The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

They tell me we get the Leaders we deserve. This is cold gruel these dark and menacing days with the Boy King strutting on the International Stage, bragging one breath, bullying the next, calling everyone but himself and his Breirbartian inner circle, liars and purveyors of faux facts. No exaggeration is too excessive, no lies too egregious, no threat too outrageous.

To fact check his manic Tweets would take a Cray Super Computer, they arrive 24/7, the man a veritable teletype of epic petulance, no doubt driven to madness by greed and lust for Total Attention. He’s a five year old rich kid with attention deficit, a P.T. Barnum for the television addicted. Do we deserve this nasty buffoon?

Maybe so, maybe so…. In this news cycle of constant updates, peppered with tabloid-style salaciousness, gossip and cheap thrill entertainment, along comes a carnival barker full of piss and vinegar, spewing racist vitriol and promising to Make America Great Again. There’s a Meanness emanating from the Heartland, a foul fog of inchoate resentment and fear. Of immigrants. Of terrorists. Of a digital world that’s moved beyond their ability to comprehend. Oh sure, they can get and send e-mail and they can join Facebook, but the world that’s accelerating here in the 21st Century isn’t their world. They think Trump means he’ll Make America Go Back, Reverse Course, Revert to Ozzie and Harriet Values, Be White and Paternalistic, Be Great That Way Again.

He’s selling Snake Oil, he’s selling the Past and folks are lining up to buy it. They love a rich guy, they love a playboy, they love Dirty Harry as President. We’ve made politics a game show and the president a carnival barker in a 6 ring circus. See the Bearded Lady, the two headed baby, the Man with No Clothes, step right up, step right up, no need to push, step right up for the miracle of miracles, for the panacea for all your woes. Double your money back, ladies and gents, if you’re not completely satisfied. You won’t be disappointed, you’ll be amazed. Step right up. Step right up. 100% satisfaction guaranteed. See the Wonder of the Ages! See the President of the United States walking upright! 100% guaranteed! Step right Up!!

Well, the Big Top is coming down and the elephants and the clowns will have to find new homes. Ringling Bros/ Barnum and Bailey is throwing in the towel. It couldn’t find enough audience for its traveling extravaganza and so another piece of Americana bites the dust of the digital 21st Century. Maybe you’re too young to remember when the circus came to town, midgets and lion tamers and acrobats on the high trapeze, cotton candy and the smell of sawdust, but back when I was a little kid, it was a Big Deal.

Strange too. Weird people, the circus performers, living on the road, traveling by train, hauling elephants for godsake across the continent to every mid-size town they could set up the Big Tops. It was nostalgic then, an era out of its time but slogging on despite accusations of animal cruelty. Still, you have to admit, those elephants standing on the rumps of the ones in front of them were a sight to see for kids used to stupid chickens and funny looking goats. You don’t see cows trained for bovine acrobatics, that’s for sure.

The only 3 ring circus now is in the White House, maybe not the greatest show on earth, but a helluva carnival these days. The spokespeople for Trump, the Ringmaster, can hold their own with their aerial verbal gymnastics, flying with the greatest of ease, touching the ground rarely. And the jugglers and the clowns, well, you be the judge. If the elephants can find new homes when the tents come down, these folks will be fine too, probably 6 figure salaries as lobbyists soon.

The Prezident is squealing and boo-hooing that he’s the most picked-on politician in American history. The bully pulpit, I guess, but now the bully is getting a dose of his own medicine and he doesn’t much like it. He sez the liberals and the lying press are on a Witch Hunt to bring him down. He sez it’s So Unfair. He wants them to leave him alone. This from the man who treated the press and the media the way you’d treat your worst enemy. Little wonder, eh, the worm has turned.

Being president, who knew it would be so complicated, so hard, so not fun??? Well, everybody but him, it looks like. It could make me believe in Karma watching the Birther Boy wiggle on his own petard. He’s not the only president I haven’t liked, but he’s the first one who deserves to be flagellated in public, whipped like a vicious dog and then put in a cage where he’s rendered harmless. Harsh, I know, but the man made the New Rules and he should accept the wisdom of the mob. After all, he whipped them into a frenzy.

Lock Her Up!? No, Don, Lock YOU Up!! The court of public opinion can turn on a dime, friend, but Real Wrath belongs not to the Lord but to the Deceived. They may be Dumb but all the worse when they realize you conned them with Snake Oil and rotten bile milked from their own despair. They’ll drop your sorry self into a coal mine and block the entrance to keep from hearing these pathetic whinings of yours. The Wilderness is coming, Rich Boy and it won’t have a gold TRUMP over the boulders at the shaft.

History belongs to the Winners, Donald, but it will be a cruel and implacable Judge when your return comes up, a lesson for the kids. We can tolerate a Nazi, we can accept nepotism, we can embrace outright greed, we can even stomach a Total Idiot. But a liar? You made Nixon look honest and Clinton seem moral, but you wouldn’t know the difference. Lock him up! Lock him up!

This is the first morning at our cabin on the flood-swollen Salmon River. The sun’s coming up over the canyon walls, a pair of geese just landed on the far shore, a crow is pestering a bald eagle and a heron is wading a small submerged island where a few shrubs bob in the fast current. A doe tiptoed across the shallow side of the river, feeling her way tentatively, then stopped halfway among larger islands in the middle before plunging into the icy currents to swim the last 30 or 40 yards, finally dragging up onto the rock embankment nearly down here to the cabin.

It would be easy to draw metaphors out here watching the river flow, draw comparisons to the ‘outside’ world of politics and the bustle of our ordinary activities, see ourselves splashing across the floodtides. But … for the time being at least, this morning anyway, why not put the pen down, douse the brain’s fever and wade into this place where time flows downstream while we sit watchful? Adam and Eve weren’t thrown out of the Garden, they just couldn’t see it finally. God and the Serpent? The kids should have realized they created both.

Even these words make for a kind of fence, one with a sign that says No Trespassing, No Admittance. We should go outside and leave the gate open behind us …