The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

It’s been raining here in the land of rain, the Pacific Northwest. Even here on the banana belt of the South End, the rains are biblical. Water is coming off the hillsides, down driveways, off the bluffs, over our clogged gutters. The gutters, well, they’re not really unusual since I’m a little slothful when it comes to keeping them clean. The bonsai trees seem to thrive up there, if nothing else. But the bluffs, not ready for this kind of constant deluge, they’re slip-sliding away.

I just put the finishing touches on the new oars I built for a rowboat I found escaped from its moorage in one of last winter’s storms. It had a 1979 Arizona registration number so we could, if we wanted, surmise it had journeyed through deserts and over mountains, blown by sandstorms and avalanches, all the way to Puget Sound where I found it washed up a mile north of my beach. It kind of looked like it had had a rough voyage, but hey, any boat in a storm, I say, so I hauled it back to our bulkhead, patched it up and used it for crabbing last summer.

My new oars needed one final fitting before I attached the oarlocks so I was taking them down to the beach for a tryout … only to discover a landslide of trees, blackberries and a million years of sediment layers had sloughed off and buried the bulkhead stairs and smashed my twelve foot dinghy into a four foot crumpled tin can. So much for fitting oars for that compacted aluminum scow. Easy come, easy go, as the philosophers say.

I stood there awhile in stupefied wonder, staring at my wrecked rowboat and at the naked bluff where water was still seeping along a clay layer, threatening further mayhem, maybe even treating me like it did my boat. A watersogged peninsula of sand hovered precariously 50 feet above me, ready to let loose any minute, so I decided to abandon my nautical dreams and just get myself and my oars out of harm’s way.

The weather folks are predicting rain for the rest of the week. I’m predicting landslides. The neighbors on the bluff are suddenly alarmed, I guess just now noticing that the banks aren’t stable. My second prediction is that by next week we’ll see a new crop of FOR SALE signs across the road. That, or maybe I’ll have beachfront property soon if the monsoons don’t stop.

So little by little, tweet by tweet, you’ve come to grips with the sad reality that Donald J. the Trump is king of America. Hard, isn’t it? Sleepless nights, muffled sobs of despair, an inchoate but ever present anxiety, a mounting anger and a refusal to fully accept this harsh new reality. You thought, with Obama winning the second term, we’d turned a corner in this country. Oh, racism had reared its ugly head again, but … we were a pluralistic liberal society after all, we’d solve these vexing problems.

Just like you, I didn’t see this coming. Sure, I’d listened to Hot Talk Radio and those rating-hungry demagogues. I predicted Trump beating the Rhinos, but I sure didn’t see him winning the Whole Enchilada. I couldn’t imagine it. But … no need to tell you, unless you’ve been self-medicating too hard, he did. I’m not going to reiterate the man’s foibles, you can read it in the lying press every damn day. What we’ve all got to face, what we all need to understand, is we’re in a culture war and we’re losing. The kids aren’t buying into Trump and so if you’re willing to wait a decade or two, well, the tide will turn once again.

But me, I waited through the anti-war Civil Rights 60’s, the Nixon 70’s, the Reagan 80’s, got hopeful in the Clinton 90’s, lost faith again in Bush’s war years, then grew optimistic with Obama. Now we get the backlash. Easy to say it’s just the old white guyz, those Fox News addicts who think their Anglo country is being over-run by immigrants and welfare queens, transsexuals and women in the military, who call themselves the real patriots because they think this is a Christian nation and by God they’re Christians even if they never go to church on Sunday and they’ve made Hate a breakfast cereal to wake up to every day of their unhappy lives.

You don’t win the culture war by staying in the closet. Ask your gay friends. Black Lives Matter has it right. The Occupy Movement had it right. Folks don’t like uppity blacks? Tough. They think men shouldn’t sleep with men? Tough. They think Hollywood is a bunch of neo-commies? Fine. They think immigration is a doorway for terrorists? Wake up. They want to make America great again? Welcome to the future. We won’t be going back to Ozzie and Harriet, Ike and Tricky Dick. The America that’s great is the one that honors innovation, fresh ideas, new blood. It’s the America that’s inclusive, welcoming, democratic and optimistic. And yeah, it’s the America that’s willing to fight back against the bigots, the small minded, the xenophobic and the misogynistic, the America that has nothing to fear but the fearmongers themselves. I say sharpen your pitchforks, we’re in this fight for real now and I for one don’t plan to lose.

