The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Maybe I live too far from Rome. Which, these crazy days of politics gone mad, might be viewed as a blessing from the gods. But unfortunately I’m a news junkie and even worse, I care about the world beyond the South End’s porous borders. As hard as it is to believe, I’m watching the increasingly probable return of Donald J. Trump, convicted felon. A man indicted on so many counts, we’ve all lost count. Impeached but not convicted, twice. We all know who this guy is and yet …

What I cannot comprehend from my perch at the end of an island at the far reaches of the continent is how this election seems to have lost focus on the real issues of our time. Trump is gaining traction with the Hispanic vote. Doesn’t matter, apparently, that he calls the immigrants criminals, insane, rapists, murderers. Trump is polling better with the Black voters. Doesn’t matter that for a decade his dog whistles underly a racism that ought to disqualify him for any black votes other than Clarence Thomas’s. The young voters, all those Gen Whatevers, have begun to swing his way. Doesn’t matter that the greatest threat to them is climate change and if Trump wins, it’s more drill baby drill. Bring back coal, kill the EV automobile, forget about cutting emissions. He’s even gaining with the women, maybe they’re tired of the Me Too Movement and a guy who grabs crotches, rapes women and pays hush money to porn stars isn’t as bad as they thought.

How hard is it to make this case? He blames the deficit on Biden but was the one to cut corporate taxes. And wants to cut them further. He wants to put tariffs back on Chinese imports. How difficult is it to point out the average household will pay even more than what inflation has already cost us? The economy, despite Trump’s dire prediction, isn’t going down the toilet. It’s in better shape than most other countries, employment is growing, wages are up, inflation is down.

I guess our attention spans, shrunk to a few seconds max by Instagram and X, certainly can’t recall when this pre-felon advocated treating Covid with bleach and other quack remedies. Only one million Americans died of that disease but we’ve forgotten by now. Big deal … and the next pandemic he’ll outlaw masks and isolation.

January 6th was far too long back for most of us Inattentives to remember. Mobs hunting our senators and representatives, howling to hang Pelosi and Pence, killing and beating a few capitol police. What the right wing calls a tourist imbroglio, nothing to see there; in fact, given the chance, the instigator will pardon the convicted.

The list of outrages is too long, too depressing, too egregious. But this country, apparently amnesiac, may vote him back in. It takes your breath away. And it will take more than that before his next term ends. Assuming it ever ends.

Billy Jean ran the art gallery down here at the aesthetically swollen South End, the only paid employee. The artists who showed their wares could pay extra commission or work 10 hours a week. Since they rarely sold their art, the extra commission was zip so why should they work? The first year the co-op, the South Fork Art Barn, was closed most days when no one was willing to sit in the vacant Second Hand Shoppe they’d leased. Finally, after mounting rental bills, the South End Arts Council voted to hire a staff person to do what they wouldn’t.

Billy Jean interviewed for the minimum wage, no benefits job and was hired the same day, primarily by dint of NOT being an artist herself, the main criterion the Council set for qualifications. Not having been around artists, B.J., who thought the position would mostly be running the store, tracking sales and receipts, closing up at the end of the day, well, she never dreamed the job actually was Ego Masseuse. The first day Sarah Jenkins came in early to demand her watercolors be moved front and center where they would cheerily greet the customers before they decided to leave empty handed. Billy Jean nodded and smiled, but eventually pled ignorance of the rules by virtue of being the New Hire. She would, she vowed, check with the Council and the Co-op Board. Course, it turned out the Board had their art front and center so a rule was made on-the-spot to keep the current display configuration.

The first week various grumpy artists brought forth their complaints, moved paintings or hung new ones, argued their cases with Billy Jean and wished her luck. Meaning, sell my work! By Friday she felt like a vise had scrunched her ears into one auditory pancake of pain. She was, she told her newly unemployed plumber husband Brent, nothing but a glorified Cat Herder. Brent, still in shock over his sudden layoff, told her she’d get the hang of it, just stick with it, Honey, we need the money, a refrain she later could have embroidered in needlepoint and hung front and center by her own front door and called it art or literature or just a motto for the rest of the South End.

Barely a week has gone by since the Great Debate Debacle, two old geezers in a WWF Smackdown with wet towels. One ranting and ducking, the other just a deer in the headlights, all in all a sad spectacle most of my libtard snowflake friends turned off in less than 15 cringe-worthy minutes. Me, I stuck it out til the end, no doubt hoping Joe’s Red Bull would kick in and he would respond with outrage to some of the lies and evasions of his goofy opponent, but I was more than disappointed, alarmed even that this election looked like a gimme to the goof.

