The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

“I hear so many times, ‘Oh, I want my people to be smarter than I am.’ It’s a lot of crap. You want to be smarter than your people, if possible.”

I’m guessing that half of the American people voted for Trump hoping that a businessman, a CEO, a job creator, a billionaire entrepreneur, a captain of industry, might lead them out of the Valley of Death, or at least the ravine of income inequality. I figure they think the head of Boeing or Amazon would be the sort of bright, can-do person who could turn this country into an economic machine. So they held their noses over Donald’s, let’s call them his idiotsynchrocies, and cast a vote for a real estate developer turned reality TV host.

Why not? Some folks actually believe the country is going down the sewer. They see the world shape shifting faster than you can say Virtual Reality. They feel left behind, culturally, economically, politically, socially, you name it, they’re watching the future speed past them before they can even get a hitchhiking thumb out. Not that it would matter with self driving cars coming up from behind them. They want to make America great again. Meaning, they want America to be the myth they have in their heads, the one where they liked Ike and Beaver, that loveable white kid out in the suburbs who was always getting his ass in trouble, but in the end, he learned some valuable lessons and went to bed happy that in the morning his cereal bowl of processed and sugared grains would be waiting once again to fill his belly with empty calories.

Five months into this Presidency they still hold out hope that the Mogul of Manhattan will turn D.C. upside down and shake these swamp denizens until the loose change in their bulging pockets clatters to the base of Lincoln’s monument, then rolls down the marble steps and finally into their own bank accounts. If he lives up to his myriad promises, they’ll have free cable TV by Christmas. Yes, Virginia, there IS and he lives in the White House! When he’s not at Mira-de-Lago.

I happen to be one of those cynics who believes CEO’s are paid a hundred times too much. Call me an infidel and take away my passport, but you can’t tell me stockholders aren’t idiots for paying some yahoo in an Armani 50 million bucks to run their corporation. Course, it’s their money and they can fritter it away on mega-talent, but in the end, all of us pay for that, stockholder or not. The real price, though, is that we are fast becoming a society of peasants and princes.

We’ll see soon enough if the real estate developer king was worth the price. We’ll find out if America should be run like a corporation or a real estate office, if we can lean on the unions, bribe the politicians, coerce our enemies and bluster our way to greatness once again when the man at the top declares publicly he wants only inferiors beneath him. Little wonder he hasn’t filled all those hundreds of vacancies in his government. Hard to find folks that dumb.

Jared Kushner, the Mad King’s son-in-law, is taking time off his busy domestic schedule and his real estate business to head to the Middle East, see what he can do with this Israeli/Palestinian mess. You and me might’ve sent someone with diplomatic cred instead, but hey, this is a New Paradigm. Historians will no doubt look back at this era in slack-jawed open-mouthed wonder. Wheeler Dealer! The Art of …

Goodness gracious, great balls of fire! Let’s send the kids over to solve the world’s most pressing problems, why not? This kid is Jewish and as far as I can tell, that’s his only resume for something as complex and historically impossible as this. Many presidents and their ambassadors and their state department experts have thrown their shoulders against this wheel, but they have come up with nothing more substantive than torn rotator cuffs for their efforts. It’s a tough rock to move, a hard nut to crack, pick your own metaphor, it’s a bastard of a problem.

So send in the clowns, let Netanyahu and Abbas see we’re serious. About letting the status quo simmer on high. When Jared resolves those issues, he can hop right over to Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Afghanistan. A one man diplomatic corps. Course he has to get back for that meeting with high tech CEO’s, something to do with corporatizing America, making it safe for entrepreneurs once again. It’s a high wire act that few would take on outside the Wallendas, but he is, after all, the son-in-law of the president who has already accomplished more in half a year than his predecessors managed in their entire terms. Except maybe FDR, who had more advantage than our Caligula will due to presidential term limits, sad!

No doubt Peace, World Peace, is finally at hand. Well, after Jared deals aces over there in Pyongyang. Let’s just hope he doesn’t get tired. We need him to be strong, savvy and wide awake. I’m counting on his youthful energy to win the day.

I’ve been cooling my heels in the Tire Shop in town getting a flat tire fixed. Sitting here in the communal waiting room I got pulled into the crackerbarrel talk with a few fellow customers when the palaver turned to government excess, corporate greed, pharmaceutical warnings, health care costs, pretty much the gamut of modern grievances in this dystopian world we now live in.

Did YOU know, for instance, that the government was dropping chemicals into the atmosphere to halt global warming? No? Or that John Wayne’s lung cancer was caused by nuclear testing outside Las Vegas where he rode his horse? You could see the mushroom clouds from your hotel room on the Strip.

