The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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I live in the only industrialized country in the entire world that doesn’t have universal health care. Instead, we have privatized health care, the kind that’s supposed to bring the full firepower of capitalism’s vaunted competition to bear on prices, meaning, we, the citizens, are shoppers in the medical market. It’s like buying a couch or a car … except far far more complicated. I also live in the only advanced nation in the civilized world that rejects the science behind global warming. Not only rejects it, but now thumbs its nose at the rest of the world.

Today our president started the process of rescinding EPA restrictions on American power plants. With a stroke of his mighty pen, he proclaimed a New Day for coal powered plants and for coal mining jobs. He’s making America great again. If only he realized how complicated this will be!! If only he’d checked to see what natural gas plants cost now to run. Or how many jobs are in the alternative energy field compared to coal mining and gas and oil extraction. But no, he’s bringing back coal, making America, if not great again, what it was 50 or 100 years ago.

What’s next, you ask? Cotton farming and slavery? Kodak and the print film camera? The slide rule? We going to raise buffalo to hunt, old growth cedar to log, 80 pound salmon to fish?

I wish the world was the Way it Was when I was a kid, a white middle class kid anyway. I wish technology wasn’t moving so fast most of us feel shocked and stupid and scared. I wish the world would get small again, about the size of the South End and its environs. I wish I wasn’t bombarded with the news, faux and real, 24/7, maybe give me time to read a book or listen to music. I wish there was a job for everyone that paid well, except maybe the Irish/Jewish/Eastern European/ Hispanic immigrants who’d work for cheap all those jobs we need but don’t want to do ourselves.

I wish America was the fantasy on Roy Rogers and Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver. I wish Ike was still president. But you know what, it wasn’t all that great for a lot of us and it won’t be like that again, I don’t care if the buffalo roam the plains by the millions. We hunted them to death, we killed the Indians that needed those bison to live and I can tell you with no little certainty, those coal jobs aren’t coming back either. Who’s kidding who here?

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Back when I first came to Seattle and Gomorrah, I had a buddy who lived in a dive apartment that was going to be sold and remodeled. They were tossing the old 1940’s era refrigerators the junkies and alcoholics had used for decades and my pal asked me if I wanted to go in with him on the capitalist venture of hauling, cleaning and selling these vintage frigidaires for fun and profit. Not being employed and in full possession of a half ton Chevy pickup, I said sure. And by that afternoon we owned 60 reefers of various stages of mold and decomposition.

I had access to a garage none of my six roommates used, so we stored them there after a couple days lugging them down 2 or 3 flights of stairs near downtown, then hauling them up to the university district where I rented a room in a house full of students. Each one got cleaned, disinfected and plugged in to see if it still worked. They all did. Tough units, those old Kelvinators and Frigidaires. Not particularly efficient, but they’d run until the next century if you asked them to. All we asked them to was run for the 30 days we offered as a ‘quality assurance guarantee’. If we’d been savvier biznessmen, we would’ve offered a 2 year service plan like Sears. Course, Sears is in about the same shape today as some of those refrigerators were back then.

Our ‘advertising’ campaign was simple in those pre-Craigslist times — we put flyers on telephone poles.
$30 30 DAY GUARANTEE FREE DELIVERY CALL THIS #
The Freon filled appliances sold like hotcakes, mostly to little bistros and coffee shops and student renters and our friends. I kept one for my room after my roommates started stealing my beer and food from the communal fridge. Then I locked my room. I guess they were young communists, share and share alike, mine is theirs. They weren’t bad people, but I learned why communism doesn’t work unless the others do and you don’t.

By the end of a month we’d sold every last unit. We made about $800 dollars each, more than I made the entire previous year, maybe two. My buddy said maybe we should’ve grabbed the stoves too, but by then it was too late and our experimental entrepreneurism came to an abrupt end when demand outstripped product. Probably lucky for both us Appliance Kings.

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It’s been raining here in the land of rain, the Pacific Northwest. Even here on the banana belt of the South End, the rains are biblical. Water is coming off the hillsides, down driveways, off the bluffs, over our clogged gutters. The gutters, well, they’re not really unusual since I’m a little slothful when it comes to keeping them clean. The bonsai trees seem to thrive up there, if nothing else. But the bluffs, not ready for this kind of constant deluge, they’re slip-sliding away.

