The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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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White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said Thursday that cutting funding to several anti-poverty programs is “one of the most compassionate things we can do.”

These are the days where definitions get re-evaluated, where meaning is relative, where up is sometimes down. Wiretap is not the same as ‘wiretap’, enclosed quotes. One means wiretap, the other means, well, not wiretap. It all depends on what your definition of IS is. Compassionate, adjective: feeling or showing sympathy and concern for others.
Synonyms: sympathetic, empathetic, understanding, caring, solicitous, sensitive, warm, loving

Let’s use it in a sentence, Class: Compassionate conservatives care about the poor and the unemployed. Or another: Republicans are compassionate conservatives because they want to ensure a working mother in Detroit with three kids won’t see her hard earned dollars being spent on Meals on Wheels or Headstart. As Mr. Mulvaney stated in justification for cutting funds to low income programs, the poor would rather see their hard earned money going to beef up the national defense.

I mean, who wouldn’t!?? It boggles the senses to think conservatives even try to sell this logic. Cutting taxes for the poor or giving tax breaks to the wealthy? Which do I think their priority might be? Cutting Medicaid programs so we can upgrade nuclear stockpiles that I thought we were hoping to downsize? In my Alice in Wonderland Universe ‘compassionate conservative’ is an oxymoron. Quotes or no quotes. A person who tells falsehoods, what I call lies, is a liar. If he claims, when confronted with the lie, that he read it in an article that was in, say, Brietbart news which is mostly nothing but unsubstantiated fake news stories, it’s STILL A LIE! Oh, my buddy the liar told me that so it may very well be true. Seriously? Are we in first grade???

Day after goofy day our Comic-in-Chief tweets out a new sketch for Saturday Night Live. OBAMA ASKS BRITAIN INTELLIGENCE TO WIRETAP TRUMP TOWER! CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET OFFICE CAN’T BE BELIEVED! VOTER FRAUD IN MILLIONS, COST ME GREATEST POPULAR VOTE IN HISTORY! INAUGURATION TURNOUT BEYOND BELIEF, BIGGER THAN BARACK OBAMA’S!! WILL RELEASE TAXES WHEN IRS AUDIT IS COMPLETED!!! I GAVE MILLIONS TO CHARITY!!! NO CONFLICT OF INTEREST HOSTING WORLD LEADERS AT MY HOTELS!! I NEVER MET VLADIMIR PUTIN, DON’T EVEN KNOW WHERE RUSSIA IS ON A MAP!!!!!!!

Someone, maybe even the Republicans in Congress, needs to yank this boy out of class, walk him to the prinicipal’s office and reprimand him for constant lying. I know we can’t rap a ruler on his knuckles anymore and we can’t turn his fat little backside over a knee and give him an old fashioned spanking, but how much of this are we going to endure before some adults have had enough? Mr. Ryan, Mr. McConnell, when are you going to be sufficiently embarrassed?

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I just e-mailed a friend who had gone up to Fairbanks, Alaska to see his grandkids and kids. Just said hello basically and how’s the weather? Within a few minutes I got a new feed on my Yahoo news advertising great deals on Fairbanks hotels. Now … I suppose this could just be a cosmic coincidence, a shot in a trillion that maybe I was hoping to take a vacation jaunt up into the north country in winter, catch a little of that minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit and enter the Iditarod with my husky sled dogs.

But … I’m betting my friends at Yahoo are monitoring my every word in hopes of monetizing one or more of them into sponsored ads. I’m growing accustomed to online shopping opening me up to every Amazon algorithmic advertisement based on my curiosities, but I like to think e-mail is more like sending a letter than it is posting on Facebook. Sure, they’re probably like the NSA, CIA and FBI, just collecting metadata, not really reading or listening to actual content. And like our friend Mark Zuckerberg sez, whaddaya got to hide anyway? We should all be open books, transparency is in society’s best interest.

Well, Mark’s best interest anyway. Love ya, Marky! You adorable rich rascal you. Mmmmwaah. You killed that lying press with a billion posts of faux news, you cute little bugger. And now we got a reality TV host as CEO of America, muchas gracias. I noticed, though, that you filed suit in Kauai to keep your estate there private, even built a rock wall to help you hide behind. What gives, little buddy? Whatcha hiding? Whatcha scared of from the peeping masses?

Well, if things get too hot in Kauai, I got some great deals in Fairbanks to help you chill out. Least I could do. Send me your e-mail and I’ll pass them on. Say hi to the mizzus, Mark. And keep yer head down.

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In Sweden there’s a town that just designated one hour for sex at lunch. Seems their childbirth rate is a bit low and maybe morale too so the mayor declared that lunch be turned over to libidinous activity. Good exercise, he added. And, if sexual shenanigans needed any further endorsement, substituting that for lunch should bring the city’s citizens’ weights right down as well. Exercise and diet together, probably cut down on heart attacks by half.

Some wag on the city council wondered what about those who didn’t want to have sex at lunch or maybe didn’t have anyone to have sex with. The mayor was undeterred, suggesting those lonely workers could take a walk instead, something easier to mandate than, say, setting up sex clubs for those sad bereft souls wandering pitifully in the snowy parks while their peers were boffing under quilts in their warm beds.

While this is just a small experiment in social engineering for one town in a northern latitude, it isn’t hard to imagine it spreading like a herpes virus to other industrialized countries. The Japanese tried stretching and exercise breaks but the Swedes may have hit on something much much better for morale in this cubicle infested world most employees feel trapped in. Sure easy to imagine the Danes and the French jumping on the bandwagon, probably a stretch for us tight ass Americans though, especially now that the unions are pretty much gutted. More likely employers in the U.S. would opt for mandatory masturbation. That, or keep the bag lunch as the better option.

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These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry baby, don’t cry
Don’t cry.

So sang Paul Simon on The Boy in the Bubble.

These are the days of lasers in the jungle
Lasers in the jungle somewhere
Staccato signals of constant information
A loose affiliation of millionaires
And billionaires and baby , don’t cry
Don’t cry.

Aw, who’s crying now? Trump’s apologists are all over the jungle these days trying to mop up the mess he left accusing the prior president of wiretapping Trump Tower. Kellyanne Conway, as always the most entertaining of the surrogates designated for bidet overflows, suggested what he meant was that this is the day of wiretapping microwaves, everybody knows that now and that was only one of many possibilities. TV sets, I-phones, dishwashers, baby monitors, talking toilets, who could possibly say for sure which smartass device was doing the surveillance bidding for that lowlife Obama?

She sure didn’t know, but she was not, she insisted with some petulance, Inspector Gadget. Next question? I know what you’re thinking: she’s the mole burrowed in the Trump administration clandestinely working for Saturday Night Live. Deep Comedy. Staccato signals of constant misinformation tailormade for another hilarious sketch.

There is a boy in the bubble, all right, so deeply out of touch with reality it probably should scare the bejabbers out of us, but … what about those poor folks who pinned their hopes to this guy,
It’s a turn-around jump shot
It’s everybody jump start
It’s every generation throws a hero up the pop charts
Medicine is magical and magical is art
The boy in the bubble
And the baby with the baboon heart?

Me, I feel sorry for the baboon.

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