The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The President recently tweeted that the American public is finally wising up, high praise for us dweebs out here in the hinterlands. He’s talking about a survey that shows how few people believe the news media is truthful. You know, media like the New York Times, NBC, the Washington Post, CNN. Wow! I remember reading Orwell’s 1984 as a kid in high school and being chilled by Big Brother’s revisionist history. The Ministry of Truth needed entire departments to rewrite past events to make current events fit into what preceded them. “It’s a beautiful thing, the Destruction of words. …. Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?” Easy, just change history.

These days we don’t change history to match our beliefs, we just say facts are lies. Ignorance is Strength. War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Faux news, fake history. Trump and the alt-right have managed to convince the public the truth is whatever they want to believe. Fox News, fair and balanced. Facts? We don’t need no stinking facts!! The President is a liar but plenty of folks think the press is fabricating stories to defame him. He would like to pull the broadcast license of NBC. He’d really like to shut down most of the news media and replace it with the Ministry of Tweet. Big Brother is in office right now.

If Big Brother had a real agenda, we’d be in a sinister world of trouble, but thankfully the Donald is only interested in self-aggrandisement and increasing his brand’s net worth. If he had any ideas or ideals, we’d be in deep doo-doo. He’s no neo-con and he’s not much interested in policies. One day he’s against this, next day he’s all in. Only a craven empty suit could flip flop one hundred and eighty degrees then announce that he always believed the flop. Newspeak for Dummies. Rather than change yesterday’s headlines, just convince the proles the headlines were lies, a helluva lot easier. Ignorance, once bliss, is now strength. Truth, once the thing that would set you free, is now a shackle.

Back when I first got off the Mayflower south of Utsalady, I hitched my fortune to an unlikely looking piece of bottomland which had a shack, a large shed (or small barn depending on your agricultural perspective), a chicken coop, doghouse and a pen for some rabbits. Better than raw land, I figured. But not by much ….

Those early years I mostly hunkered down and tried to stay warm. Some folks would just look at this and shake their heads. Can’t say I blame them, but looking back now 35 years, I’m glad I bit it off. Occasionally I’d get friends coming up to see the estate. We were all pretty much layabouts from our days driving school buses in the Big City, not big dreamers, just slackers getting high on getting by, or so the song goes…. We were an aimless bunch, lacking in ambition and drive, plenty short on cash, but optimistic the future would play out all right for us. Why? I couldn’t say, just that a good positive attitude might, in the end, carry the day. I guess we drank the Kool-Aid —- or if we hadn’t, we were more than willing.

Some of those weekends, come nightfall, we’d load up the VW bus and motor into town, figuring to catch some Stanwoodopolis night life. Rudy the Banjo King played every Saturday night at the Hotel, but once was plenty and so we went to the other side of town to see what the Sportsman and the Sundance and the East Side had to offer a half dozen of us thirsty revelers. First tavern up, the Sportsman, we ordered schooners of tap beer. A minute later every barstool was empty and we were alone with the scowling bartender. Couple of beers, some pool, we moved next door. Our absentee barstool pals were all there, waiting, I guess, for us to bring the party.

We bellied up to the bar, ordered pitchers and watched our fellow revelers finish their beers and head for the door, about half a dozen fellas exiting. Was it something we said? The bartender took our money, but offered no clues. An hour later we were at the East Side, little shotgun of a place, shuffle board half its width. The locals kindly gave us their stools, tipped their hats and left. Once again.

Some places the drinking establishments are lively, a democratic conviviality. Alcohol has its negatives, but for loosening up inhibitions, it’s tried and true. I’ve lived here now 40 years. I’ve been to every drinking establishment that’s come and gone, lived and died. The mizzus says you can’t judge a town by its saloons … and she’s a historian … but I say you can. I could live here longer than Methuselah on scotch and soda and I tell you what, it’s way more fun to drink alone. Which is what we got in spades down here on the South End.

Some of us farmers down here on the organic South End are alarmed at the news Coca-Cola is making milk. They claim they’re making it better. God is going to be heartbroken to hear this. Probably thought She’d pretty much perfected it after all these millennia. Course God neglected marketing, something the labs down at Coke sure didn’t.

I’ve been getting milk down the road from my friend the Goat Lady. Pure, unadulterated, no growth hormone, no antibiotic, free range goat milk, unpasteurized, really creamy stuff. What we South Enders call ‘natural’, Coca-Cola would characterize as raw, meaning it’s pre-manipulated. They’re planning to separate that into sugars, proteins, carbos and fats, all its component parts, then reconstitute it. I’d tell you the formula, but it’s a secret, no doubt the hangover of those first Coke recipes that used cocaine before the pharmacologists and food scientists realized sugar and caffeine would be cheaper and less criminally suspect.

Science, a powerful tool. And … if you can’t trust your food to a soft drink corporation, who can you trust? It’s not as if they’re a cigarette company, chopping tobacco into its component parts, making a slurry, then adding 200 ingredients known to the state of California as carcinogens before rolling the goop into a totally addictive product for the consumer. Not like that at all! Besides, we got the FDA regulating food, right? Right??

The future looks grim for us farmers is what I think. Reformulated broccoli candy bars, reprocessed pea popsicles, endive gum, bush bean twists. But … when the chemists are done, what an improvement on that stuff growing in dirt and you-know-what. They’ll take that out first step in the centrifuge.

