The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

“How do you impeach a president who has won perhaps the greatest election of all time, done nothing wrong (no Collusion with Russia, it was the Dems that Colluded), had the most successful first two years of any president, and is the most popular Republican in party history 93%?” D. Trump tweet

It’s a brand new year, full to the brim with sound and fury, promising another 365 days of hyperbolic tweetstorms, narcissistic mirror gazing and the release of the Mueller findings. God help us if those findings reveal collusion and criminality. How could we possibly impugn, much less impeach, a man who has done so much for the country? Instead, we should begin prep work on Mt. Rushmore.

When in doubt, tweet. When in trouble, lie. When cornered … well, we’ll have to wait and see. But I suspect we won’t be waiting long. The man is a spoiled brat with a mean temper, accustomed to getting his way always, so when the wheels start coming off the limo, he’ll blame the chauffeur and bail out the back by the Trump Tower’s rear fire escape where he’ll live out his days in squawking exile as a pundit on Fox News. If he avoids prison. Which at this juncture is anybody’s guess. Good luck to Ivanka and Jared and the boys. Someone is going to have to pay for all this success. The only one coming out of this unscathed might be Melania. She won’t have to worry about losing her credit cards. Just another immigrant success story.

Let’s forget about politics for a nano-second. Not that the future with Donald J. Trump looks so bright you’d hafta wear shades …. But looming in the background beyond all that white noise of collusion and criminality something dark is rearing its monstrous head. You can sense it without actually seeing it, a kind of high pitched whirring drone buzz coming up faster than 5G, and when you glance in the rear-view mirror, the objects you can’t see yet are actually about to pass you, sucking you forward in a wind-draft of sudden acceleration.

The future is here and the speedometer is way over the speed limit of comprehension. Cyber-hacking, drone warfare, artificial intelligence, smart houses with smart appliances, self-driving cars and trucks, crypto currencies, blockchain technology, facial recognition, data tracking, government and corporate surveillance, tech monopolies, genetic engineering, fake news — the Silicon Valley boyz are bending the gravitational field, warping reality, moving us toward an unregulated future our politicians can’t comprehend and the rest of us can scarcely imagine.

This isn’t 1984, this is the Matrix. This is a world running on algorithms and multi-layered programs built by engineers and geeks without regard to implication or consequence. If you feel queasy coming into the New Year, it isn’t the punch. It’s the creeping suspicion that things to come are out of control, that the future isn’t just unpredictable, it’s downright scary. We live in science fiction now and the monsters are coming. The monsters are already among us.

We’re now interconnected, a global hive. The checkout woman at my grocery store was muttering how everyone is in too much of a hurry. Oh, ya think? We’ve been in a hurry for decades. This isn’t that. This is an amorphous unsettled angst, a barely audible shriek in broad daylight, something spinning out of our control. We dial up our devices, we hold back the boredom, we reprogram our reptile brains, we ignore what all this means. But deep down we’re scared. We think it’s the economy maybe, or politics, or the endless wars in the Middle East, or terrorists, or Trump, or the immigrants, or another in an interminable series of mass shootings. It isn’t. They’re distractions.

Binge watch Netflix and update Instagram, but outside that cocoon the world is morphing into something unstable, something gathering form, something menacing and dark. Something we’re creating. Don’t ask what, don’t open the door, don’t look out the window. But it doesn’t matter, it’s inside now, in your smartphone, in your gadgets, in the refrigerator, in the computer, in your head. If you think it’s too late … it is.

The immigrants are coming! The immigrants are coming! Build a Wall, take down the Statue of Liberty, man the battlements! The immigrants are coming! The melting pot is boiling over! The borders are being over-run! My hair is on fire! The End is Near!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

These are scary times in Fortress America. When under siege, what else can our Leader do but convince us they’re even scarier? Time to go to the bunkers, bolt the doors, shutter the windows, isolate isolate isolate. The bad people want IN, the immigrants are killers and rapists and drug addicts and carriers of disease, Melania excepted. They want to take your house, steal your educational system, abuse your social services. Bad. Very bad people. I see them every day mowing my neighbors’ lawns, building new houses down the road, probably plotting how to massacre us all. They’re biding their time, working for peanuts, scheming, always scheming.

One of my band members is half Ojibway. She was telling us the other day about a woman who was complaining bitterly about some Indians who had moved into her neighborhood and were bringing down her property values. “She wouldn’t shut up about it” Monika was saying, “just kept going on about those damn Indians invading her neighborhood. Finally she got so exasperated she threw up her hands and screamed ‘Why don’t they just go back to where they came from and leave us alone?’”

We forget where we came from, most of us. Unless you’re native American…. Once we’re inside, we want to build a fence and lock the gate. We were never Them and They should never be Us. Sure, we can turn a blind eye when we need cheap labor, but don’t come knocking for citizenship. We’re full up and the country club doesn’t need new members. The plaque on the Statue of Liberty was meant for us, not them. It was meant back then, not now. Why don’t these people go back where they came from?

Maybe you’ve gotten weary of the news stories about the government shutdown over building a Wall between our frightened citizens and the zombie apocalypse moving north out of the other Americas. Too much, too often, too damn hard to take. If so, the news that the Chinese had landed a spaceship on the back side of the moon must’ve been either heartening or a relief or possibly just the precursor to a lunar Wall to keep the Chinese on their side of the moon. And if that wasn’t interesting enough for the world weary, NASA’s New Horizon space probe photographed Ultima Thule, a ten mile long chunk of ancient something or other, while rocketing by at 35,000 mph, a feat of engineering I’m not even going to try to describe. This is a speck of matter a mere one billion miles beyond Pluto. Wrap yer mind around THAT instead of gnashing your teeth over Trump’s latest tweet.

There will be those, of course, who ask why we would spend our hard earned tax dollars on flinging a satellite out into the Kuiper belt. Can’t mine many minerals on Ultima Thule. Probably couldn’t sell condominiums out there or even build a Trump Tower. Doubt if you could grow tomatoes in that soil. I mean, what earthly good is this adventure? Oh sure, it gives a few engineers some employment, but what about taking care of poverty here on terra firma? We could’ve built a Wall between us and Mexico, plus one between us and those Canadians with the money NASA spent to shoot a sputnik past Pluto.

I get it. Folks probably said the same thing to Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand when they bankrolled Columbus. The English, the French and the Portuguese had all turned Christopher down before Spain threw the dice. Why send expensive ships out to the edge of a world where they’d slide right off the face of the earth? You kidding me? We got problems right here in River City, pal. Good money right down the vortex.

But … before you start another Tea Party Rebellion, let me say it has been a welcome diversion from our earthbound impasses to watch our government and the Chinese too engaged in a grand adventure beyond the limits of my own meager imagination. Heartening, is what it is, to cheer the success of a team of dedicated scientists and engineers. Far greater, in my mind, than cheering for a football team or an American Idol finalist. This is what government is capable of, you ask me, daring to boldly go where no one has gone before. Frankly, given the state of our politics these dark days, I can use all the inspiration I can get.