Down here on the South End most of us get our ‘news’ the old fashioned way: gossip. Meaning, South Enders, like the rest of the connected world, listen to their cohorts on social media. Their friends don’t lie, or so goes the assumption. A few of us still subscribe to the local lying mainstream media, the Everett Herald, a newspaper like all the others in this digital post-Gutenberg world that struggles to stay afloat. Recently, in a cost cutting measure of last resort, they downsized their comic section.

The real comics, I’m talking about, not the AP or UPI feeds. The funnies. In a matter of nano-seconds the backlash from informed readers was second only to the tsunami in Fukushima. Readers fired off angry letters to the editor, readers canceled their subscriptions, readers wanted to vote which comics were discontinued, readers fumed that their children would never grow up to read newspapers if they couldn’t read Beetle Bailey every morning. Readers were broken hearted.

I suppose if the Herald had discontinued the crossword puzzle and sudoku, they might just as well have shut down their presses, the self inflicted wound would prove too grave to survive. I don’t know what Beetle Bailey or Blondie costs in syndication to print in a daily paper, but I suspect whatever it is, it’s too much judging by the last time I peeked at those zombie funnies which were never funny in 1950 and certainly aren’t now. I wanted to write a letter and say thank you, they needed killing. Course, long ago the paper had dropped my own favorites, funny only to cynical yahoos like myself. And yes, I read the comic section. Or did before it became the Syria of humor, a wasteland of irreparable disaster….

Some days, maybe most, the entire paper seems like a comic section. Presidential tweets attacking Saturday Night Live, presidential advisors pretzelizing the English language to defend their boss’s latest gaffe, the upcoming heavyweight title fight between Kim Jong-Il and Donald J., the Sean Spicer comedy hour, the Paul Ryan budget, on and on, day after day. Who really needs the funnies when politics are so hilarious?

White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said Thursday that cutting funding to several anti-poverty programs is “one of the most compassionate things we can do.”

These are the days where definitions get re-evaluated, where meaning is relative, where up is sometimes down. Wiretap is not the same as ‘wiretap’, enclosed quotes. One means wiretap, the other means, well, not wiretap. It all depends on what your definition of IS is. Compassionate, adjective: feeling or showing sympathy and concern for others.
Synonyms: sympathetic, empathetic, understanding, caring, solicitous, sensitive, warm, loving

Let’s use it in a sentence, Class: Compassionate conservatives care about the poor and the unemployed. Or another: Republicans are compassionate conservatives because they want to ensure a working mother in Detroit with three kids won’t see her hard earned dollars being spent on Meals on Wheels or Headstart. As Mr. Mulvaney stated in justification for cutting funds to low income programs, the poor would rather see their hard earned money going to beef up the national defense.

I mean, who wouldn’t!?? It boggles the senses to think conservatives even try to sell this logic. Cutting taxes for the poor or giving tax breaks to the wealthy? Which do I think their priority might be? Cutting Medicaid programs so we can upgrade nuclear stockpiles that I thought we were hoping to downsize? In my Alice in Wonderland Universe ‘compassionate conservative’ is an oxymoron. Quotes or no quotes. A person who tells falsehoods, what I call lies, is a liar. If he claims, when confronted with the lie, that he read it in an article that was in, say, Brietbart news which is mostly nothing but unsubstantiated fake news stories, it’s STILL A LIE! Oh, my buddy the liar told me that so it may very well be true. Seriously? Are we in first grade???

Day after goofy day our Comic-in-Chief tweets out a new sketch for Saturday Night Live. OBAMA ASKS BRITAIN INTELLIGENCE TO WIRETAP TRUMP TOWER! CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET OFFICE CAN’T BE BELIEVED! VOTER FRAUD IN MILLIONS, COST ME GREATEST POPULAR VOTE IN HISTORY! INAUGURATION TURNOUT BEYOND BELIEF, BIGGER THAN BARACK OBAMA’S!! WILL RELEASE TAXES WHEN IRS AUDIT IS COMPLETED!!! I GAVE MILLIONS TO CHARITY!!! NO CONFLICT OF INTEREST HOSTING WORLD LEADERS AT MY HOTELS!! I NEVER MET VLADIMIR PUTIN, DON’T EVEN KNOW WHERE RUSSIA IS ON A MAP!!!!!!!

Someone, maybe even the Republicans in Congress, needs to yank this boy out of class, walk him to the prinicipal’s office and reprimand him for constant lying. I know we can’t rap a ruler on his knuckles anymore and we can’t turn his fat little backside over a knee and give him an old fashioned spanking, but how much of this are we going to endure before some adults have had enough? Mr. Ryan, Mr. McConnell, when are you going to be sufficiently embarrassed?