The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The Prez has just nominated the guy who worked with Ken Starr’s investigation of Clinton’s Whitewater accusations to be the next Supreme Court justice. No, they couldn’t find any evidence of that, but they did find the stain on the blue dress and the House impeached him for lying about it. High crimes and treason back then.

Not so much now. The Cohen tapes are coming out now, conversations about hush money for a year-long affair with a Playboy model right after Donald’s wife gave birth to their son. The evangelicals apparently don’t mind this kind of infidelity and the Congress doesn’t mind the lies or the breaking of campaign finance laws. What was good for the Clinton goose doesn’t cut it with the Trump gander. What matters is preserving the Party. Respect for the law, respect for Biblical tenets? Just lip service. If you find fault with the Donald, his true believers will make you pay at the polls next time around. This is the quandary the Grand Old Party finds itself in for electing a boy-man without ethics or common sense. For a time, we might have gloated, but now he’s the madman in the middle of the room and the majority in Congress are frightened to death.

We should all be.

A buddy yesterday, a veteran no less, asked me, “Nixon looking pretty good to you these days?” And I had to admit, yeah, better every day. Give me Tricky Dick or LBJ over this creepy clown. I never liked these guys but I never thought they were unpatriotic, just working off a different set of values which weren’t mine. This new guy, c’mon, he’s beyond the pale. He’s not working for the America you and me live in. He’s not bringing back coal mining jobs and factories. He doesn’t care about anything but the Trump brand. Who knows what the Russians have on him, but he’s willing to throw the intelligence agencies under the bus to protect his self or his interests, whatever they are. He’ll be willing to do the same with the nation as he did with Melania right after giving birth to their son.

The terrible thing to watch, more frightening than the President’s actions themselves, is the apologists and sycophants who make this guy possible. Blame it on the Russian bots if you want, blame it on Fox fake news (and I do), blame it on a disgruntlement with Hillary and the Democratic Party, but the dirty truth is there are a lot of folks out there willing to turn a blind eye to a very scary demagogue in our midst. This autumn we are going to learn something about ourselves and it may very well be that this nation is not what we thought. It may be that we have elected the man we deserve.

I guess I’ve lived on the South End long enough to see many changes in Crabbing Techniques. Down by us we still walk for the dangerous beasts, armed with only a potato rake and our wits. Obviously the crabs have a definite advantage…. If, as sometimes happens, the wily Dungeness gets the potato rake, well, the poor South Ender is rendered nearly helpless and few, if any, hear those anguished screams.

Some of my newcomer neighbors can afford traps and boats. Boats with motors even. They launch at high tide and bait the traps with caviar and special crackers from Trader Joe’s. They say they catch crab, but I suspect they eat the bait themselves later with lobster flown in from Maine.

In the olden days, when crabbing was a mainstay of South End maritime economics, we drove the great Dungeness herds north every spring to the stockyards of Utsalady and Stanwoodopolis. These were difficult and dangerous drives for the crab cowboys — and many a young wrangler never made it up the coast. Crab stampedes were a constant source of concern. Knee deep in the eelgrass with 10,000 head of the crustaceans clacking claws, the smallest motion would set em to running. Old drovers still tell the story of Mabana Mike, caught in the stampede of ’09 with a herd of barnacle crusted monsters whittling him down like a chainsaw speed carving contest. Old Stumpy, they called him after that at the Tyee Retirement Villa. Never the same. The sound of a denture clacking would set him off for days, the nurses said.