I just put the finishing touches on the new oars I built for a rowboat I found escaped from its moorage in one of last winter’s storms. It had a 1979 Arizona registration number so we could, if we wanted, surmise it had journeyed through deserts and over mountains, blown by sandstorms and avalanches, all the way to Puget Sound where I found it washed up a mile north of my beach. It kind of looked like it had had a rough voyage, but hey, any boat in a storm, I say, so I hauled it back to our bulkhead, patched it up and used it for crabbing last summer.

My new oars needed one final fitting before I attached the oarlocks so I was taking them down to the beach for a tryout … only to discover a landslide of trees, blackberries and a million years of sediment layers had sloughed off and buried the bulkhead stairs and smashed my twelve foot dinghy into a four foot crumpled tin can. So much for fitting oars for that compacted aluminum scow. Easy come, easy go, as the philosophers say.

I stood there awhile in stupefied wonder, staring at my wrecked rowboat and at the naked bluff where water was still seeping along a clay layer, threatening further mayhem, maybe even treating me like it did my boat. A watersogged peninsula of sand hovered precariously 50 feet above me, ready to let loose any minute, so I decided to abandon my nautical dreams and just get myself and my oars out of harm’s way.

The weather folks are predicting rain for the rest of the week. I’m predicting landslides. The neighbors on the bluff are suddenly alarmed, I guess just now noticing that the banks aren’t stable. My second prediction is that by next week we’ll see a new crop of FOR SALE signs across the road. That, or maybe I’ll have beachfront property soon if the monsoons don’t stop.

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So little by little, tweet by tweet, you’ve come to grips with the sad reality that Donald J. the Trump is king of America. Hard, isn’t it? Sleepless nights, muffled sobs of despair, an inchoate but ever present anxiety, a mounting anger and a refusal to fully accept this harsh new reality. You thought, with Obama winning the second term, we’d turned a corner in this country. Oh, racism had reared its ugly head again, but … we were a pluralistic liberal society after all, we’d solve these vexing problems.

Just like you, I didn’t see this coming. Sure, I’d listened to Hot Talk Radio and those rating-hungry demagogues. I predicted Trump beating the Rhinos, but I sure didn’t see him winning the Whole Enchilada. I couldn’t imagine it. But … no need to tell you, unless you’ve been self-medicating too hard, he did. I’m not going to reiterate the man’s foibles, you can read it in the lying press every damn day. What we’ve all got to face, what we all need to understand, is we’re in a culture war and we’re losing. The kids aren’t buying into Trump and so if you’re willing to wait a decade or two, well, the tide will turn once again.

But me, I waited through the anti-war Civil Rights 60’s, the Nixon 70’s, the Reagan 80’s, got hopeful in the Clinton 90’s, lost faith again in Bush’s war years, then grew optimistic with Obama. Now we get the backlash. Easy to say it’s just the old white guyz, those Fox News addicts who think their Anglo country is being over-run by immigrants and welfare queens, transsexuals and women in the military, who call themselves the real patriots because they think this is a Christian nation and by God they’re Christians even if they never go to church on Sunday and they’ve made Hate a breakfast cereal to wake up to every day of their unhappy lives.

You don’t win the culture war by staying in the closet. Ask your gay friends. Black Lives Matter has it right. The Occupy Movement had it right. Folks don’t like uppity blacks? Tough. They think men shouldn’t sleep with men? Tough. They think Hollywood is a bunch of neo-commies? Fine. They think immigration is a doorway for terrorists? Wake up. They want to make America great again? Welcome to the future. We won’t be going back to Ozzie and Harriet, Ike and Tricky Dick. The America that’s great is the one that honors innovation, fresh ideas, new blood. It’s the America that’s inclusive, welcoming, democratic and optimistic. And yeah, it’s the America that’s willing to fight back against the bigots, the small minded, the xenophobic and the misogynistic, the America that has nothing to fear but the fearmongers themselves. I say sharpen your pitchforks, we’re in this fight for real now and I for one don’t plan to lose.

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