The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Having endured a flickering lightbulb in our walk-in closet for months, one that would, if you hung around awhile, kick up to full brightness, I decided to bite the bullet and replace the damn thing. Couldn’t see what I was doing down there, socks didn’t match, shirts put on backwards, kind of like living in a cave before rural electrification. I climbed up on a chair to reach the fixture and unscrewed one of the first ice cream cone fluorescents that came out back in the last century.

I went up to another closet, this one with no lights whatsoever, and dug out the box of LED’s that I’ve been using to slowly upgrade every light fixture in the house and shack. Went back down to the cave, screwed the bulb in, one that looks exactly like the old incandescents, and voila, the closet lit up like a dressing room in Las Vegas. Whoever invented LED’s should get as much recognition as Tom Edison, far as I’m concerned. Bright, efficient and I’ll probably never change that bulb as long as I live. What’s not to like?

My President, that’s what. This week he rescinded the Obama era edict to phase out the wildly inefficient incandescent light bulb. If Obama had required we ban kerosene lamps, I’m sure the Trumpster would be advocating a return to those or whale oil lanterns. Nothing is too anti-sensible for our boy. Bring back the coal jobs, drill for oil in the Arctic Wilderness Refuge, build the pipelines for sandpit oil, spurn the climate talks with our allies. I mean, I love the 20th century myself and I call myself a Luddite when it comes to a lot of so-called modern conveniences, but c’mon, embracing plastic straws and incandescent lightbulbs, let it go, man, let it go.

And while we’re at it, how about cutting down on the hairspray? We got holes in the ozone that are widening faster than the seas are rising, probably because of that ozone killing spray you douse yourself with every 15 minutes, proud as a peacock to have a few hairs left to spray at all, I suppose.

Go take a long hard look in the make-up mirror, Don. LED’s might offer closer inspections. Course, you said this week that the newfangled lights make you look orange. I bet they do. Maybe that’s the real issue….

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I read in the lying, failing press today that gun sales in the Don’t Tread on Me, Yew Ess Aye, were up 15%. All I can figure is the buyers were inspired by the recent burst in mass killings. That, or they have deduced that if they own a semi-automatic military assault rifle, when the next Democratic president is elected, they will be asked to sell it back for a handsome profit in a government buyback.

When Obama was elected gun sales went through the roof, folks so alarmed that he would take away white folks’ weapons. Ragin Cajun Roy, down at the South End Pawn and Loan, claimed he was mostly in the arms trade back in those heady years. “Hell, Skeeter,” he told me when I asked how biz was, “I get six guns a day coming in from yahoos scared the damn government’s going to confiscate them soon as Obama gets in office and I sell six to the boys who think it’s high time to stockpile weapons. They think the revolution is coming.”

Well, Obama didn’t set his sights on gun ownership, looks like in hindsight, but there’s something deeply paranoid in the Heartland, apparently. The NRA is worried, that’s for sure. And a few Republicans can see the writing on the bullet sprayed walls of high schools and tabernacles. Gun regulations are like whisky prohibition back in the early last century. The men want firearms and firewater, the women want to feel safe in their homes and know their children are safe in their schools. It’s a gender schism, all right. And I don’t know about you, but down here in the shooting ranges of the South End, not too many of the ladies are packing.

Hunting seems to have gone out of favor too. We let the deer munch merrily on our gardens and orchards and flower beds rather than fill the freezer with venison. Once in awhile we hear the soft pop of AR-15 gunbursts, not exactly reassuring, but this is, after all, the country. Or so I tell the mizzus who always seems agitated by gunfire, can’t say why. She might be thinking of my old buddy Bipolar Jim who visited recently, manic as a meth addict, then hurried back to his home in Chicago to buy an assault rifle and a titanium .45. They sold him both even though it would be obvious to anyone he was out of his head. Probably just making a savvy investment. You know, for when the government police pay him handsomely to sell them back. Smart guy, Jim. Meanwhile, he’s spinning the barrel of that cute titanium.

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I hear folks say all the time how the country no longer makes anything, everything’s outsourced, manufactured in China, then imported. Course, they’re running up to Wal-Mart for all this cheap junk, save them a few bucks, half of it going back into gasoline on their SUV. Here on the self-sufficient South End, we still make stuff. Okay, mostly because we couldn’t afford to buy that stuff new. But partly because there’s still a vestige of pioneer pride. You make something yourself, you maybe understand how much work goes into it, you maybe understand the real worth of it, you maybe become a part of it and it becomes a part of you.

We got about 2 million artists down here who paint and sculpt and carve and you name it. They make stuff. That’s what art is. Creation. If they could sell it, they’d be ‘job creators’. Always that damn ‘if’. I admit, half of artistic inspiration is job avoidance, or, in my case, about 100% is. Workaphobia, almost a crippling malady. I’ve had friends, who fancy themselves psychotherapists, suggest that if I spent half as much time employed as I do avoiding work, I’d be rich. Course I explain that then I’d have to do taxes or hire an accountant, set up wills, keep records. I’m just a little too busy for that kind of complexity.

