The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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.

Jeez, no sooner than the British start the process to exit the EU, those sneaky Spaniards make a claim for getting back Gibraltar. Brexit is a more slippery slope than the Brits thought, but if Spain thinks it’s going to annex the Big Rock without a fight, they’ve forgotten the Falklands. And the Falklands, with their herds of sheep thousands of miles from the English shore, well, they’re not the Rock of Gibraltar, trust me.

Here on the breakaway nation of the once 13 colonies, we’re starting our own withdrawal from globalism. Maybe we should worry a little about Hawaii and Alaska. The Russians feel pretty gypped by Seward’s little folly back 150 years ago and Pele, the volcano god, might feel the same. And let’s not even mention Puerto Rico and Guantanamo.

But that brings us to Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, all those territories we took after John Wayne lost the Alamo. Mexico would be crazy not to make a grab; after all, they’ve been slowly invading for decades, pretending to work low paying jobs without even getting social security, just biding their time until the day America, trying to be great again, shrinks its borders. With a president who understands the art of the deal, maybe the time is ripe for a fast negotiation, see what we can get for the Lone Star state since they want to secede anyway. Maybe trade for Cancun with Baja thrown in for good measure. We could easily toss in Arizona for good measure, let Sheriff Joe fight the cartels on their own turf, see how tough he really is.

Down here on the South End I’m licking my chops. Might be the exact right time to make a play for the northern section of the island, save us going the Kim Jong-un route and developing nuclear stockpiles. A peaceful resolution seems a lot more likely now that American expansionism has come to a crashing end judging by the Trump Doctrine: Talk loud and carry a small stick. Maybe my neighbors to the north will see the logic and economics finally in reunification. If not, well, let’s not start saber rattling just yet. Down here we still believe in peaceful negotiation.

This morning in the mainstream lying press, I read about a UW professor who was tracking blogsites and twitter feeds to see if she could get a handle on where folks are getting their information these days. InfoWars. She was astounded that most people are reading – and probably believing— the alt-right and far left sites that appeal to their biases, not their reason. I listened this morning on the radio to an interview with a right wing talk show host who accused his interviewer and NPR of bashing all things Trump, just another example of the lying media.

Trump and his mentor Bannon of Breitbart have studiously planted the seeds of public doubt about the veracity of the Washington Post and New York Times. We are entering a techno-fueled Dark Age. I talked with a woman last week who said she couldn’t bear to read anything but the sites that bashed Trump. The entire nation seems to be pulling the covers over our heads and listening only to voices that agree with us. This tribalism bodes ill for Reason.

If I can summarize, the way to determine if something is faux news or factual news is this: it’s all phony. Everyone is lying. Truth is relative. Truth is what I believe, period. Walter Cronkite was a big fat liar, we just didn’t know it yet. Rush Limbaugh is God and he’s laughing at us. He killed the truth by telling people what they wanted to hear.

I don’t have the optimism I once had about the fate of a nation that loves its own ignorance. Like my old neighbor loved to intone: no brains, no headaches. Course, he went bankrupt three times, lost his wife and kids and his farm. My bet is he didn’t learn a single lesson from that. It isn’t that we no longer learn from history, we don’t even believe in history.