The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Well, Mark Zuckerberg has told us for years that privacy is a thing of the past. In fact, he thinks we should embrace a completely public existence and just to help us out, Facebook opened up its vaults of your personal information to a political team called Cambridge Analytica working for Donald Trump. Cambridge Analytica harvested –I love that word — harvested data from 50 million Facebook users to use in the 2016 presidential campaign. Thanks, Mark!

Facebook attorneys point to the disclosure clauses all Facebook suckers agreed to in defense of their lack of security. You signed up, you gave up your rights, read the fine print, boys and girls. Somehow, though, I don’t think a legalistic defense is going to help these folks whose vision of the company apparently never included a premonition of what was coming. Russian bots, faux news stories, data mining, alt-right hoaxes, phony baloney trollers, political operatives and shady ‘friends’.

I have my own problem with the idea of Facebook as a public forum, but why air that opinion one more time? If folks want to sex-text, if the neighbors want to reveal to any and all what their favorite pizza topping is, if this is the way families and friends communicate in the 21st century, be my guest. Mark’s your guy. Me, I didn’t move lock stock and crackerbarrel down to the South End of a little known island so I could tell you my secrets. It’s why we call em secrets. And no, I don’t think it’s a crime against society to keep my privacy. Even if, as we all know, the security cameras, the GPS cellphone tracking, the Google algorithms, the entire tilt of the future is toward eliminating the individual and celebrating the public. Big Brother is definitely here, he just turned out to be a corporation, not the government, not the Deep State. And all he asked, in return for instant communication and information, was that you ‘friend’ him. Trust him. Serve him. Obey him. Read the fine print, it’s right there between the lines….

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I’ve been cooling my heels in the Tire Shop in town getting a flat tire fixed. Sitting here in the communal waiting room I got pulled into the crackerbarrel talk with a few fellow customers when the palaver turned to government excess, corporate greed, pharmaceutical warnings, health care costs, pretty much the gamut of modern grievances in this dystopian world we now live in.

Did YOU know, for instance, that the government was dropping chemicals into the atmosphere to halt global warming? No? Or that John Wayne’s lung cancer was caused by nuclear testing outside Las Vegas where he rode his horse? You could see the mushroom clouds from your hotel room on the Strip.

Did you know that arthritis was the result of wheat harvested after being sprayed with Roundup, that gluten intolerance was actually chemical poisoning? No, you hadn’t heard that? Did you realize the EPA Superfund cleanup of the Duwamish River in Seattle got hauled a few miles north and dumped off Magnolia? You didn’t?

I bet you also didn’t know the oyster farms up north were so polluted they couldn’t grow baby oysters. No? Actually, it’s partly true, but not because of pollution, it’s because of acidification of the ocean. Bet you the ‘chemtrail’ is causing it. Along with celiac disease, irritable bowel syndrome, autism and presidential neurosis.

My tire repair didn’t take long, but enough time to cover some fairly major conspiracies, from government experiments on us rodents to ‘Deep State’ cabals. My new friends didn’t trust anybody or anything. Although … they did like their health care which cost way too much, but it was better than what Trump and his pals were going to do. If I had said I liked rainbows, they’d have told me they were oil sheens reflecting off the atmospheric poisons, a sure sign I would have rheumatoid arthritis in a month. The world was a mess and its leaders were evil. We were doomed, that was pretty much the gist of things. One guy said he was spending his grocery money to get the struts on his Honda fixed, had to do all four, cost a fortune. Damn car companies anyway! Damn tire place too!

My tire guy saved me finally, said he’d put my spare back up under the truck bed if I showed him where I’d hidden the gizmo that hoisted it up. I said I’d do it when I got home but he said he might as well do it, save me crawling on my back later. When the spare was in place, I asked what I owed. “On the house,” he said. “No charge, sir.” You know and I knew too after listening to my new pals in the waiting room, some kind of tire conspiracy was at work. I’m still trying to figure out what their game is.

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