Did you know that arthritis was the result of wheat harvested after being sprayed with Roundup, that gluten intolerance was actually chemical poisoning? No, you hadn’t heard that? Did you realize the EPA Superfund cleanup of the Duwamish River in Seattle got hauled a few miles north and dumped off Magnolia? You didn’t?

I bet you also didn’t know the oyster farms up north were so polluted they couldn’t grow baby oysters. No? Actually, it’s partly true, but not because of pollution, it’s because of acidification of the ocean. Bet you the ‘chemtrail’ is causing it. Along with celiac disease, irritable bowel syndrome, autism and presidential neurosis.

My tire repair didn’t take long, but enough time to cover some fairly major conspiracies, from government experiments on us rodents to ‘Deep State’ cabals. My new friends didn’t trust anybody or anything. Although … they did like their health care which cost way too much, but it was better than what Trump and his pals were going to do. If I had said I liked rainbows, they’d have told me they were oil sheens reflecting off the atmospheric poisons, a sure sign I would have rheumatoid arthritis in a month. The world was a mess and its leaders were evil. We were doomed, that was pretty much the gist of things. One guy said he was spending his grocery money to get the struts on his Honda fixed, had to do all four, cost a fortune. Damn car companies anyway! Damn tire place too!

My tire guy saved me finally, said he’d put my spare back up under the truck bed if I showed him where I’d hidden the gizmo that hoisted it up. I said I’d do it when I got home but he said he might as well do it, save me crawling on my back later. When the spare was in place, I asked what I owed. “On the house,” he said. “No charge, sir.” You know and I knew too after listening to my new pals in the waiting room, some kind of tire conspiracy was at work. I’m still trying to figure out what their game is.

Now, a lot of us South Enders look a little dubiously at Dad’s Day. It sounds suspiciously like one of those STING operations for deadbeat dads delinquent on child support payments. Get us all down here, then throw the net. We can already see the headlines in the Conway Chronicler: South Enders nabbed in Paternity Sting.

NOT that I’m saying I’m a deadbeat dad. I know being an artist and a banjo picker sort of doesn’t help the image, but we all been down on our luck. Little Jimmy understands that. His mom’s a little less forgiving, but when the CD sales start rolling in and the big art commissions, she’ll change her tune.

What with all these studies proving that more than a quarter of men in this country aren’t the genetic fathers of their children, Fatherhood on the South End has taken on a whole new meaning in these modern times we live in. DNA tests take all the romance out of relationships, you ask me. The old family tree’s got some extra branches now. And I guess that’s good, but it sure takes some of the mystery away from sparking and courting. Personally I don’t care to find out half the South End String Band is related.

But it IS father’s day coming up. Won’t be long before dear old dad is just a Test Tube in some sterile lab. Sample # 74 Double X, blue eyes, dark hair, long fingers for the banjo. I like to think I got more to offer than a Petri dish. Although, Little Jimmy’s mom might not agree.

The Band was thinking of maybe lobbying for Father’s Day being a day of amnesty. You know: Give a Dad a Break Day. Or even a whole month. NOT that I’m saying the boys down here are looking for a way to skip the June payments. We were just thinking a little breathing room ….. you know, til the CD sales pick up.

‘Well, I came upon a child of God
He was walking along the road
And I asked him, Tell me, where are you going?’
‘Woodstock’

It’s been 50 years since the hippie uprising bloomed in San Francisco and wilted shortly after. I went out to Haight-Ashbury in 1975, only 8 years too late. By then Flower Power was dried and pressed, steel bars were on the storefronts and the streets were filled with zombies too drugged to leave in time. I left in a few hours, scratching my long haired head where to go next.

Hunter S. Thompson famously said in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas that there was place in the foothills above Frisco where a person with the right kind of eyes could see where that bohemian utopian tidal wave crested and finally broke. I’m pretty sure I found the archaeological proof of that highwater mark. Just turned the truck around and headed ‘home’, a fictional place as it turned out, an old Polish farmhouse with a barn, summer ‘kitchen’, well and hand pump, plus an outhouse. Cut wood for the hard winter to come and settled in to work on a divorce. We wore icicles in our hair, not flowers. We picked at our marital wounds and by spring the Summer of Love was long since dead and buried.

But — and yeah, Virginia, there’s always a caveat — but some of those seeds from that era, passed bong to bong or secreted away in the short stints at communes, something remained fertile of those ill-formed dreams we had, some lyric or other took root and grew in my personal darkness until finally it emerged, a full blown song, tentative at first, I realize now, then more vigorous in the damp country air of the Pacific Northwest. We did go back to the land, we did set our souls free. We did realize, in the end, we are stardust, we are golden. And we finally got ourselves back to the Garden.

Camano Island 50 years later