The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I was just reading that Amazon has 30,000 non-human employees, what we proletariat call robots. In 2014 Facebook acquired Whatsapp whose worth was 22 billion dollars. The messaging firm had a total of 55 human employees, not that I think they were profit-sharing with them. Google, whose worth is more than most country’s G.D.P., has 60,000 workers compared to GM (worth a tenth of Google) which has 215,000. And you can bet your 401-K GM is on the forefront of automation.

Trump can talk about bringing back the coal mining jobs til the cows come home again, but if anybody thinks employment is going to go up in the land of the digitized, home of the android, they need to adjust their meds. Go ahead and bring those factories back to America’s fruited plain, but don’t expect them to hire us humans. That dream left with the Industrial Age. The discontent from the folks who watched their jobs outsourced to China, Mexico and the robots, well, that resentment is only going to get worse. And the income inequality too.

This is Future Shock rearing its ugly orange head. This is the future roaring up in our rearview way closer than it appears, ready to roar past, curves or not. The folks who think we can close the barn door and wall off the borders, they either need to stop smoking whacky tobaccy or start. Pulling the covers over our heads isn’t really the brightest color in the crayon box. I know, folks are worried about global warming and immigration issues, minimum wage and Black Lives Matter, transgender rights and gun control, abortion restrictions and prayer in the schools. All worthy causes and reasons for concern, granted. But when half the population is thrown out of work, when the 1% who own the wealth become the overlords who wall themselves in armed compounds and patrol the perimeter with drones to protect their largesse from the peasants who suspect injustice is being done to them and their odds of winning the Lottery are actually worse than they ever dreamed, well, all those other issues will take a backseat to the bonfires that light up the purpled mountains majesty.

Like the song sez, the jobs are gone boyz … and they ain’t comin back. And if you think Trump is scary, get ready for what’s coming when people who aren’t stockholders in those companies worth billions with 55 employees can’t feed their families. You might just change your mind about gun control.

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A study cited in the morning’s lying press showed statistics that kids were less likely to do drugs these days. The thesis these researchers had come up with was they were doping themselves on social media, a steady drip of dopamine pleasure, nearly constant in their waking, if somnambulistic, hours. Social media as narcotic….

You live down at the tail end of an island far from the tentacles of Facebook, you forget sometimes you’ve set yourself adrift from the continental shores of 21st century modernity, but as the riptides sweep you away and the land lines tear loose from the walls, those messages from the Mainland become fader and more indistinct, Morse code from telegraph poles rotting in the relentless rains.

For a confirmed xenophobe, this desire to stay in constant contact with strangers and family and friends is bemusing, like stuffing messages in bottles all day long and setting them loose on the tides. I had a buddy back in high school who was a ham radio operator tapping out code to other hamsters overseas and across the globe, who stayed up late in his room on the chance that meteorological conditions were ripe for some far away contact. “I talked to a guy in England,” he would tell me the following morning.

“Whadja talk about?” I’d ask. Invariably, nothing much, just name, serial numbers and rank. Where they lived. Age, maybe. I guess we just have this desire to make contact, to let someone know we’re out there, that we’re not alone. Same reason we send radio signals into space. Same reason we write blogs. Ironically, my buddy the ham radio operator slowly became afraid of human interaction of all kinds, what the shrinks call agoraphobic. I tried getting in touch with him some years after the last time I saw him, but he’d lost his job, moved away from his house in Missoula and now even Google can’t locate him. I imagine him holed up in some desolate place, tapping Morse code late into the comforting night, listening for an answer from folks he’ll never have to meet, all his bottles crashing onto lonesome beaches in places he’ll never see.

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Well, they didn’t like being called Deplorables but I’m not sure they’d have liked being labeled racists either. Or homophobes. Pretty sure they wouldn’t care to be called bigots either. But they’ve elected a guy who feeds their fury and their boundless resentments, a vindictive self-righteous instrument of their revenge. He told them he would be their Retribution and they voted for him to be just that.

Oh yeah, they were sick and tired of the elitists, the East coast yuppies, the Wall Street crowd, the immigrants, the Woke, the trans and the gays and any religion other than theirs. Deplorable? They’ll show you deplorable!

Try this: get rid of foreign aid, eliminate the Department of Education, NOAH, the EPA, half the Department of Agriculture, fire the bureaucrats, deport anyone their Leader takes umbrage to, put totally incompetent sycophants in charge, alienate our allies and suck up to our enemies. How do you like that?

