The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Maybe some of you were a little busy scanning the local Help Wanteds in the Stanwoodopolis Gazette this week and missed the post on X calling for resumes for the new Government Efficiency Panel headed up by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy (not a real swami). If so, there’s still time to apply. I’m not sure how many high IQ small government revolutionaries there are out there, but I can bet not too many are looking for 80 plus hour work weeks for an efficiency department that starts out with not one Director, but, efficiency be damned, two. Two heads are better than one, right?

Label me cynical but somehow I suspect salaries for the position won’t compare to what a genius entrepreneurial type might earn in a start-up. Or a hedge fund. Hey, all you bored high IQ retirees, the government is looking for you anti-government types hoping to fill the long days with assignments to seek out new inefficiencies and lost departments, to boldly go where no bureaucrats have gone before.

Sure sounds like fun to me. Of course, I lack the high IQ requirement. And that 80 plus hour work week is fairly anathema to a guy who hasn’t worked a full time job since 1974. Although maybe I could fudge the curriculum vitae to make that part time graveyard shift as an orderly in a hospital two nights a week back in the ‘80’s sound a bit more work obsessive. Okay, maybe not. The revolutionary requirement seems a little out of reach too, even though us old hippies like to think we had a bit of the radical in us, at least back in the ‘60’s. Not so much these days, although … this last election percolated my blood.

I wish the Bright Boyz all the luck in the world bringing the government to heel. And even though I won’t be sending in my job application I would like to offer some advice from the South End peanut gallery. Start at the top, guyz, I think you have a low IQ lazy golf-playing yahoo you might want to take a good hard look at.

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When I was about butt high to a bumblebee, we lived in Mississippi. Then we moved to the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina to live in a ranger station back in the Pisgah National Forest. Some years later we headed further south and moved to the hill country of North Georgia. I lived in the Deep South from the time I was three until I was thirteen. You never lived there yourself, you can’t really imagine what the South is. It’s different, is what it is.

My best friend in 6th grade invited me to come along with him to his grandparents’ for a day on the farm and a Sunday dinner with the family. I said sure and we all rode in Tom’s dad’s station wagon into the red clay country south of where we lived. Once we arrived Tom and I headed into the pasture to explore the countryside, getting admonitions from his folks to be back in an hour for supper, supper being lunch. All I remember of that walk was being chased by the biggest meanest bull I’d ever seen. Tom said Run! and boy we sure did. I’ve never thought of cattle as benign ever since.

So later at the dinner table, after grace, we told the assembled family how we narrowly escaped death by Brahma as we hunkered down to eat okra and cornbread and ham and pickled beets and so many vegetables from the garden it looked like a pantry from the Garden of Eden. I may have noticed the grandfather glaring at me, kind of a contemptuous stare, but I tried not to, just ate my food and complemented Tom’s grandmother and thanked them all for inviting me for lunch. Supper, I mean. Somewhere about the first round of dessert he pointed a fork over my direction and asked, “Boy, where you from?”

“Dad, don’t start up now,” Mr. Vandiver, Tom’s pop cautioned. The old man said he was just askin the boy a question, and he turned his gaze on me again. I felt my apple pie turning to cement in my mouth. “I’m from Gainesville,” I said and he shook his head no. “You come from up north with that Yankee accent,” he corrected me. “Yessir, I do. I lived in Mississippi, North Carolina, California, Michigan and I was born in Maine.”

“A Yankee,” he muttered, “in my house. Never thought I’d live so long to see the day …”

That supper table got real quiet real fast. Tom’s father was shaking his head sadly but he wasn’t about to add much to the conversation, not at his own father’s house. Later on the long ride home he told me he was sorry it turned out this way, but Gen. Sherman had marched through those hills 100 years ago burning and pillaging and some folks had long memories. His father was one.

You think maybe another fifty years later, folks down there might have forgotten the War. But you would be wrong. They don’t fly the Confederate flag because they forgot the damn war. Some of it might be racism, plenty of it is resentment the North fought them and won, even more is that they think a way of life, a cultural heritage was stolen from them that left them poor. I have no doubt there are more than a few places still where no Yankee has crossed the front door in a century and a half. And just like the bulls, I give them a wide b

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In 1973 I worked at a dog pound in Madison, Wisconsin. What we called a Humane Society. We adopted 40 % of our mutts … meaning, we killed 60% of the animals, the correct euphemism being euthanized. The national average was 25% adopted so we patted ourselves on the back. My minimum wage job was to clean puppy cages and help kill critters. Let’s just say it’s a short career track unless you’re a practicing sadist, which I am not.

