The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I hear folks say all the time how the country no longer makes anything, everything’s outsourced, manufactured in China, then imported. Course, they’re running up to Wal-Mart for all this cheap junk, save them a few bucks, half of it going back into gasoline on their SUV. Here on the self-sufficient South End, we still make stuff. Okay, mostly because we couldn’t afford to buy that stuff new. But partly because there’s still a vestige of pioneer pride. You make something yourself, you maybe understand how much work goes into it, you maybe understand the real worth of it, you maybe become a part of it and it becomes a part of you.

We got about 2 million artists down here who paint and sculpt and carve and you name it. They make stuff. That’s what art is. Creation. If they could sell it, they’d be ‘job creators’. Always that damn ‘if’. I admit, half of artistic inspiration is job avoidance, or, in my case, about 100% is. Workaphobia, almost a crippling malady. I’ve had friends, who fancy themselves psychotherapists, suggest that if I spent half as much time employed as I do avoiding work, I’d be rich. Course I explain that then I’d have to do taxes or hire an accountant, set up wills, keep records. I’m just a little too busy for that kind of complexity.

The thing is, see, if you do your own car repair, fix your own leaky pipes, dig your own garden, catch your own food, prune your own fruit trees, cook your dinners, play your own musical instrument, sing your own songs —- you don’t have time to work some silly crappy job. No way. You’d fall behind, the chores would gang up, the shack would rot, the whole she-bang would come undone, entropy would rule, chaos would ensue. Down here, you do not have the luxury of a job! What you got, as consolation, is making your own life yours. Not buying it on credit, piece by piece, from a factory filled with people paid next to nothing in a country that makes stuff for all of us who don’t have time to do it ourselves.

Day in and day out we watch this country lurching from one outrage to another, usually more than one or two a day. Mass shootings are common now, illegal deportations are too. If we had more time, I’d chronicle them, but you know what we’re talking about here. The list is long and the country is getting a firsthand look at how we can easily slide into despotism with only a whimper.

But there are countries that fight back. Hong Kong has been waging a furious battle against their Chinese overlords who initially promised, once the British turned over control, to honor their independence while still holding sovereignty. They were under no illusions so that when the edict came down that citizens could be deported to the Mainland for trials and prosecution, they understood implicitly what this meant, a thumb on their liberties. Unlike us freedom-loving Americans, they fought back. Maybe you remember Tiananmen Square. Tanks rolling over protesters, an insurrection ruthlessly put to a complete stop. You better believe Hong Kong remembered. But it didn’t faze them. They took the streets, the airport, the business district. They wore gas masks, hurled Molotov cocktails, took vicious beatings and came back for more.

Why? Because they knew this was the first step the Chinese would take to make them servile to the State. The rest would be pre-ordained. Even the United States, once that cheerleader for democracy, once the protector of civil rights, once that City on the Hill, stood mute. Wouldn’t want to spoil the chances for a trade war resolution by irritating the Chinese with our intervention. Their business, after all. Let Hong Kong fall behind the Iron Curtain, not our concern.

Today the Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam rescinded the extradition order. There would be no Tiananmen Square. But that was what it would have taken to stop the rioting and the Chinese apparently had no taste for a bloodbath in front of the entire world. Times change but tyranny still rears its ugly head.

We take our freedom for granted. We wave our little flags and go nearly crazy if someone suggests abrogating our 2nd amendment rights. We wear red baseball caps that say Make Us Great Again and we demonize anyone who dares kneel at our precious Star Spangled Banner as a protest against racial discrimination. We tell ourselves the press is the Enemy of the People, same as Hitler did, and Stalin, and Mao. Same as every despot who ever jackbooted down the highway. We can see the elections being rigged, minorities disenfranchised, income inequitably distributed. But we’d rather watch Wheel of Fortune and Fox News. We’re no Hong Kong. We’re more King Kong, hanging for one last breath off the Empire State Building, killed by our own people.

Hurrah for Hong Kong. You were courageous beyond belief. The world should take notice.

I didn’t hear about the Straight Pride march in time to attend. As a white guy, straight male, I’m like a lot of Trump supporters, angry as hell that I’m being persecuted for being white and male, straight and of European descent. Seems like these days the only people getting Medicaid and Food Stamps are anybody that isn’t me. It just ain’t right. It just ain’t fair. If anybody needs a break, it’s us Caucasian country club boys.

Sure, it may look to some that we’re the 1%, rich as Midas, getting all the tax breaks, but lemme tell ya a little secret: it’s lonely at the top. Look at Trump, how many hate the guy. And why? For being rich. And white. And male. Think how he feels, the most despised person in the world. The only folks who like him are, well, white, and male, and rich. Okay, even some of the poor like him. If they’re white and male and straight. And some of the women too, if you want to know the truth, if you can even handle the truth. If they’re white and evangelical.