The thing is, see, if you do your own car repair, fix your own leaky pipes, dig your own garden, catch your own food, prune your own fruit trees, cook your dinners, play your own musical instrument, sing your own songs —- you don’t have time to work some silly crappy job. No way. You’d fall behind, the chores would gang up, the shack would rot, the whole she-bang would come undone, entropy would rule, chaos would ensue. Down here, you do not have the luxury of a job! What you got, as consolation, is making your own life yours. Not buying it on credit, piece by piece, from a factory filled with people paid next to nothing in a country that makes stuff for all of us who don’t have time to do it ourselves.

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Day in and day out we watch this country lurching from one outrage to another, usually more than one or two a day. Mass shootings are common now, illegal deportations are too. If we had more time, I’d chronicle them, but you know what we’re talking about here. The list is long and the country is getting a firsthand look at how we can easily slide into despotism with only a whimper.

But there are countries that fight back. Hong Kong has been waging a furious battle against their Chinese overlords who initially promised, once the British turned over control, to honor their independence while still holding sovereignty. They were under no illusions so that when the edict came down that citizens could be deported to the Mainland for trials and prosecution, they understood implicitly what this meant, a thumb on their liberties. Unlike us freedom-loving Americans, they fought back. Maybe you remember Tiananmen Square. Tanks rolling over protesters, an insurrection ruthlessly put to a complete stop. You better believe Hong Kong remembered. But it didn’t faze them. They took the streets, the airport, the business district. They wore gas masks, hurled Molotov cocktails, took vicious beatings and came back for more.

Why? Because they knew this was the first step the Chinese would take to make them servile to the State. The rest would be pre-ordained. Even the United States, once that cheerleader for democracy, once the protector of civil rights, once that City on the Hill, stood mute. Wouldn’t want to spoil the chances for a trade war resolution by irritating the Chinese with our intervention. Their business, after all. Let Hong Kong fall behind the Iron Curtain, not our concern.

Today the Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam rescinded the extradition order. There would be no Tiananmen Square. But that was what it would have taken to stop the rioting and the Chinese apparently had no taste for a bloodbath in front of the entire world. Times change but tyranny still rears its ugly head.

We take our freedom for granted. We wave our little flags and go nearly crazy if someone suggests abrogating our 2nd amendment rights. We wear red baseball caps that say Make Us Great Again and we demonize anyone who dares kneel at our precious Star Spangled Banner as a protest against racial discrimination. We tell ourselves the press is the Enemy of the People, same as Hitler did, and Stalin, and Mao. Same as every despot who ever jackbooted down the highway. We can see the elections being rigged, minorities disenfranchised, income inequitably distributed. But we’d rather watch Wheel of Fortune and Fox News. We’re no Hong Kong. We’re more King Kong, hanging for one last breath off the Empire State Building, killed by our own people.

Hurrah for Hong Kong. You were courageous beyond belief. The world should take notice.

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I didn’t hear about the Straight Pride march in time to attend. As a white guy, straight male, I’m like a lot of Trump supporters, angry as hell that I’m being persecuted for being white and male, straight and of European descent. Seems like these days the only people getting Medicaid and Food Stamps are anybody that isn’t me. It just ain’t right. It just ain’t fair. If anybody needs a break, it’s us Caucasian country club boys.

Sure, it may look to some that we’re the 1%, rich as Midas, getting all the tax breaks, but lemme tell ya a little secret: it’s lonely at the top. Look at Trump, how many hate the guy. And why? For being rich. And white. And male. Think how he feels, the most despised person in the world. The only folks who like him are, well, white, and male, and rich. Okay, even some of the poor like him. If they’re white and male and straight. And some of the women too, if you want to know the truth, if you can even handle the truth. If they’re white and evangelical.

Lately we’ve been inundated with everything from the #MeToo Movement to Black Lives Matter. The immigrants even want to point accusing fingers at us white guyz. And now the gays and the transgenders. They want to use my bathroom, for godsake. How am I spozed to take a piss with some character who might be half a woman watching from her stall? The Bible didn’t say God was created in her image, let me tell you straight up. Check it out for yourself, Trump’s favorite book. Mike Pence wouldn’t be caught dead with a straight woman much less one with what he has between his legs. Not that I’ve given a lot of thought to what the Vice President has between his legs … trust me on that too. Straight as an arrow, that’s me. Whiter than white. And persecuted for it!!

No, I missed the Straight Pride march. But I sure am glad my fellow Aryan brothers organized it. Let the losers call us Nazis, maybe it’s time to take a stand. We’re rapidly becoming the minority in America. It isn’t right. What’s the point of being the 1% if folks don’t fear us? If money can’t buy happiness, why do these people want to take it away from us?

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