The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I suppose if we voted a reality TV personality as our President, we shouldn’t be surprised that we’ve made the White House a running joke. Jerry Springer, where are you when we need you??This past week the wives of the Donald are mudwrestling. The mother of Don Jr. and Ivanka claims she is the true First Lady, has a direct line to the White House and would straighten up the Oval Office Daycare in a week. Ouch! Melania slaps back that this is all about Ivana drumming publicity for her tell-all book. And a breathless America, weaned on celebrity news gossip, waits for the next POTUS tweet. Now That’s Entertainment!!

Remember a few short months back when the pundits wondered if the President would adapt to the solemnity of the office and become, oh, more presidential. They don’t wonder now. And serious Republicans are realizing their dream of leading this horse to water and making him drink were fantasies and delusions. This horse won’t go near the waterhole. He’d rather splash in the toilet. He may have even hired whores to piss on the bed the Obamas slept in. We didn’t vote for Class, we voted for Crass and if some folks are disappointed, think how the rest of us feel. Because it’s worse, way worse, than we ever dreamed.

Every empire deserves one or two Caligulas, power-crazed psychopaths who steer the ship of state into the ditch. Great civilizations eventually succumb to corruption, hubris or greed, a form of shared insanity and decadence. Usually the populace rises up in revolt when enough is actually beyond enough, preferring anarchy to chains and abuse, neglect or subjugation. This empire, nurtured on violent pablum and prize-fueled game shows, happily voted in the man they’ll be just as happy to send to the guillotine. Rome wasn’t built in a day and it didn’t crumble in one either. But there are ways to speed it up.

Used to be Midlife Crises came when we were shocked to realize youth had lost its bloom and wouldn’t be coming back. Although … guys bought red sportscars and their wives dyed their grey hairs and considered plastic surgery. A new set of wheels or breasts usually didn’t work — truth was, what they mourned was the end of dreams. The corporate man was never going to backpack Europe or write the Great American Novel. And his trophy wife was not going back to college for a degree in sociology. Even if the kids were….

But I’m seeing friends who are going through a different crisis, the one where mortality is closing in and so is the realization that their life was mostly mortgaged, maybe even subprimed and now the equity seems puny and someone else may actually foreclose on it. They’re retired, time is not on their side and may never have been, and now the prospect of another hard winter is really bearing down. They think maybe a move might help. Go south, go back to their hometowns, look for a second childhood or adolescence, start over and see if the dice come up Lucky Sevens. They ask me: do you think I’m nuts to do this? And I say sure, (as if I got anything against being nuts)  but … if you’re not happy here, with what you got, with the life you made, I’d take a roll of the dice too.  Plus, it’s America.  We’re supposedly the adventurous, the brave, the pioneers.  We leave the known for the unknown.  We let optimism be our guide.  Complacency is the enemy.  Nothing ventured, nothing gained.  Go west, young man!  At least …. that’s what we tell ourselves.  Even if most of us have settled for a secure banality.

So it’s the winter of our discontent. Friends are dying, not a lot, but a start and our turn is in there somewhere. The community volunteerism isn’t working, the house has a leaky roof and the deck is rotted, retirement is surprisingly BORING, the walls are closing in and the trips to town are maddeningly uneventful. It’s as if the life we thought we’d built on sturdy foundations is sliding toward the bluff in incremental but steady tectonic lurches. We aren’t going to be rich and famous, money didn’t buy us love, religion was dumbed down to an embarrassingly blind faith devoid of anything resembling much more than a hope for another life in the after-world or prayers for winning the Lotto. We’re adrift, unmoored and untethered, and definitely uneasy.

I know. This is how I felt when I came here. For you pilgrims, be of cheerful heart! Sometimes the grass IS greener. Occasionally you CAN start over. Dreams DO come true in the once upon a times…. And happiness may actually be just over the next hill, the one you won’t find if you don’t go looking. Good luck!

In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue. I still remember that bit of ditty from 3rd grade. Nina, the something, Pinta maybe?, the Santa Maria. Three ships sailing into history in search of Asia, the long route, the wrong route. No doubt they loved finding gold instead of spices. And of course a New World to explore, conquer and repopulate. In return for the native’s hospitality they brought microbes the indigenous folks had never been exposed to and so, without the necessity of major battles, the Spaniards decimated the Mayan, the Aztec and the Incan civilizations with brand new diseases. Smallpox for gold goblets. Black fever for slaves.

I suppose when we earthlings go to distant planets we’ll be peaceful, respectful, good neighborly, remembering that Columbus Day is just another Subjugation Day for the unfortunates who get discovered. Mars Rover Day will get replaced with a more politically correct moniker for its historic moment. Indigenous Martian Day really doesn’t work for me, but I won’t be around anyway, call it whatever you want.

Columbus Day either. Dump the whole holiday for all I care. Just don’t rebrand it. Us liberals really do value political correctness carried to the extremes. And so I can’t wait to hear the folks who vociferously decry any political correctness as a limit on their freedom of speech. They’re gonna howl that we’ve waged war on poor Christopher the way we wage war on their Christian holidays. And their Star Spangled Banner. And their Confederate traitor statues. Is NOTHING sacred?

Can’t we just learn to love one another even if they were slave traders and warmongers? Can’t we simply celebrate the holidays of the Judeo Christians and skip the minorities? So okay, we drop Christmas but we don’t call it Islam Alternative Day. And if we drop Columbus Conquers the Americas Day, let’s just find a new one somewhere in October to make a federal holiday. I like Halloween, good national fun and a money mojo for the candy and costume industry. Nobody made a dime on Columbus Day anyway and I notice the stock market doesn’t bother to celebrate it. What kind of holiday is it that can’t be monetized? Not a true American one, that’s for sure.

