The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Down here on the South End most of us get our ‘news’ the old fashioned way: gossip. Meaning, South Enders, like the rest of the connected world, listen to their cohorts on social media. Their friends don’t lie, or so goes the assumption. A few of us still subscribe to the local lying mainstream media, the Everett Herald, a newspaper like all the others in this digital post-Gutenberg world that struggles to stay afloat. Recently, in a cost cutting measure of last resort, they downsized their comic section.

The real comics, I’m talking about, not the AP or UPI feeds. The funnies. In a matter of nano-seconds the backlash from informed readers was second only to the tsunami in Fukushima. Readers fired off angry letters to the editor, readers canceled their subscriptions, readers wanted to vote which comics were discontinued, readers fumed that their children would never grow up to read newspapers if they couldn’t read Beetle Bailey every morning. Readers were broken hearted.

I suppose if the Herald had discontinued the crossword puzzle and sudoku, they might just as well have shut down their presses, the self inflicted wound would prove too grave to survive. I don’t know what Beetle Bailey or Blondie costs in syndication to print in a daily paper, but I suspect whatever it is, it’s too much judging by the last time I peeked at those zombie funnies which were never funny in 1950 and certainly aren’t now. I wanted to write a letter and say thank you, they needed killing. Course, long ago the paper had dropped my own favorites, funny only to cynical yahoos like myself. And yes, I read the comic section. Or did before it became the Syria of humor, a wasteland of irreparable disaster….

Some days, maybe most, the entire paper seems like a comic section. Presidential tweets attacking Saturday Night Live, presidential advisors pretzelizing the English language to defend their boss’s latest gaffe, the upcoming heavyweight title fight between Kim Jong-Il and Donald J., the Sean Spicer comedy hour, the Paul Ryan budget, on and on, day after day. Who really needs the funnies when politics are so hilarious?

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