It’s a brave new world and maybe we better put on a brave new face. Hey, if nothing else they’ll take the sting out of our nettle crops. Sales might go back up to pre-Recession and the good times might return. Plus we won’t have cows tromping around pooping in our fields now that they’ll be confined to laboratories. Thank you Coke! But … wasn’t your slogan a few years back ‘YOU CAN’T BEAT THE REAL THING’? So why try?

I read the other day that 81% of Republicans still support Donald J. Trump. Loyalty is a laudable trait usually, but c’mon, this is beyond the pale. That, or I’m one of those snowflakes (whatever the hell that is) who gets indigestion and migraines whenever I open up a newspaper or read a newsfeed. Yesterday the Liar-in-Chief told the press that he hadn’t called the latest fallen soldiers’ families with condolences and that most presidents, especially mentioning Obama, didn’t do that. He’d get around to writing a note later. He joked that his vice president wanted to hang all gays and had asked smugly those who had been to see Pence if he’d made them pray with him.

It’s hard to keep up with this guy’s outrages. Course, maybe that’s the point. One outlandish act on top of three others, which one you gonna pick? And then toss in the Iran nuclear deal backtrack, slip in the Affordable Care subsidy withdrawal, slide in the Korea threats, demand that Mueller end that Russian collusion investigation, toss in the Melania vs. Ivana soap opera, call out the NFL for not firing those unpatriotic sonsofabitch players, defend the Confederacy and its generals, mix it all up with attacks on McConnell and Company, withdraw from the global warming treaty, slather on the Bannon hotsauce and who could possibly stay focused on any one outrage?

The man wants to pull the broadcast rights on NBC one day, declares he won’t allow cameras into the White House briefing room another, defends the Russians over any accusations they meddled in our elections, admires dictators, the list never really ends. If you think you know what’s in his orange hairy head, you haven’t been awake the last few months. He contradicts himself, reverses himself, changes opinions constantly. Why would anyone believe anything he says? Last week he attacked McConnell. Yesterday he had a meeting with Mitch and told reporters they were best pals. Believe what you want, believe in the Tooth Fairy, it doesn’t matter anymore, it’s all faux news now.

And 81% of his Republican voters apparently think this is fine. If that doesn’t scare you half to death about the future of democracy in the Land of the Free, you apparently picked the right guy for Halloween fun.

Now here’s an idea whose time is long overdue. Murder insurance!! You got a house full of guns and maybe shoot the mizzus, thinking she was an intruder and next thing you know, the neighborhood is critical, the lawyers are gunning for you and the whole world seems to be against you. What’s a gun owner gonna do?

Well, the National Rifle Association is there for you. They’re now offering insurance policies to protect you against those litiginous victims, what else! For a small annual fee you get peace of mind. Nobody needs to be wondering in those wee morning hours when the noise from the backyard invades your sleep, whether to take the safety off the AR-15 and risk losing the advantage over your would-be attacker because you were worried it might be the neighbor’s kid coming home late after a party. No, you need to be Ready, you need to be Focused, you need to be Alert and you definitely need NRA insurance!

You have insurance for auto accidents, why not gun accidents? Isn’t a little peace of mind worth the small price of the policy? Accidents happen every day in an armed America so why become the victim too in those unfortunate but understandable events? One victim is plenty, no need to martyr yourself to some ambulance chasing lawyer’s attacks. Take the anxiety out of home protection! Sign up today! And for a few dollars more, they’ll insure the entire family. Guns don’t kill people. But sometimes you might. Don’t leave yourself defenseless when you have an arsenal. Murder Insurance. Because you have the right to kill without worry!

There was a study recently — I know, who believes those anymore? — where college students were tested with smart phones on them, with smartphones in their packs and with smartphones left in an adjacent room. Nobody used them, nobody answered calls, nobody googled anything, but in the end the kids with phones on their person scored worse than the ones with phones in their packs. The highest scores were those of the students whose phones were left in the adjoining room. I would’ve loved to know how kids — if there are any left — would score if they had never owned a smarty phone at all. The conclusion the researchers reached was something on the line that smartphones make us dumber. Since I don’t own a smartphone, you can well imagine my pleasure at learning this. Or, if you’re a slave to the device, you’ll say I’m full of shit and the study was faux science.

I got a buddy, Computer Carl, who was the first guy I knew who bought a GPS. He visited us with it proudly mounted on his dash and we all listened — in amazement — to the female voice in perfect enunciation — command us to turn left, proceed point six miles, turn left again, or if we screwed up, recalculate and order new revised instructions. Carl, being a techie, gleefully obeyed her every edict.

Invariably we’d be driving home down the island and the smarty pants GPS lady would tell him to turn left at the corner where we always go straight, no doubt calculating distance, not time, and Carl, who never remembered the route even after two or three dozen visits and one hundred trips, would turn left. No, I’d say each of those 100 times, go straight, but Carl trusted the GPS more than me, a 40 year resident, and — here’s my point — more than HIS own memory. This is what we’d call now, Google Brain. Why trouble yourself learning and memorizing (and possibly using) that stored information if you can just google it up?

Maybe when I have Alzheimers I’ll have a better answer for that. You know, if I can remember where I put my smarty phone….