The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Did you know the world’s richest 8 people had more wealth than the poorest 50%? You think maybe this is an April Fool joke? Faux facts? No, eight people had amassed as much riches as 3.7 billion people at the bottom of the heap. Stop and think about that for more than a nano second. Stop in your tracks. Let your jaw drop down to your knees. 8 people – 8! — with more money than 3.7 billion people combined!! 3.7 billion people in poverty, some starving of famine, some refugees from wars, some just us South Enders who maybe didn’t want to work very hard and never started up a Tech Company.

I guess I knew we had some income inequality, growing wider every year, but c’mon, this seems slightly skewed. I don’t begrudge Gates and Bezos and Buffet and Zuck a few billion, but show me the trickle down. Better yet, show the 3.7 billion people at the bottom whose only trickle is maybe a golden shower. Oh, I know I got a lot of neighbors who think whatever we do, don’t tax the rich! Because they think they might be rich one day…. You know, get an inheritance from Uncle Bezos or finally get around to that start-up tech company or reap the gains from those bitcoin investments or … more likely, win the Powerball Lottery. That, or just bottle lightning and sell it to the poor.

God forbid that we redistribute wealth!! Wouldn’t want to be accused of communism or social engineering or even basic Christian values. Those eight fellows made their money the old fashioned way, with lobbyists and sweetheart deals, with ruthless monopolies and cut-throat capitalism. Why on earth would we tax them exorbitantly when we can take the money from regressive taxation, user fees, sales taxes and other old fashioned usury? Sure, we could use those trillions to feed the poor, cure diseases, fund scientific advances, stuff like that, but you know and I do too we’d probably just build a bigger military. Kill the poor, let them die of disease and starvation, pay them as little as possible. After all, they’ll get to inherit the earth, right? Not that I’m blaming those 8 fat cat rich guys, no sir, they’re probably nice fellows, the way we’ll be when we win the Sweepstakes. I’m just saying there’s billions of folks who maybe deserve a slightly bigger piece of the pie. And I don’t mean Humble Pie.

Trump declares April National Sexual Assault Awareness Month

Somebody please tell me this is an April Fool’s Joke!! This is like Charles Manson declaring May Anti-Murder Month. Or Judge Roy Moore and Woody Allen announcing June is Leave the Little Girls Alone Month. Bill Cosby probably has July locked up for Rape Drug Truce Month. And the National Rifle Association requested an August debut of Assault Rifles for Pre-Schooler Training Month.

These are tough times for us poor souls who are tasked every year to come up with an April Fool’s joke to slip past the gullible, the unsuspecting and the literal. What is a satirist supposed to do when every day is April Fool’s Day in the Land of the Free, Home of the Brave? Everything now is labeled Faux News, true or not, outrageous or not, phony or not. People believe what they want to believe and what they don’t, fake news!

The President had multiple affairs with Playboy models! Fake news! The Russians hacked and trolled the 2016 elections! Ho ho, all lies! Largest crowd ever at the Inauguration! Melania Trump entered the country on an Einstein Visa! What? You don’t believe it? We’re winning the war in Afghanistan another year! The economy is the greatest it’s ever been! Hillary Clinton was a traitor! The Trump kids are Martians!! Strange electric beams of energy have been seen emanating at night from the Washington Monument!!! Camano Island has voted to become a Sanctuary City!!!! Amazon is planning to take over the world!!!!! The Bots are coming, the Bots are coming!!!!!!!

If we now feel like Alice in Wonderland where up is down and right is wrong, how in the world do we sucker in the unsuspecting with some cockamamie story that sounds plausible but is actually a total fabrication when everything now is either a fabrication masquerading as truth or is a truth deemed phony baloney. Nobody tries to keep up with the lies anymore, we just take them for granted as part of the political landscape. The more outrageous the whopper the better, all part of the reality TV show we now live in. Every day is April Fool’s Day, but it’s harder and harder to know who the Fool is.

Down here on the cynical South End, sadly, we’ve grown accustomed to the Weird and the Fabulous. Reality has grown fangs and claws. Our neighbor was murdered and beheaded last week off Tamarack Lane. Faux news? I don’t think so. An underground bunker stocked with guns and ammo was hidden beneath a camouflaged hatch cover on the same property. Fake news? Don’t kid yourself. A killer is on the loose, our heroin thief is back and, I fool you not, so is the Barefoot Bandit. Phony news? Go ask Alice … when she’s ten feet tall. Meanwhile, Happy April Fool! And Colton, welcome back, Kid! We missed ya! And good luck on a new start. Seriously.

