The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

We’re less than a month into the Second Coming of the Trump Administration and already the temperature down at the Pilot Lounge is hotter than a New Delhi tenement in the last summer’s global warming. Jolene’s Beauty Salon, thanks to Ronald’s constant up-to-the -minute hair on fire news commentary, has resulted in the loss of three of Jolene’s most reliable clientele, a fact which she has tried to impress on her gay beautician without much success. A couple more and Ronald will be going with them, she thinks. Although, truth be told in these post-fact times, Rebecca Arnold pretty much instigated the argument when she announced to the entire salon that she was happy the Man in the High Tower had declared that only two sexes were admissible in the new definition of gender. No trans and, according to her, maybe no gays either. Red flag to Ronald’s bull.

The Diner, as always, is a hotbed of insurrectionist talk, liberal outrage, militia supporters and even a few customers who seem only interested in breakfasts and lunches. Even the Flatheads left off the usual arguments of stock vs. after market carburetor replacements, 6 to 12 volt upgrades, the only topics across their DMZ concerned now with geopolitics. Did Trump really mean he’d bulldoze Gaza and make a Riviera on the sea? Was Greenland worth a war with the Danes? Should we take back the Panama Canal? Fuggetabout carb overhauls and white wall tires, the vintage car guyz were weighing in on the Ukraine War, the China/Taiwan threat, the NATO debates. Don’t even get them started after two refills of Brenda’s high octane caffeine on the purges going on with the Musketeer crews or the confirmation battles split evenly down Party lines!!

The only thing that united these patriotic diners, the only thing, was their unanimous outrage when Anita inked in on every spattered and battered menu: “Due to the spike in egg prices all egg items will be $2 extra.” The great wailing and the drumbeat pounding of chests that emanated from the formica tables could have been heard clear to Stanwoodopolis. As Two Toke intoned once the hubbub had died down a few decibels, “It’s the eggonomy, stupid!” And for possibly the first time in months, we all laughed.

There’s an old fable about a snake that asks a man to carry it across the river, promising not to bite. Before they reach the other side the snake sinks its fangs into the man. “You promised not to bite me!” the man cried out. To which the snake replied, “But I’m a snake. What did you expect?”

In Michigan the Moslem minorities are complaining bitterly about the man they trusted to bring the Gaza genocide to an end now floating the grand notion of evacuating the survivors to neighboring countries so that the United States can clear the rubble and rebuild on the ruins a fabulous waterfront mecca, a Riviera on the Dead Sea, pardon the irony. Mar-a-Gaza, owned and controlled by the United States and no doubt built and operated by Trump Global Enterprises.

Agreed that no one probably could have imagined this ‘solution’ to the Palestinian problem in any form or fashion, but c’mon, the same folks bitterly denouncing the scheme voted for the man or abstained from voting at all. They trusted the snake not to bite but of course the snake was true to its nature. The same is true for the rural red states, of course, who voted to drain the swamp, cut spending, slash departments and root out the cursed bureaucrats who are stealing their hard earned tax dollars. All that infrastructure money has been terminated, most of it going to those same states. Health care funding has been slashed and it won’t be long before rural hospitals begin to fail. Tariffs promised should soon jack up inflation, hurting the poorest the most.

There will come a wailing and pounding of fists from the heartland before very long. They will say they were betrayed, that all politicians are liars, that no one is to be trusted. I’m sorry, but you brought the snake on board. He did what he has always done. Sure, he said he wouldn’t harm you. What did you expect?

I always wondered which American era the MAGA folks wanted to return to, maybe McCarthy and the communist witch hunts, maybe the slave era, maybe before women’s suffrage was passed. But this first couple of weeks of the new regime made me realize they want to go back to 1984, the book. Thought Crimes. Political purges. Weaponized government. Computer surveillance to weed out wrong thinking, contrary viewpoints and incorrect political beliefs. Fire the enemies then prosecute them. How many fingers am I holding? Big Brother asks Winston after secret surveillance revealed his doubts about the government. Who won the election in 2020? Who were the heroes of the Civil War? What is a female? Who started Covid? What did they put in the vaccines?

It’s not a far reach to go from firing anyone in any department who might have been involved in the DEI programs, the folks who mistakenly thought diversity and inclusion and equity were positive values, not crimes against the state. The history books will be purged of references to anything that does not ennoble the country. Racism will be erased from the textbooks, slavery was nowhere as bad as some suggest, the Civil War was a fight to protect states’ rights, the indigenous population was given generous reservation lands. Anything other than the official line will be considered a Thought Crime.