Lately we’ve been inundated with everything from the #MeToo Movement to Black Lives Matter. The immigrants even want to point accusing fingers at us white guyz. And now the gays and the transgenders. They want to use my bathroom, for godsake. How am I spozed to take a piss with some character who might be half a woman watching from her stall? The Bible didn’t say God was created in her image, let me tell you straight up. Check it out for yourself, Trump’s favorite book. Mike Pence wouldn’t be caught dead with a straight woman much less one with what he has between his legs. Not that I’ve given a lot of thought to what the Vice President has between his legs … trust me on that too. Straight as an arrow, that’s me. Whiter than white. And persecuted for it!!

No, I missed the Straight Pride march. But I sure am glad my fellow Aryan brothers organized it. Let the losers call us Nazis, maybe it’s time to take a stand. We’re rapidly becoming the minority in America. It isn’t right. What’s the point of being the 1% if folks don’t fear us? If money can’t buy happiness, why do these people want to take it away from us?

Hurricane Dorian, packing winds over 200 mph and pushing a storm surge of up to 25 feet, is hammering the Bahamas right now. The Bahamas are almost all under 30 feet above sea level. Meaning, well, you get the picture. If you want to see what rising oceans mean for the future, this week will give us all a frightening sneak preview. The Trumpster was so concerned he canceled his trip to Poland, supposedly to take a hands-on approach to the incoming disaster, but actually to play 18 holes of golf. His handlers argued that he was paying close attention with advisors bringing frequent updates. Considering his warning that folks in Alabama should be prepared to evacuate, I’m guessing the updates came from his caddy.

What, him worry? Alfred E.’s got nothing on the Golfer-in-Chief, that’s for certain. But it is, after all, Labor Day and I’m sure you’ll agree that even the hard-working President of the Yew Ess Aye deserves a vacation. Trade wars are easy, he tells us, but c’mon, you and I know it’s actually hard. He just doesn’t want us worrying about him. Trump famously castigated Obama for taking time off from his job to play a few rounds of golf, but that was then, this is now and the job is harder, maybe the hardest it’s ever been in history. Why the man has played 229 days of golf in his first two and a half years on the job. GolfNewsNet, a must-read site for those who want to stay abreast of our duffing prez, states that he has played golf or spent time on his golf courses 22% of the time since being elected.

This, of course, is how billionaires conduct bizness. Off the tee. It’s where the deals are brokered and if the man cheats a bit, welcome to the world of high stakes finance. And sure, it costs a bit to fly to these golf courses with a full entourage of secret service folks, but would you rather have a stressed-up Leader of the Free World? No, I didn’t think so. Let’s be honest, he wasn’t going to stop Hurricane Dorian anyway. Not unless it was going to make landfall at Mar-a-Lago. In which case he’s got his hand on the nuclear button. Lose Mar-a-Lago and where would the next G-7 summit be held?

So Rome burned while Nero fiddled, if we’re to believe our 8th grade history books. The emperor of the most powerful country the world had ever seen had supposedly gone mad and started the fire In Rome A.D. 64, then played his violin while the city burned. Nero, legendary in history for something he probably didn’t do…. Making Rome Great Again, by destroying it if necessary.

Ah, the good old days, back again. Our own Nero just went to the G-7 summit, skipped the climate hearings since he doesn’t believe in global warming, probably sat in his room, not with a fiddle, but a couple of TV sets tuned to Fox and Friends, fuming that the allies he’s repeatedly kicked aren’t interested in his tariff war with China.

Meanwhile … the Amazon rainforests are burning. Greenland’s glaciers are melting. The planet, this fragile little ball of crust surrounded by water, fueled by a molten core and held together with gravity that keeps the atmosphere glued to the surface, spins on its axis as it hurtles through the universe. Why worry? It’s done just fine up til now. You know, if you don’t count meteor strikes and super volcanos and ice ages.

There is something apocalyptic about viewing the Amazon smoldering from satellite images. We’re burning what we call the ‘lungs of the world’, the place we get over 20 % of our oxygen and where C02 is absorbed, the rainforest where more than half of the world’s estimated 10 million species of plants, animals and insects live. If this isn’t an existential threat, I guess there are no existential threats. Sure, why would the New Nero sit in on the climate discussions? The Brazilian equivalent to Trump has let these fires burn, even blamed his political opponents for setting them when the truth is the fires are started by illegal miners and farmers. Gold fever. Same as our fossil fuel industry. Money to be made. The future can take care of itself.

I don’t know and neither do you how much damage is being done while we tune our banjos and string up our fiddles. But to sit and watch the Amazon burning, my god, Nero looks like a choir boy. And to think, we put this madman in office.