Let’s talk guns! I’m betting most of my card carrying liberal pals, guys like Two Toke Tom, will never in a dozen lifetimes understand why anyone would own a gun, much less a couple of dozen or more. Or 36 like the killer in Vegas last week who killed 58 people and wounded hundreds more…. They want gun control. Half would like guns banned outright. Tom would, for sure.

I had a neighbor who didn’t like me much (I know, hard to believe!) who announced, apropos of nada, that he always carried a pistol and kept a loaded one by his bed. Just in case I was contemplating a late night break-in burglary. When I asked why he ‘packed’ during the day, he said dogs. Packs of dogs. The .38 was dog spray for he-men. I hate to extrapolate from one case study, but my sense is people keep guns out of fear. Dogs, burglars, gays, rapists, Muslims, the Chinese Mafia. You laugh maybe at the Chinese Mafia but I have a pal who, devout Christian that he is, struggled mightily with whether to buy a gun for protection. “Protection from what?” I asked. “The island is pretty much violence free.” He said gangs of the Chinese Mafia. Them and the Muslim Caliphate.

It’s hard to argue against folks’ fears. They’re real even if the basis isn’t. TV news is half reportage of violence. Movies and TV and video games are full to the cerebellum with mayhem. The cities are war zones, gangs rule entire neighborhoods, drive-by shootings are commonplace —— or so we believe. There’s talk of endtimes, societal breakdown, dystopia and riots in the streets. One gun isn’t gonna do it!! Not when the zombie apocalypse or the Chinese Mafia roll into the pastoral South End.

My Christian buddy decided not to arm himself. No killing, the Bible admonished and he was pretty certain he’d be going to heaven if the Mafia did kill him. My neighbor, though, shot himself in the head. Any way you parse it, that’s tough gun control, one that Two Toke might not endorse, but I say it’s a good start. And no, I didn’t pry the gun out of his cold dead hands. Let’s have a modicum of respect for the dearly departed.

I have a sequoia I planted below our house, down where the hill levels out into a ravine. I planted it as a seedling instead of buying a wedding ring for myself since I really dislike a ring. At least one on my finger. Ten years later we built the house up on that hill and from a second story perch I’ve been watching it reach up over the woodshop below, then slowly rise to the new house’s level, go beyond the height of the barn across the ravine and above our own house.

I have to step forward into the window now to see its top. At 35 years old it’s still pretty much a baby so far as a sequoia goes. On our anniversary Karen and I wrapped our arms around its trunk and barely locked hands. With any luck it’ll outlive me by, oh, 500 years or so. In my own lifetime, with a little luck, it’ll be the biggest tree on the place, which is no mean accomplishment considering the five redwoods we planted from seed, a few humongous big leaf maples, some second growth firs and one cedar that, for now, holds the title at a circumference of 13 feet and must be the oldest tree by far on our seven acres.

I’d like to think when we no longer prowl this property, it’ll be a forest again, not some logged off scabwoods the way it was when we first arrived. The field that once grew alfalfa for our goats is now a small arboretum of oaks and maples and beeches, rhododendrons twice as high as us, walnuts and hickories, a carpet of shamrocks and periwinkle growing underneath.

We are definitely shaped by our surroundings, I know that much. And it’s no small pleasure to return the favor by shaping them. The orchards, the flower gardens, the riot of 150 rhodies all blooming over a slowly unfolding spring, the vegetable gardens, the shrubs, the back woods —- all of this becoming as much a part of us as we became part of it. If you were to ask if I was an environmentalist, I would have to say no, probably not. I’m mostly just part of the environment.

I read a letter to the editor recently from a newly minted graduate of our school system railing about that same school system as mostly purveyors of communist propaganda. It forced him to learn about Islam, he complained, but didn’t teach the Bible. It taught him Egyptian history but never, not once, mentioned Moses parting the Red Sea. Apparently his science teachers wouldn’t touch it either, afraid, probably it would subvert the shaky foundations of rationalism.

I’ve lived here long enough to remember when those commies used to bring in Creationist speakers and when evolution was fairly taboo, days our Graduate would like to bring back. Religion, I’ve learned the hard way, is a tough subject to tiptoe around. Any religion. Just not an amusing topic for the True Believer. So mostly I just pick a safer target and hope not too many toes are stepped on.

But I hafta say, in a country that vents mightily about the Taliban or extreme Muslimism, it is troubling to realize the folks who hate the false gods and beliefs of others would gladly set up their own religious schools and maybe make 2nd class citizens of their Jewish classmates or their Sikh or Hindu or B’hai or Buddhist or Catholic or …. well, anybody but their particular sect. They want freedom of religion all right. Theirs, not yours.

I wish religion WAS the opiate of the masses, but sadly, it’s the testosterone. Maybe if we didn’t have religious beliefs to fight about, we’d wage wars over scientific dogma instead. The Big Bangers vs. the Multi-Dimensionalists. Eat this theory, blasphemer!!

Facts, though, don’t seem to matter, just fervent faith. I can’t prove it … so what? I believe it so it’s true. Obama’s a Muslim, evolution is a fraud, the moon landing was hoax, God is a Christian, the universe sits on the back of a tortoise, aliens are among us, the world banking system is controlled by Zionists, the Stanwoodopolis school system is a communist conspiracy.

It’s nice to know that our taxes have done a fine job educating our children. I think they’ll be more than ready to take their place in society. Sometimes, honest to your God, even on the South End, there’s no place to hide from these people.