The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Cadbury, the two centuries old chocolatier from Merry Olde, recently dropped its chocolate eggs from their assembly lines. Of course the ever vigilant right wing holier-than-me devotees of all things religiously correct — but NOT politically correct, no siree — screamed bloody murder. War on Easter, they cried, as if chocolate eggs are referenced repeatedly in the New Testament. In fact, when did the Easter bunny and the egg hunts get edited out of King James? I sure don’t remember them any more than I remember Santa getting a mention.

Poor Cadbury. If anyone wanted to scream, it might be us folks who get sick and tired of monetizing religious holidays. Pepsi just pulled its clever little ad with one of the Kardashian kids offering up a 12 oz. peace offering to a riot cop during a political demonstration. One sip, baby, and it’s peace on earth. Black Lives Matter, but hey, so do corporate profits. Why can’t we just all get along?

I know we’re a polarized nation these days. We don’t know our facts from a hole in the ground and apparently that’s just hunky dory with half of us. We’re a faith based country now. Proofs? We don’t need no stinking proofs. Proofs are for scientists and since we don’t trust science any longer, why try to ram a bunch of gobbledygook down our throats? We’re going to believe what we want, thanks, but no thanks to your theorems and your spurious data. And you know what, maybe Pepsi is a panacea for the world’s ills, screw those politicians who want to put a sugar tax on it.

Cadbury better wake up, is what I think. The Lord maketh rabbits and the Lord maketh eggs and the Bible mentions somewhere, maybe in coded reference or in some yet to be discovered Lost Sea Scroll, that rabbit eggs are meant to be taken as sacraments. At least if they’re chocolate covered. You blaspheme this at your peril, Cadboyz, but maybe, here’s an idea, offer your critics a Pepsi.

Let me say right off the get-go here: I’m no pacifist, don’t play one on TV, don’t really believe in non-violence in a world that’s inherently violent. I’m no Martin Luther King and I’m no Mahatma Ghandi. On the other hand, I don’t go out of my way to get into fights and I’m happy to look like a coward if it will help me avoid one. Once, in high school our band went to some redneck town across the state and some banty hen yahoo wanted to fight me, I forget what the reasons were now, something stupid no doubt, probably the reason I forget. “Let’s go,” I said, seemingly raring to get into it. My would-be duelist put up his dukes right then and there in the pizza joint and I said, “Whoa, Tiger, I see your game. You start a fight right here in public and right away the owner comes over and stops it. You think I’m stupid, you just haven’t got the guts to fight.”

Well, this stopped my pugilist in his tracks. “Whadda ya mean?” he asked, worried that our bout was about to be cancelled. “I mean, you go out the back door first. We don’t go out together, don’t want to call attention to this. I’ll be out in half a minute and then you better be ready to take a beating like you never got before but you obviously need.” This guy was way dumber than I could believe, but he looked like he didn’t need brains to knock mine out. As soon as the back door closed, I was up and out the front, running down the empty streets of that yahoo town, hoping like hell he wouldn’t see me before I got to my hotel.

We just dropped a MOAB on Afghanistan. Taliban, I assume, the boyz we used to give SAM missiles to when they were fighting the Russians. Mother of all Bombs. Cute name, right? We launched 59 cruise missiles on Syria in response to them, somebody over there, using sarin gas to kill babies and kids and moms and dads. We don’t approve of sarin gas. We do approve of big ass bombs. Trump just sent an armada over to menace N. Korea, a show of force to maybe get them to rethink their nuclear ambitions. Okay for us to have nuclear ambitions, not for anybody else. Except maybe Pakistan. India. Oh, Isreal. Not Iran, though. Destabilize the Middle East. Did I mention Isreal?

It’s not that I’m okay with chemical warfare, don’t get me wrong. Mustard gas, sarin gas, bad, very bad. Nuclear, way bad. Bio-warfare, well, probably not okay. Cluster bombs, pretty bad. Nuclear tipped artillery, not as bad. Mines, sometimes okay, sometimes not. Saturation bombing, like in Germany, firestorms, deaths in the many thousands, nobody said much against that, so probably okay. MOAB, bunker busters, have at it. Drones, sure.

I realize the gentility of old school warfare is passe. Line up the archers on each side, let loose the longbows, next wave steps up, another round of arrows flies. At least we kept the civilians out of it. These days, collateral damage is justified, but not every version of weaponry. What I think is, killing is pretty much killing. Might be better to acknowledge that. Or just run out the front door.

Who would’ve guessed, right? Some 35,000 year old warrior channeled through J.Z. Knight right down the road from us in Yelm, WA, pounds his fist and high fives the President. And this was a week BEFORE the Trumpster ordered up 59 Tomahawk sandwiches for the Syrians. I assume Ramtha isn’t Syrian. Lemurian, actually, but where exactly Lemur is, your guess is pretty much as good as mine. Mine is that it’s a country right behind the hippocampus region of Oz and that Trump will be sending Ivanka’s husband Jarud over there as Ambassador –at-Large once Jarud’s cleared up the Palestine/Isreali spat and brought peace to Iraq and business-ized D.C. and neutralized ISIS and … well, pretty much squared up the world, probably a month or so at most.

John McCain and Lindsay Graham, two boyz who never met a war they didn’t love, thought it was a great start, those cruise missiles, but hopefully they were just a nice prelude to some regime change in that war-torn country. Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, all lessons lost on them. The Trump team crowed that now the world will respect us at last and the about face of the Commander-in-Chief, who ran against further involvements abroad, should put the fear of the Christian God into nations that thought we’d become weak and ineffectual, especially given the unpredictability of American policy now. “They can’t be too sure what we’ll do,” the advisors claimed, rightfully so.

Course, we can’t be too sure either. One day pro-Russia, next day not. One week all for letting Syrians decide on Assad’s fate, next minute a proclamation that he has to go. One pronouncement, health care reform is dead, next one a few days later, not so fast, we’re working on a deal. Pretty obviously, consistency is the hobgoblin of their little minds. Better to be nimble, keep the enemy off balance. Including us. Trouble is, the administration is too. In a world where stability was once considered paramount to peace, these are troubling times.

But … when push finally comes to shove, when the Trumpster decides, after a particularly fitful sleep, that North Korea needs a fat wake-up call, trust me, he’s not going to send in the Tomahawks or even Steve Bannon. Too dangerous. After all, they got nukie eggs and a million soldiers in uniform. Who’s he gonna call? Jared Kushner? I don’t think so. He’s gonna call his old buddy Ramtha. And god help those silly North Koreans. We got the Warrior King on our side now.

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.