But when the crabs were delivered and the happy Crabpokes had money in their waders, you better believe Stanwoodopolis and Utsalady resounded to the whoops and cries of drunken drovers celebrating another successful drive to market. You see an occasional crabber in the Hotel now, a small reminder of those South End glory days when Crab was King and Crabboys were too. So when you’re eating high on the shell this year, remember you’re partaking in a bit of history. And be careful. Don’t want to hurt yourselves with those nutcrackers and picks…

This past winter we holed up one night in San Jose, Costa Rica on the way back home. Miles of razor wire, concrete walls, security gates, metal fences. Not a place where you’d take a stroll after dark, maybe not even in the daylight. The motel we’re at here in Oakland reminds me of the barrio down south, ramshackle houses, razor wire, homeless encampments, a third world nation invisible to most of the 1%’ers who would gladly take welfare away from these poor and add it to their portfolios. It’s a land of equal opportunity, they like to argue, and these people squandered it out of laziness or because of drug dependency.

The America of gated communities, razor wired walls and security patrols is fast coming, a nation that blames the victims and champions a bully President and his toady minions. We will have walls within walls, walls at the borders, walls in the cities and walls in the prisons and detention centers.

In the land of really not very equal opportunity, the Ladder to Success is missing a few rungs for, say, someone of color, or a woman, or an immigrant than, oh, the son of an Ivy Leaguer. If you start at the bottom, you might hit a home run, but not one 1/100th as likely as the guy born on third base whose dad owns the stadium.

There will always be inequality in a democracy but let’s not call the attempts to minimize it ‘socialism’. Trying to shift the wealth to correct those income gaps only seems unfair to those at the top who don’t find a problem with lowering corporate taxes or skyrocketing CEO pay, or taxing stock portfolios as capital gains, not income. They know perfectly well how to redistribute wealth; after all, they write the laws. And from the looks of things here at street level, they want more and maybe they want it all. We’ll see how that works when they’re afraid to leave their walled kingdom without bodyguards they trust.

Maybe you wake up in the middle of the night, cold sweats and a fevered brain, unable to sleep, impossible to think clearly. You feel an anxiety, you have labored breathing, you feel mood swings from rage to despair. You’ve talked to your doctor and he suggests you try an extra adult beverage in the evening before he prescribes lithium. He tells you you’re not alone, that half his patients lately seem to be suffering similar symptoms. Mass hysteria, he mumbles to himself, and you go home thinking you should seek a second opinion. Or a third. Or double down on those adult beverages.

You decide to quit watching the news, stop reading the papers, forego the radio. It doesn’t help, not a bit. Menopause? you wonder, or in half the cases, male menopause. Hot flashes, mood swings, depression. You discover half the neighborhood is suffering the same malady. Something in the water? Something in the air? A terrorist nerve toxin, maybe?

And then, out of the blue, right after the President sides with Putin over his own intelligence agencies and even some of his Fox Friends wonder what in the world?, Rand Paul, of all people, comes out and says this hysteria is nothing more than intense hatred that blinds you to … well, maybe not facts exactly, but Trump’s latest diplomatic move. He even gives it a name; after all, he is a doctor. Okay, an ophthalmologist. And you are having trouble seeing straight. He calls it Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Meaning, you hate the guy so much you can’t see what he is doing is smart, strategic and possibly even visionary. You can’t see it because you’re blinded by hatred. If he calls the EU our foe, if he believes Putin when he tells him he didn’t tamper with the elections, if he tells you he’s saved you from nuclear war with N. Korea, if he lambasts our NATO allies and goes straight to Helsinki to meet amiably with the Russian leader, well, you only see red. You’re locked and loaded with piss and vingear. You have TDS, my friend. You’ve doubled down on the double negatives.

And from here on out, you will hear that diagnosis again and again. Think Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi, Lock her Up, Lock her Up, Lock her up! There’s no cure and I suspect no one is looking for one. So today, when the Trumpster reverses once more on whether the Russians meddled with our election, jumping back to his original position, which, if you remember, was before he explained the double negative he actually meant to say, well, you probably gnashed your teeth and beat your fists and screamed into the storm. Because you hate the guy so much, you are blinded to the genius of his strategy. You probably even think, like me, that Trump Derangement Syndrome isn’t a description of us, it’s a perfect description of him. Quite a disease….