How’s biz?” I asked Jesse who was perched predatorially on a stool behind a glass case. He looked like a hawk on a telephone line. Patiently waiting for the next mouse. “Couldn’t be better,” he smirked. I shrugged and he went on about the boyz hurrying in to sell their guns ‘before the Democrats takes em away’ and the boyz who wanted to buy guns ‘before the socialists outlaws em.’ “I shoulda voted Democrat. These guys are making me rich!”

I never really paid much attention to Jesse’s arsenal before, but I said show me what you got. He asked what I was looking for, pistol, semi-automatic, shotgun over and under, military assault rifle ….. “Whoa,” I said, “Jesse, I’m just an innocent bystander. Doing some research …”

Half an hour later I’m casually acquainted with enough armaments to take the City of Stanwood, just me and a few NRA pals. If Jesse has 200 firearms — and apparently my neighbors are stockpiling what he’s selling — the idea of disarming my het-up citizen friends seems more than a bit quixotic. They’re apparently a gun-totin, pistol packin, shoot from the hip pack of yahoos and by god, good luck talking down the barrel of a Smith and Wesson. You can probably tell a South Ender easy enough by his gun collection, but you sure can’t tell him much.

I walked out of Jesse’s with a big used tube amp for my electric guitar. Jesse said it was brought in by a kid from a heavy metal band who was dead broke. “Dems’ll probably ban these too before long,” he said as I lugged it to my truck. “Dial it up full volume, it’s potentially lethal.”

Right, it could kill my marriage, if nothing else.

Maybe I’ve mentioned this before, maybe even a hundred times, but I have a 96 year old father who forwards me the emails he gets from his buddies, most of them probably nearly as old as he is, what we’ll generalize and call ‘angry white males’. Yesterday I got one that headlined Who the Hell is This? which was mostly a recounting of every misinformation ever written about Obama, his wife, his daughters and whether or not they were really Americans, really lawyers, ever went to the colleges they claimed to have attended, even if they had proof of their birth certificates. Including the kids.

I used to send him fact checks on the stuff he forwards, but my suspicion is he never really reads the replies. Nevertheless, I figured he sends me these screeds to see what my response will be, which in the past was sometimes fairly wild. But the old man is going on 97 and the last thing he needs is vitriol coming back at him from his oldest son. My brother gets the same emails and just hits Delete. Probably the smart response.

Today he asked me if I’d read that email he sent regarding the Obamas and what did I think. I said I think it’s old news, Dad, the guy is long gone. ‘Yeah, but pretty interesting, wasn’t it?’ he commented and I realized he believes these crazy conspiracy theories. ‘No,’ I said, ‘they’re not interesting, they’re bullshit, Dad. I don’t have time to go through 20 goofy accusations but half of them, when Obama was President, I sent you fact checks that showed these were phony baloney.’

‘Okay,’ he said, ‘but the other half sounds kind of right.’

My old man has very short term memory, the emphasis on very. Even if I spent hours fact checking and sending him the results, what would be the point? Next email he gets, we can start all over again. What I think is that most people have short term memory, mostly self-induced. They believe, like Dad does, why would anyone send this stuff out if it wasn’t true. And anyway, it sounds true so isn’t that close enough?

Donald Trump questioned Obama’s birth certificate and now he’s been elected, at least once, maybe eventually twice, by folks who believe what he tells them when obviously he isn’t telling the truth, isn’t factual, isn’t honest about much of anything. I wish it was as easy as fact checking, just send them a memo with a Snopes attachment saying FALSE. Between you and me, I can hardly wait to hit 96.

The mizzus just bought herself one of those gizmos that keep track of how many steps she takes. Our friends kept shining around with theirs, forever mumbling about 6500 already or need to make 2000 more, about as interesting to a guy like me as it was when she got interested in computers back in the Dark Ages and the first ones got semi-affordable. Not enough beer in the entire world to make those conversations interesting to the guy who swore he wouldn’t own one until it could talk to him, steer him through its intricacies and pat him on the back when it had taught him some new program. Course, instead of getting simpler, they got way more complex and I realized if I waited much longer I might as well reconcile myself to the life of a caveman living in the Bronze Age. Ugga bugga meets the Flintstones. Yabba dabba do!

This fitbit contraption straps on her wrist and needs to be worn all day if you want an accurate count. Don’t ask me who came up with 10,000 steps, no doubt the result of extensive studies and only coincidental it happens to be a nice round number. The average joe has a stride between two, two and a half feet, so 10,000 steps comes to, oh, 5 miles, give or take. Doesn’t matter to the fitbit if you walk all of it at once, maybe get some aerobic benefit, or just waddle out to the kitchen for another snack. You just need to hit 10,000 of em.

Now, I don’t want to be too dismissive of this technological wonder. If it gets folks off their tush and makes them feel guilty when they only get to 8000 steps that day, I guess that’s progress. Gotta be better than looking at a computer screen or a TV all the livelong day. And it’s not like the thing starts to administer shocks in increasingly painful feedback when you fall short of the 10K goal. Although I suspect the next generation Apple version will have that app built in. For your own good, you understand. Impose a little discipline to the lax.

And I expect my health insurer will want those records before another year goes by. Average 8500, premiums go sky high. And you thought smoking was problematic for those folks. Why not? The lazy bastards who refuse to keep themselves in tip top shape ought to pay more than us fitbitters, don’t you agree? Stick a GPS on that device with a built in transponder, the data goes to the HMO in real time, 24/7, save you the trouble of emailing. After all, could add a few steps to your day with those kind of savings….