Wildfires are raging across the country in the unprecedented heat waves. Mostly hair on fire among the Democrats wondering what now? What now, indeed. Their candidate, the one who says he was jetlagged after his European D-Day junket, plans to fight on. But … maybe only from 10-4, no more evening interviews, debates or, well, much of anything beyond milk and cookies. So what to do, what to do?

I like Joe, I really do. I loved my Old Man too but when he reached 100, I understood he’d gone past his expiration date a few years earlier. And yeah, I get that Joe surrounds himself with good people, something Donald Trump wouldn’t understand when all he requires is absolute loyalty to Donald Trump. Joe could manage the office another four years with the folks he picks, I have no doubt. But so could plenty of others who are younger, more vibrant and energetic. There comes a time when a wise person should know he needs to step down. Joe has reached that time. His legacy is secure.

But if he pulls a Ruth Bader Ginsburg here and lets that moment pass allowing the country to vote for a vindictive, narcissistic, anti-democratic, probably insane authoritarian who is backed by legions of mewling sycophants, well, Joe, your legacy will be quite different. It’s time to take one for the team. For the country. Take a rest. You deserve it.

was watching an IBM ad the other night. They were touting their genius machine WATSON as an example of how we humans were going to succeed in the future. By out-thinking our competition. WATSON can beat any human in chess. WATSON can whip anybody in Jeopardy. WATSON is as smart as we are and getting smarter every day. We just need to make smarter WATSONS if we want to get anywhere in this brave new world. Down here on the South End we aren’t likely to cobble together an artificial intelligence. Or even much of a natural one, judging by our track record so far.

IBM is creating machine intelligence. WATSON is a machine, built by us, programmed by us, in service to us. In a couple years WATSON will build itself, program itself, improve itself and surpass its original creators in no time flat. The mega corporations and the defense departments of the world think this is the leg up for their profits and their success. WATSON and his brethren will simply out-think their competition. Trouble is, we’ll be the machines’ competition. Well, not much competition, judging by the South End, but hey, even MIT, Stanford, NASA, you name it, they’ll be left in the silicon dust too.

We live in a world of machines now. Already machines run machines. Computers run factories, control the banking, game the stock markets, kill the enemy with their drones. They live in our office, control our entertainment, answer questions on our phone, connect us to other humans who have them too. We’re dependent already even though we think we’re boss. We even got em down here on the South End. Okay, we’re mostly using them for e-mail and Google. But we take them for granted already, just a couple decades since Bill Gates put the pods under everyone’s bed.

You think maybe I’m a Luddite. You think I’m paranoid. You think I don’t trust IBM or Microsoft or Apple to make the future a very comfortable place for me. You think we should just let them be smarter. Out-think the competition! You think maybe this is just another tool, like a hammer or a sewing machine or a spinning jenny, something we use to better our lives.

But I’ll tell you something: a hammer doesn’t get smarter. A hammer doesn’t figure out it could make next-generation hammers that self-feed, that replicates those with built-in mobility, that deduces new uses for nails, that realizes its potential as a weapon and identifies the new enemy. A hammer isn’t going to out-think even South Enders. Okay, maybe a couple of us. WATSON isn’t your friend, all I’m saying … and he won’t be your servant much longer.

So I’m sitting in the South End Clinic filling out paperwork they lost the last and only visit many years ago … when a young guy comes in with what he tells the receptionist is a very bad cut on his hand from work. His hand is wrapped in a dirty handkerchief held in place with duct tape. The receptionist explained they don’t do that kind of emergency — he’d need to drive himself to the next clinic down the road in Stanwoodopolis. About 10 to 15 miles.

But wait … did he have insurance, she asks. He did, but then he was told the clinic about two pints of hemoglobin away wouldn’t accept the insurance he had. Could he drive 15 to 20 miles further?

Healthcare, at least from my seat in the waiting room, seemed hazardous to this guy’s health, if he even makes it the 40 mile drive before blacking out at the wheel. No one asked him how bad the cut was, whether fingers were missing, if a transfusion was necessary. I know it’s not an emergency room, but it is, supposedly, a part of the health care system.

My brother, back in our days together in college, wanted to be a doctor … until the night he did a drunken back flip and hit the radiator in his dorm room with his head. His roommate ran him to the University ER where he sat for a couple of hours with other patients bleeding and vomiting and oozing fluids. By the time he got stitched up he had changed his major from Pre-Med to Don’t Know. Probably good to learn he was squeamish around pain and blood before he interned.

Sitting my turn at the South End Clinic, I know how he felt. Trouble was, I was a patient. On the South End we’ve always relied more on Self-Reliance than health insurance. But sadly, the time comes to all of us when we need outside help. Course, chances are good they’ll tell you to go further on up the road. Keep the gas tank full is what I’d suggest. And carry a tourniquet.