Our former enemies will now be our allies. North Korea, Russia, previously stigmatized, are now friends of the regime. Canada and Mexico suddenly are demonized, tariffs placed on them, little more than drug smugglers. Any suggestion of past alliances to the contrary will be erased from the data banks. “Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”

“What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?” Big Brother owns the media, Big Brother controls the executive, the legislative and the judicial. Big Brother Is Watching! We are all immigrants to him. We are all guilty of Thought Crimes. 1984 has finally arrived. Forty years late.

My sense of humor went on strike yesterday. Nothing I could say or do, not even a considerable bump in the minimum wage I pay her, would convince her to come back, not even for a trial run. ‘Where you gonna go?’ I asked in a painfully pleading voice. ‘None of your business,’ she called out over her shoulder. I offered early retirement, vacation time, full health care, but nothing doing. I said at least leave me a phone number where you can be reached. ‘I need you more than ever,’ I admitted. ‘These are terrible times. If a man can’t laugh occasionally, he’ll go insane.’

‘Welcome to the club,’ my sense of humor growled just before slamming the door on the way out. I confess, I haven’t been attentive to my S.O. H.’s needs of late, but I didn’t think things had gotten so far beyond remedy. Sure, I read the papers, newsfeeds, blogs, all things political and yeah, it makes me eternally pissed off seeing my country run by punks and thugs as if they were operating a crime syndicate in a third world country. I mean, I did notice that my chuckles were few and far between, my drinking had picked up a notch, my messages to friends were growing darker, my response to phone solicitors was no longer amused, but I didn’t realize I had slipped into a steady dripping funk. Sinister thoughts were entering my fevered head, fantasies of terrible accidents befalling our dear Leader, subpoenas and impeachment wishes, presidential untreatable syphilis and worse, much much worse.

No wonder my S.O.H. took a hike! What’s funny about wishing harm to someone? Even if you hate the sonofabitch? But of course the corrosive part of hating this guy was that eventually I started hating the people that voted him in. And the politicians who make excuses for him. And the Party that enables this totally undemocratic dickhead. My S.O.H. doesn’t handle that kind of toxin, nothing humorous about it, no great punchline here. The trouble with hatred is it has no room for my S.O.H., none whatsoever, and couples counseling isn’t going to help, no way. We might have stayed together for the children, but … we don’t have kids. So I can’t blame my sense of humor for this. She knew it was time to go. Well before me, I see now. Maybe we can work things out eventually, I’m hoping but not real optimistic. Meanwhile, I’ll just stew in my own bile and trust in the power of a vestigial funny bone. You never know, sometimes life can turn funny again….

Count me in as a huge fan of Donald J. Trump’s mission to make our government more efficient. Obviously it was a wise choice to put the richest man on earth in charge of the effort to weed out incompetency, complacency, graft and just plain sloth. If anyone knows how to downsize, it’s Elon Musk, the billionaire who cut the staff of Twitter to its core. Send him into the Department of the Treasury to root around in its highly classified files on … well, just about everyone. Our social security numbers, our financial records, all that highly sensitive data we change our passwords frequently for and need additional authentication to access ourselves. Is he a robot?

Course, as Department head, Mr. Musk sent a crew into the data banks without security clearances of any kind. I’ll leave it to you if that constitutes incompetence or potential graft (to use information for his personal fiscal aggrandizement), lack of judgement or nefarious activities. Take your pick, he’s fired.

The upper management decision to immediately eliminate USAID left shipments on the docks, in warehouses and on cargo ships. A slower rollout might have prevented this waste but no, incompetence and a reliance on gut instinct left governments and agencies scrambling. Efficiency? Not exactly, but probably the exact opposite. Someone needs to be fired!

We just came out of the worst pandemic since the Spanish Flu so obviously we can stop worrying about future outbreaks, might as well cut out funding for the Contagious Disease Center and the National Institute of Health, not going to need any bogus and toxic vaccines the soon-to-be head of the Department of Health and Human Services has been warning us scientifically infatuated citizens about. If he were already confirmed, we’d have to fire him. Probably could save ourselves some waste of time and reject him beforehand.

When the fires of Los Angeles swept through residential neighborhoods and firefighters ran the hydrants dry, orders went out from the highest office to have the Army Corps of Engineers open the floodgates on the dams to send billions of gallons pouring toward that imperiled city. Unfortunately no one did any research, asked any probing questions, consulted the experts no doubt in line for elimination and so those billions of gallons, unexpected by the downstream farmers, drained into fields that might need that water in the coming droughts of summer. Nothing reached L.A. Incompetence? Mismanagement? Lazy thinking? Absolutely! He should be fired! No questions asked. Pack up your belongings and vacate the White House immediately.