The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Okay, the verdict is in, the election is over, it’s all over but the shouting. Or at least the celebration by the billionaires. All of you who voted for the winner, maybe you thought he would unleash capitalism, deregulate the poor hamstrung corporations and bring riches to your small towns and rural communities. Let the captains of industry loose, you figure, and they will pull all of us up on a rising tide that has nothing to do with fake global warming.

Trickle down economics will unleash a flood of wealth, lifting all our boats. Just let the tech boyz and the corporations have their way, unfettered by pesky rules and regulations, and the engines of capitalism will bring untold wealth and prosperity to our land. If government was the problem, the obstacle, the elephant in the boardroom, then by god, government has to be dismantled department by department. Or at the very least it has to be hobbled. Put in charge the most incompetent people possible, fire the deep state employees, drown the damn beast in the bathtub when its size is reduced. Drain the swamp and let the corporations run free. After all, isn’t that what it means to make America great again?

If the rich don’t know how to make money, who does? YOU? No, your job is to get out of the way, let the corporations do their job competently and no doubt whatsoever with your best interests in mind too. If competition was once thought the way to keep your prices down, be advised, it’s a brave new world now. Apple, Google, Nvidia, Microsoft, Tesla, they’re all gobbling up the little companies. Banks are consolidating, grocery chains are buying up the losers, airlines are merging. The New Capitalists aren’t wasting time competing with the hangers-on, they got bottom lines to watch, stocks to tend, CEO salaries to pay. Don’t worry, you’ll get yours too. Eventually. Didn’t we just raise the federal minimum wage? Sure we did. Some states even raised it more than that. The red states didn’t but that’s because they understand the importance of letting business run business, not government run business. Just the way you voted.

Sit back and get ready for your votes to pay dividends. First to the wealthy, sure, but down the road, you’ll get yours. Truth is, you’ll get exactly what you deserve….

Not long ago a friend asked me if I thought the rest of the country was pretty much the same, economically, as the South End. Obviously my buddy needs to get out more once this Covid business recedes enough to allow traveling again. What he was really asking was if most folks were fairly well off in America. Now, to be fair, my pal isn’t exactly in the 1%, he’s more likely down in the bottom quarter, no Social Security, no retirement, still working manual labor under the table at 74 and will be until he dies.

Traveling through the Deep South one year with my father and brother on one of our Trips with Dad, the Old Man mused how in his lifetime most of us boats had risen with the economic tide. He and my mom grew up poor in Northern Maine where nearly everyone was in that same boat, not much water underneath. And of course there was the Great Depression, then World War Two, what some historian yahoos call the Good War. Please leave your college degrees at the door when you leave, guyz….

We got a few leaky dinghies on the South End moored next to the yachts, but most folks don’t have a boat to pee in and some not even a pot to bail with. We’re 99% white bread with the few immigrants working on our lawns then leaving by dark. The South End has a few homeless people, but not many. It has a few millionaires, maybe too many. Rents here are high, real estate is hot, retirees are many and working couples few. I’m no sociologist (although I have a degree in sociology) but no way is the South End representative of the America spread over 3000 miles east of us. We’re white, we’re fairly well off, we’re insular and we’re divided about equally by politics.

I told my friend that parts of America are poor and getting poorer, rural but the farms are played out or bought by agri-corporations, urban with ever marginalized ghettos, suburban with the malls dead and abandoned. The South End is a backwash of a lost American Dream on an island with a rising sea level. If my buddy is any indication, ignorance is bliss. For the rest of us, it may just be a tactic.