The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

You got to love the Republican Party, the one they themselves like to refer to as the Party of Lincoln, the Grand Old Party. Old, for sure; grand, not so much … unless you mean grandfather. Lincoln? Lincoln would roll over in his grave. The last black guy in the House of Reps just announced he won’t run next term. You could almost hear the applause from out here on the West Coast. Time for the token black to hit the road, return the club to an all white country club set once again. Making America Great Again, yah shure, you betcha.

Me, I’m old and I’m a white guy. Angry too a lot of the time. But I don’t think returning to pre-Civil Rights is going to make this country great again. I guess it’s only a matter of time before the dogwhistles become Jim Crow attacks. Racism never really went away, forget Obama being elected. It’s part of our national DNA and slavery is part of our history, shameful and inexcusable, I don’t care what the cultural norms were for the times. Send em back!? What, in slave ships?

I’m not sure where I stand on reparations, but I’m pretty sure where I stand on racism in this country. And I’m very sure what I think of this President’s pivot toward racial insults, dogwhistles and a nod to the so-called ‘Base’ who wouldn’t recognize a racist if he had a noose in his hand for the next lynching. The Confederacy never really died and slavery didn’t exactly end. You don’t think so, go down to rural Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, check out the indentured servitude still there, ask around about the local KKK, see who runs the county, the city, maybe the entire state. Tell me then who owns who.

The Republicans who enable this, the white boyz who avert their eyes and quiet their disagreement over every tweet and bully baiting, welcome to the time when the Reichstag let the Jews be stigmatized, then singled out, then gassed. Blame Hitler, sure, but the others stood silent, afraid of losing office or power, but never afraid of losing their morality, eventually their souls. No, I don’t think Donald plans to set up camps. I don’t even think he plans to send em back. He just wants to win another four years of narcissistic spotlight, and if playing the race card works, Mr. T will stoop to conquer.

Naw, guns don’t kill people, insanity and hatred kills people. Or in the words of one Ohio state representative, trans and gays were the real culprits in this weekend’s mayhem and mass murder. One Congressman claimed it was video games. Another pointed the finger at drag queens and marijuana. Former Arkansas Governor and Fox Gadfly Mike Huckabee says it’s a lack of thoughts and prayers. Me, I’m gonna go out on a long limb here, call me crazy, call me gay, call me an atheist, dress me in women’s clothes, and say it was guns. Yup, I think it was guns.

I grew up with Roy Rogers, cowboys and Indians, shoot-em-ups, all those wild west westerns where a 6 shooter kept the crooks from taking over everything but Boot Hill. I’ve owned guns, still do. I’ve hunted squirrels and rabbits and deer until I got in touch with my touchy-feely side and couldn’t do it anymore. I still kill crab but I don’t need a gun to do it. Touchy-feeliness only goes so far and I draw the line on Dungeness.

And trust me, I don’t have the solution to gun violence in America. There are more guns than people and there are people who like their guns better than they like other people. I just don’t think they ought to use their guns on the folks they don’t like. But now we got assault rifles, military weapons, more firepower than the police. We got folks like my bipolar buddy, Fast Freddy, who flew back to his home state on his last visit to buy a titanium .44 pistol and an AR-15 assault rifle. He was more manic than an amphetamine monkey but the gun shop sold him both. Something wrong with that picture if you’d seen Freddy at the height of his departure from lithium. Only picked up 32 times by the local police on his long trek out to our place. They knew he was off his rocker, I bet the gun store clerk did too.

Happiness may be a warm gun to some, but there are plenty of families who would beg to differ. Suicides, spousal killings, mass murders, accidental shootings. Gee, you think we should do something about this?

Let me assume for a South End minute that we actually do have the right to bear arms. I can’t keep a rocket launcher. I’m not supposed to have an automatic weapon. So is it such a far reach that we could outlaw — I know, I know, only the outlaws — assault rifles and military weapons? Maybe put some restrictions on dum-dum and armor-piercing ammo? The answer, if you’re not an NRA true believer, is fundamentally yes. Nobody’s taking ALL your damn guns, Bubba. Keep more than one by all means.