You wanted a Biznessman for Prez, you figured the billionaire who’d gone bankrupt how many times? would be the right fit? Sure, privatize the Post Office, let Musk get rid of his competition for satellites and space travel and EV’s, figure out how some weather company will take the place of NOAH. While you’re at it, ditch the fire and police, just more government, let the private sector sell you protection. Way more efficient, right? Doesn’t take a Harvard professor to figure out government is mostly waste and fraud and incompetence.

And while you’re at it, close the borders, lay tariffs on everything that crosses them, who needs an economist, you got the guy with all the answers. Fortress America! The one true God on the money! Put religion — yours — back in private schools. Get rid of science while you’re downsizing. Vaccines? Who needs em? Scientific research? Don’t make me laugh. Global warming studies? Hell, no, drill, baby, drill!

Slash the IRS too. Why make the rich endure an audit for those bogus exemptions? Social Security must be rampant with abuse, all those 150 year olds collecting your tax dollars. Time to slash and burn, so what if you get your check a little late. If at all….

Deplorables? You tell me. What I think is you’re just ignorant. Time will tell if you’re making America great again … or just breaking its back.

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Rebecca Snowalter runs her own business, the Top to Bottom Cleaning Crew. The crew consists of, well, her. Primarily — and nearly exclusively — the clientele are VRBO and Airbnb leasers, houses all over the island rented out by the day or week to tourists who vacation here. Used to be winters were slow but not sinc Covid kept folks in lockdown. Now everyone wants to travel. Rentl prices soared but Rebecca’s cleaning fees really didn’t, just more profit for the landlords.

Rebecca rents an old double wide down at the Mabane Mobile Village. Rumor has it lately a Canadian consortium may buy the Village lock stock and rain barrel, then jack up the rents. Way of the world, she figures, but she’s not happy about it. These days she’s not happy about much of anything.

“I’ve got to hire help,” she told me the other night at the Pilot House Lounge. “I can’t live on the few clients I have.”

Trying to detour her pessimism, I said, “Maybe the new owner’ll turn the Village into vacation rentals, more work for Top to Bottom.” Rebecca looked at me like I’d just spoken in glossolalia, babbling gibberish about the Promised Land. Or the sweet hereafter, the after being her death.

“Sure,” she said, “and maybe I’ll make a fortune in the next year, buy a house or maybe two to live in, sell the business and retire in Costa Rica, live happily ever after.”

She was imagining what it would be like to find affordable rents here on the island, the same island the millionaires have found the last decade or two. The only cheap rents were being converted to VRBO’s, vacation rentals five times what the owners charge for yearly. “I’ll be living in my car before long,” she moaned.

What can you say? Hope you got a big car? You won’t have to cook for yourself? Think of it as road trip vacation every day? Instead, I just said, “Next drink’s on me, Rebecca.”

The South End — might not be a paradise for the poor anymore.

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There are plenty of folks who would gladly send their hard-earned dollars to the TV ads for abused dogs and abandoned cats but would never give one thin dime to some charity that helps us humans. Which, in all fairness, is their right. Their money, their choice of charities. We can’t save the world so pick a cause and hope it does some good, maybe even makes a difference.

The Tyee Rescue Farm, just down the road from the now shuttered Tyee Store, take in unwanted dogs and cats, injured raccoons, eagles with broken wings, lost possums, unsaleable ostriches, crippled llamas, sick parrots, three legged squirrels, well … they take in whatever critter or creature gets dropped off by its owner or the Island County deputies, the concerned citizens and even Jim Jensen, the official ‘animal control officer.’ Martha Petersen started taking in strays back about 1975, built a small kennel, taught herself basic veterinary skills and within a year she was swamped with a veritable zoo of inmates, detainees, patients, the unloved and the unwanted. Which, when her husband John left her the night she drove to the State Park to retrieve an injured deer, she became too. Unloved, I mean. John said he’d had enough. “You love that rabbit more than me,” he accused her before she shut the door on both their way outs.

Martha has told that story to most every volunteer and staffer who’s helped her build her 10 acres to what it is today. Kennels and barns, sheds and walking paths, a small hospital, aviaries and pig pens. “He said I loved that rabbit with the ear half torn off more than him,” she’d narrate, immobilizing a crow’s bent wing or applying antibiotic to a raccoon’s dog-eaten tail while the newest volunteer held the injured beast. “And you know,” she’d say, pausing for effect like she always did, “he was right. The animals people bring in when they don’t want them anymore … you know what? They’re better off here.”

Love, all I can say, is love. Martha, I guess, has more than most. John? I’m betting he doesn’t have a dog or a cat or gimpy alpaca. He probably counts himself the lucky one. Maybe they both are.

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