The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

You have to love a man who’s willing, in less than a day, to change his mind on important foreign affairs. Give him a TV show to watch and if it shows children being Sarin gassed, well, the man’s heart bleeds and the policy he announced just the past week to let the Syrians decide for themselves regarding Assad’s presidency gets reversed. He was opposed to bombing them back in the first chemical attacks on Assad’s own people, but now, well, that was one powerful TV program apparently.

Most of the Congress seems to love a good war. Especially one that’s short and sweet and doesn’t involve our own troops. Send 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles to destroy an airbase, hey, they can rally around that flag. Course, we had to warn the Russians to evacuate and they warned their Syrian allies, but if you want great visuals for TV coverage, nothing beats 59 Tomahawk missiles homing in on one target. Unless it’s 60. We do love air power.

Me, I like to be a bit more judicious when I attack a country whose ally is Russia. Maybe consider the geopolitical consequences. But most Americans like decisiveness. They like revenge. And so what if Iraq turned into a quagmire and the rest of the Middle East is ablaze? We showed those Arabs strength and if there’s one thing we believe, it’s that nations respect strength. You go the route of peaceful negotiation, well, they’ll mock you behind your back. They’ll play you for a chump. Just like we learned watching 1950’s sitcoms, bullies respect the kid who stands up to them. Because deep down they’re cowards….

I used to believe that too. Until I stood up to a couple of them when I was a kid. I got some great lessons. I learned they’re not actually cowards, they’re mean and they’re bullies because they’re assholes. I also learned I really didn’t know how to fight. I got the stuffing beat out of me every time. And I learned that principals and teachers, those folks who say they’ll back you up if you stand up to a bully, they won’t. They’ll drag you down to the office and they’ll call your parents and they’ll lecture you on the senselessness of violence.

My parents, raised in hard scrabble small towns in the backwashes of Maine, told me you only fight when someone hits you first, but then you knock the bejabbers out of them. If you can. Trouble is, you have to wait for that first punch. And that first punch, more often than not, finished me off. Somewhere around the start of high school I decided that I wasn’t the cop who righted wrongs. If I wasn’t attacked, then a better plan was to avoid the punks and the thugs. Not every wrong was a call to battle.

Trump ran on something similar. It was one thing I liked about him, maybe the only thing. It’s hard to tell what this guy believes, but one thing is for sure, whatever it is, it can change overnight. Keeps the enemy off balance. Actually, keeps all of us off balance.

Accommodate: meaning “made fitting.” Whether it refers to changing something to suit someone’s wishes or providing someone with something he needs,accommodate typically involves making something fit.

Re-accommodate: well, in the plummeting stock values of United Airline these days, the meaning is a little less clear. I guess it might mean cleaning the blood off that recalcitrant passenger who was dragged literally kicking and screaming off the plane when United decided they needed his seat for their employees and letting him back on the plane, maybe in the cargo hold with other dangerous potential explosives.

I’m the last guy in the world who thinks the customer is always right. I think my clients ought to be given as much courtesy as possible, but c’mon, you’ve met folks who not only aren’t right, they’re jerks, they’re insufferable, they’re the ones that should be thrown off the plane. In mid-flight preferably. But United Airlines, let’s get honest here, they no more think the customer is always right than the Sunnis think their Shi-ite neighbors need a Welcome Wagon when they move in. United, and most of the other mega corporations who fly the post 9-11 skies, don’t give a rat’s patootie about their customers’ comfort, they care about the bottom line, not my bottom crammed into their ridiculously narrow seats. You ridden on a Greyhound lately? It’s no dreaded Mexican bus with the chickens and the kids on the roof anymore, it’s cushy, it’s comfortable, it’s deluxe compared to my experience as air freight.

And that bottom line they worry about? Deduct about $ 1 billion from that and see if the CEO still thinks re-accomodation means anything in the real world. If I were him, I’d look up re-assignment. Without the stock bonuses and the golden parachute. The price of arrogance can be plenty high.

United Airlines, always on the lookout for a good publicity story to promote their quality service, had a passenger forcibly removed from his overbooked seat. Judging by the viral videos, he didn’t seem agreeable to have someone else take his place. Probably had somewhere to be, people to see, maybe a meeting to attend, something that made him reluctant to leave the plane and hope United would get him a seat later that day or next week.