It seems cruel to pick on my pal Mark Zuckerberg now that everybody and their friends are piling on the poor guy when he’s down. I was just listening to an inspirational little speech he gave to his adoring employees the other day, imploring them to go out and make the world a public forum, one that would bring the world peace, capital P. It was positively evangelical. Facebook would bring love and understanding to the community space that was expanding like an exploding nova. The cheering and clapping Facebook minions ate it with a silver spoon, their faces upturned to the jumbotron the way Apple worshippers used to gaze at Steve Jobs. Somewhere in the back they must have been pouring Kool-Aid into those ubiquitous water bottles everyone carries with them to hydrate. Enlightenment Now! Kum Bah Yah!

A few blogs back I was mumbling about Bill Gate’s comments concerning the future of Artificial Intelligence, how he thought it would probably be positive, robots cleaning up spills on the factory floors and all, and my take was here was one of the guys who brought us personal computers but didn’t have a real keen sense of where his innovations might ultimately lead. Give him credit, he’s a little busy curing malaria and other world diseases, not much time to ponder the ramifications of Microsoft down the road to the future which is now in our rearview mirror.

Mark Zuckerberg put together a social club, mostly a way to hook up his Ivy League pals, then kept extrapolating, turned it into a global network of ‘friends’. Got himself some folks who knew how to monetize it, went public and now has billions in corporate worth. Or, I guess we should say, had. That stock of theirs is bleeding bitcoins with all the investigations into information sharing with everybody from Russian bots to the Trump campaign to every advertiser on the planet. Did Mark have a far-reaching vision of where things would lead?

I think he did. Just not a real accurate one. Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men? Looks like he saw himself as Santa. Or Jesus Christ. Either way, kind of missed the mark, Mark. Instead, you opened us all up like a corporate can opener, like we were a Pandora’s box you thought you knew what was inside of but really didn’t. You turned us all into marks, targets for advertisers, targets for politicians, targets for Russian bots. You laid the groundwork for faux news, for a world where truth and fiction become indistinguishable, where charlatans undermine democracy and demagogues become presidents. You made a fortune, Markie. You made a mess too. Thanks for the Big Vision. Oh, and thanks for the Kool-Aid.

Every day I hear from friends who are alarmed and depressed by the current State of the Union. Democracy itself hangs in the balance, they say. War is imminent, they tell me. Racism is on the rise, they cry. The economy will go down the toilet, they moan. Idiots and imbeciles are running the government, they write. The sky is falling, the sky is cracking up, they scream.

I confess, there are days, even weeks, when I feel exactly the same way. Liberal Malaise. Progressive Polio. Left Wing Lassitude. It seems like it can’t get worse, then it does. Stormy Daniels spanks the President with a rolled up magazine bearing his mug on its cover. After he’s pulled down his pants. Then he tells her she reminds him of his kid daughter Ivanka. Sure, we feel queasy. Who wouldn’t outside Judge Roy Moore? He hires John Bolton as his national security advisor, the guy who still thinks the Iraq War was a smart move and whacking Iran and North Korea would be even better. I guess I feel nervous, all that talk of who’s got the bigger nuclear button on his desk. Now we got a trade war starting up, mostly against our allies. You could question the intelligence of this, I suppose, and yeah, I do. But what do you expect when half the cabinet and advisors are the flotsam from Fox and Friends?

You know in your heart the Russians got something nasty on our Commander-in-Chief. Something so embarrassing he’s willing to kowtow to about anything they pull, from Crimea to Ukraine, from nerve gas murders to election manipulations, something even the Donald would shrink from having become public. Pissing prostitutes on film, who knows? Something even worse? C’mon, in this era of daily outrage, why not?

But I have to remind myself and my horror stricken liberal pals, this is the same country that elected Obama, not once, but twice. The same nation that leapfrogged from a homophobic country to one that has made gay discrimination illegal. And even included the trans community! You think that was possible a few years ago?? Now we have the #MeToo movement, the kids protesting the proliferation of guns, the Black Lives Matter movement.

I know, we still got a bullying, narcissistic, ignorant real estate huckster for a President. We voted him in, a majority of us. I have to think, though, we’ll see he has no clothes. And not just when Stormy is whacking his ass with his own face. God Bless America. When She stops laughing.