In fact, I adopted three dogs myself, maybe not a big deal if I lived on a country estate with acreage for the hounds to chase rabbits and deer for days on end, but I lived in a second story one bedroom apartment over a TV repair shop. Hard to believe now, looking back. No, not three dogs in a small apartment. That there used to be TV repair shops. When’s the last time you remember fixing a television rather than buy a new one?

One day at the pound they needed me to man the front desk, something I’d never done previously, something that might just lead me up a rung on the promotional ladder. I asked what was expected of me up here at the front door and was told I would direct folks to the kennels where they could inspect their future pets. Beats shoveling shit, I thought.

My first encounter with the public was a woman bringing in her old dog and its 4 new puppies. “I can’t take care of these,” she said, pointing at the little wiggling pups in a cardboard box. I asked if maybe she might’ve considered spaying as an option. She shook her head. “Costs money,” she answered. “So you want to leave the mother too? Hasn’t she been with you awhile?” I asked. “Yeah, I’m tired of her too.” Oddly, this pissed me off.

I picked up the phone to our intercom. “Larry,” I said, “fire up the incinerator. We got five to torch.” My dog whisperer seemed suddenly alarmed. Shocked even. “You gonna just kill em?” she cried.

“Whadja think?” I said cruelly. “You think people are lined up for an old dog and her litter?”
About this time Larry emerged from the back, looked at the box of pups and asked, “These?” I nodded. Larry looked at the woman with measured contempt, picked up the box and went into the back where I knew he’d unload them into the puppy cages. He’d be back for the mother shortly. I started filling out the paperwork the way a guard at Dachau would, dispassionately. Name. Address. Reason for wanting your pet killed. Basic stuff.

I guess the woman called later to see if her dogs were toast because Mike, my supervisor, called me into his office. He explained — patiently — how our job was not to judge, our job was to take in unwanted animals so they weren’t drowned in pillowcases in the lake or shot behind the barn. “We want them to bring them to us,” he sighed, painfully aware I was unfit for further front desk duty.

I lasted a few more weeks. Larry lasted a month. There are, I’ve learned, some jobs that aren’t a good ‘fit’. My trouble, of course, was that was pretty much true of all jobs.

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Well, the election came and went, ending with a whimper, not a bang. Contrary to what me and my snowflake pals figured, Trump won fair and square even though he’d been saying for months the contest was rigged. Unless he won. Hurray for democracy! Hooray for the will of the people! And a hearty congratulations to a man impeached twice, convicted of felonies, charged with other crimes that will now be thrown out, indicted for trying to overthrow the government after the election he lost. Hurrah for the Yew Ess Aye!

Plenty of us on the sore losing side will no doubt spend our misery parsing the votes, question the tactics or blame the candidate and the old guy who waited too long to step off. We’ll scratch our bewildered heads and lick our wounds, maybe even set our hair on fire and pour salt in those wounds. We’ll ask ourselves what kind of evangelical votes for a criminal, an adulterer, a man wholly lacking in religious belief? We’ll wonder why the rural red states would vote for an urban billionaire who lowers taxes on the rich and cuts programs for the poor, most of those in their homelands. We’ll boggle over women voting for a rapist and an avowed pussy grabber. We’ll be amazed the Palestinians voted for a pro-Netanyahu yahoo. And shake our collective heads over Latinos and folks of color casting a vote for a xenophobic racist. Call Puerto Rico an island of garbage and they still side with the guy. So much to process, so much to learn. We’ll chase our tails in search of clues and answers, but believe me, it’s a waste of time. My time anyway.

I don’t think the folks who voted Trump back in for another crack at our Constitution are deplorables. The guy gained votes from young people casting their very first votes, from Latinos and blacks, legal immigrants, from women, from men, from whites. Especially whites. Hell if I know what they’re thinking. Maybe they just don’t believe the news. Or don’t watch or read any news. Maybe they don’t believe in science, education, the government itself. Or maybe the price of gas was all it took, the cost of a dozen eggs, how high rent became, what a house costs. The economy, stupid.

Maybe they just want the borders secured, illegals sent packing to where they came from. Possibly — probably — they’re sick of all the woke talk, the pronoun nazis, the sex changers, the statue removals, the safety nets for people other than themselves, Hollywood liberals, sex ed, the smart ass college elites.

Sure, run some studies, conduct more polls, doublecheck the demographics, see what’s at the bottom of this. They say a country gets the leaders it deserves. Which seems about right this time. Some of us just don’t really know what country this is. We live in our lefty bubbles, we listen to NPR and PBS, we think because we graduated from a university we got the news. We’re comfortable in a house we own, us and the bank. We drive cars that get decent mileage. We’re smug and complacent in our inflation proof lives. We’re happy and we can’t for the life of us understand why the others aren’t. We just want to help them, can’t they see that? Can’t they see that??