But sometime, somewhere in this fairy land we call America, we have to face the fact that blood is in the streets, in a community near yours, and people are dying, families are devastated, the carnage is real. And here’s some news for my Republican apologists. It ain’t the trans, it isn’t the gays, it isn’t violent video games, it isn’t insanity and hatred pulling that trigger. And no, Mike, it’s not a paucity of prayers. It’s guns. Wake up and smell the cordite.

The rigor mortis tortoise, I heard someone call Moscow Mitch the other day. I’m not really a fan of 3rd grade name calling, but I gotta say, what’s good for the goose is certainly good for the gander. Back when Obama got word from Comey and the Deep Staters in the FBI, he came to Mitch to see if they could, in a bipartisan way, make the case to the American Public that our election was under assault by the Kremlin. Mitch, always a good patriot, said hell no, he’d play any move by Obama to warn the states that their voting booths were potentially being compromised, as a favor to Hillary and the Democrats. This, from the guy who refused to bring Obama’s Supreme Court nominee to the Senate floor. Patriotism? You be the judge.

Now it’s turnabout and I say fair play. Bill after bill to protect voting credibility get shot down by Moscow Mitch. Mueller’s only sign of life at the last hearing was an animated pronouncement that the Russians and probably other state actors were still attempting to manipulate our votes here in the Yew Ess Aye. This from the guy who only said yes, no, could you repeat the question or that’s in the report. He made it clear the electoral process was Under Siege. Everyone in that committee room wanted to cry out He’s Alive! Everyone in D.C., maybe, except McConnell.

Now, to be totally fair, I don’t think Mitch is a Russian asset. I think he’s a guy who would do anything to stay in power and to exert that power and if anything got in his way, God help them. He will violate the Constitution, he will say and do anything no matter how hypocritical, he will sacrifice the good of the country for himself and his party. Does that make him a Russian asset? No, but the Russians must love him anyway.

And the Republicans must too. But … let’s be clear here, the tide will turn and some election in the future, the Republicans will be at the wrong end of the barrel. Nobody wins Russian Roulette, not if they play long enough. Except maybe the Russians….

This past weekend I drove upriver into the foothills east of Bellingham to visit my old friend from the Seattle days when we were both young and drove bus to the same elementary school. She and her biker beau had built a cabin on the Nooksack and I had even helped put up the roof. Funny how we both ended up living in shacks far off the beaten path, but then again, probably why we were friends in the first place.

Melinda lived in my ghetto house for a few months, about the time I hit the road for the island but before the house was sold. She came with her golden lab and I left with Dr. Gonzo, the fiercest dog I ever met and the beast that kept our larcenous neighbors from acting on their urges in regard to breaking and entering the two years or so I lived there. I didn’t bother locking doors back then, not with Gonzo on the inside.

But we left and Melinda stayed. She was mid-bath one afternoon when she heard a crash down below the upstairs bathroom and heard voices yelling at her lab which had started barking wildly. So she grabbed a bathrobe and scooted downstairs and out the front door while the intruders were helping themselves in the back to whatever they could find, not much in that house, trust me. Her plan was to barefoot it over to the hospital catty-corner, find a phone and call the police.

Which is exactly what she did. But when she headed back outside, a nurse asked her where she thought she was going. Home, Melinda told her. And the nurse, shaking her head, called a couple of orderlies to prevent that from happening. You aren’t going anywhere, she told Melinda, except back to your room. Now, what Melinda didn’t realize in her haste to get to a phone, was she’d flown into the cuckoo’s nest, the psych unit of Providence Hospital and there was no way the good custodians of the mentally ill were going to allow her to just waltz out of there barefoot in her bathrobe.

She tried explaining there was a robbery underway back at her house across the street, she told them how two intruders had hurled a potted plant at her dog on the stairs, she even mentioned she had been in the tub, why she was dressed in a bathrobe and no shoes. But these folks had heard it all before, they weren’t falling for that old line. No, ma’am, you need to get back to your room. Probably need an extra couple of sedatives.

Well, in the end Melinda finally convinced them she wasn’t totally crazy — and if you knew Melinda, you’d know how hard that would be — and by the time she got herself released from the mental ward the police were at the house and the thieves were long gone. Nothing much was stolen, not too much damage done, her dog was okay and the only thing hurt was maybe her pride. I brought the ferocious Dr. Gonzo back down to prevent repeat psych ward incarcerations and shortly after got the house sold. You ever wonder why I left the city, and Melinda too, maybe that was exactly why….