United stated they’d asked nicely for volunteers but no one came forward. So … what else is an airline to do but grab someone by the feet and drag them to the front exit door in front of all those other overbooked passengers who, if they were the thinking types, might see themselves in a similar position. One fellow passenger gave full throated support: “Way to go!” Course, he was rooting for the air marshals, not the fellow who might have been him. Probably thought the guy being dragged away was a terrorist.

I fly United occasionally. And yeah, they overbook all the time. They ask if there’s anyone who would take a voucher and fly another time, free flight or a pretty good discount. Great for folks with no family, no job, no hurry to get anywhere in particular. But for those of us who need to be someplace, well, I wouldn’t want my name chosen at random by the desk jockeys for United. And it does make me wonder, how did they choose this man to drag off? Alphabetical name place? Last passenger to book, other than the ones overbooked? Profiling? Name pulled from a hat? Eenie Miney Mo?

Personally, dragging a passenger off a plane seems pretty consistent with airline policy these days. Crammed overhead cargo, narrower seats, no leg room, extra fees for … well, everything, more and more delays, lost luggage, smaller options. I haven’t flown a friendly sky in a long long time. Next time, though, I suppose we should count ourselves lucky that we aren’t dragged by the feet off the flight we booked and paid for. And to the guy who yelled Way to Go, let’s hope it’s you next time when they need a ‘volunteer’ to give up an overbooked seat.

A man died today in a pancake eating contest. In his zeal to excel he clogged his food chute with the tasty but expansive buttermilk cakes and expired before any Heimlich maneuver could expel the carbojam from his alimentary. These things happen, of course. No one said fame would be easy. Sad to say, same day, another contestant died eating in a donut gobbling race. In the dog eat dog world of gourmet eatery contests, these two are now heroes even if their names are already forgotten.

Maybe they should’ve dedicated themselves to the hot dog eating competitions. Less bun, more meat, but who knows if this would have saved their lives or not. The quest for a Guinness world record leads many of us down a treacherous trail, but usually not an early demise. Nevertheless, the sacrifice, however steep, makes the effort that much more poignant.

I myself am not much of a pancake or a donut enthusiast, I don’t care how much maple syrup lubricant you add to the coagulated glutinous mess or how many sprinkles to the deep fried batter. And the thought of cramming these things into my pie hole at breakneck speed, well, even a hot dog competition looks good. And I can’t recall when the last contestant in a wiener race died at the plate.

Still, we are a society with an appetite for momentary fame. American Idol, the Apprentice, Dancing with the Stars, Pancake Gobbling King, President of the United States. Give us our 15 minutes, that’s all we ask. Something to engrave on the granite headstone when we’re gone, something our progeny can read with no little pride. Here Lies Grampaw: He Died Doing What He Loved Most.

For you grampaws out there slowly rocking into the shadows watching Wheel of Fortune, lift a fork to the Pancake King.

A study cited in the morning’s lying press showed statistics that kids were less likely to do drugs these days. The thesis these researchers had come up with was they were doping themselves on social media, a steady drip of dopamine pleasure, nearly constant in their waking, if somnambulistic, hours. Social media as narcotic….

You live down at the tail end of an island far from the tentacles of Facebook, you forget sometimes you’ve set yourself adrift from the continental shores of 21st century modernity, but as the riptides sweep you away and the land lines tear loose from the walls, those messages from the Mainland become fader and more indistinct, Morse code from telegraph poles rotting in the relentless rains.

For a confirmed xenophobe, this desire to stay in constant contact with strangers and family and friends is bemusing, like stuffing messages in bottles all day long and setting them loose on the tides. I had a buddy back in high school who was a ham radio operator tapping out code to other hamsters overseas and across the globe, who stayed up late in his room on the chance that meteorological conditions were ripe for some far away contact. “I talked to a guy in England,” he would tell me the following morning.

“Whadja talk about?” I’d ask. Invariably, nothing much, just name, serial numbers and rank. Where they lived. Age, maybe. I guess we just have this desire to make contact, to let someone know we’re out there, that we’re not alone. Same reason we send radio signals into space. Same reason we write blogs. Ironically, my buddy the ham radio operator slowly became afraid of human interaction of all kinds, what the shrinks call agoraphobic. I tried getting in touch with him some years after the last time I saw him, but he’d lost his job, moved away from his house in Missoula and now even Google can’t locate him. I imagine him holed up in some desolate place, tapping Morse code late into the comforting night, listening for an answer from folks he’ll never have to meet, all his bottles crashing onto lonesome beaches in places he’ll never see.