The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Hurricane Dorian, packing winds over 200 mph and pushing a storm surge of up to 25 feet, is hammering the Bahamas right now. The Bahamas are almost all under 30 feet above sea level. Meaning, well, you get the picture. If you want to see what rising oceans mean for the future, this week will give us all a frightening sneak preview. The Trumpster was so concerned he canceled his trip to Poland, supposedly to take a hands-on approach to the incoming disaster, but actually to play 18 holes of golf. His handlers argued that he was paying close attention with advisors bringing frequent updates. Considering his warning that folks in Alabama should be prepared to evacuate, I’m guessing the updates came from his caddy.

What, him worry? Alfred E.’s got nothing on the Golfer-in-Chief, that’s for certain. But it is, after all, Labor Day and I’m sure you’ll agree that even the hard-working President of the Yew Ess Aye deserves a vacation. Trade wars are easy, he tells us, but c’mon, you and I know it’s actually hard. He just doesn’t want us worrying about him. Trump famously castigated Obama for taking time off from his job to play a few rounds of golf, but that was then, this is now and the job is harder, maybe the hardest it’s ever been in history. Why the man has played 229 days of golf in his first two and a half years on the job. GolfNewsNet, a must-read site for those who want to stay abreast of our duffing prez, states that he has played golf or spent time on his golf courses 22% of the time since being elected.

This, of course, is how billionaires conduct bizness. Off the tee. It’s where the deals are brokered and if the man cheats a bit, welcome to the world of high stakes finance. And sure, it costs a bit to fly to these golf courses with a full entourage of secret service folks, but would you rather have a stressed-up Leader of the Free World? No, I didn’t think so. Let’s be honest, he wasn’t going to stop Hurricane Dorian anyway. Not unless it was going to make landfall at Mar-a-Lago. In which case he’s got his hand on the nuclear button. Lose Mar-a-Lago and where would the next G-7 summit be held?

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So Rome burned while Nero fiddled, if we’re to believe our 8th grade history books. The emperor of the most powerful country the world had ever seen had supposedly gone mad and started the fire In Rome A.D. 64, then played his violin while the city burned. Nero, legendary in history for something he probably didn’t do…. Making Rome Great Again, by destroying it if necessary.

Ah, the good old days, back again. Our own Nero just went to the G-7 summit, skipped the climate hearings since he doesn’t believe in global warming, probably sat in his room, not with a fiddle, but a couple of TV sets tuned to Fox and Friends, fuming that the allies he’s repeatedly kicked aren’t interested in his tariff war with China.

Meanwhile … the Amazon rainforests are burning. Greenland’s glaciers are melting. The planet, this fragile little ball of crust surrounded by water, fueled by a molten core and held together with gravity that keeps the atmosphere glued to the surface, spins on its axis as it hurtles through the universe. Why worry? It’s done just fine up til now. You know, if you don’t count meteor strikes and super volcanos and ice ages.

There is something apocalyptic about viewing the Amazon smoldering from satellite images. We’re burning what we call the ‘lungs of the world’, the place we get over 20 % of our oxygen and where C02 is absorbed, the rainforest where more than half of the world’s estimated 10 million species of plants, animals and insects live. If this isn’t an existential threat, I guess there are no existential threats. Sure, why would the New Nero sit in on the climate discussions? The Brazilian equivalent to Trump has let these fires burn, even blamed his political opponents for setting them when the truth is the fires are started by illegal miners and farmers. Gold fever. Same as our fossil fuel industry. Money to be made. The future can take care of itself.

I don’t know and neither do you how much damage is being done while we tune our banjos and string up our fiddles. But to sit and watch the Amazon burning, my god, Nero looks like a choir boy. And to think, we put this madman in office.

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Stanwoodopolis, like all little burgs up and down the Puget Sound, is experiencing growth pains. New schools, housing subdivisions, roads, infrastructure, you name it, the little planning department goes through personnel like suet through a goose. They’re underpaid, overworked and highly stressed. And businesses are packing up from down at the flood plain and evacuating before the tsunami of insurance premiums inundates them.

So when a new business opportunity knocks on their door, they’re all ears. The permit for a large scale compost facility at the end of town was contentious, you better believe. The good citizens of Stanwoodopolis already have the sewer lagoon next door across the highway and the thought, or the odor, of one more rotten acreage was too far a bridge. After plenty of acrimony the city council denied the composters their dump site. No doubt the Welkommen sign that would read SOMETHING IS ROTTEN IN STANWOODOPOLIS had something to do with their decision.

This week another business venture application was heard by the Planning Board and the City Council. Seems a start-up crematorium wanted to open up its furnace right there in downtown. You might think denying the compost site might have been precedent aplenty to deny the burning of bodies, but you’d be mistaken. The Council, in a carefully worded approval, stated that since restaurants emit odors in nearby locations, they could not find legal reason to deny the application on the grounds of noxious odors. I guess the difference between a burger smell emanating from the Duck Inn and the odor of human flesh may not be all that great. Who knows, the traveling public, upon sniffing the wafting breeze of the new crematorium, might subliminally hunger for the Monster Burger down the street. Great for the restaurant business, not bad for the funeral home and probably a revenue source for Stanwoodopolis. What’s not to like?

Personally I think a contest for best sign is definitely in order. Me, I like one that takes its cue from Whidbey Naval Air Base: Pardon Our Odor, It’s the Smell of Freedom. I’m sure the rest of you have your own preferences. Like Two Toke Tom’s: Stanwoodopolis, Your Last Stop. Let’s get the Chamber of Commerce on this as soon as possible. The tourism potential is too immense to be put on hold. Or, as one of the Flathead Car Guyz said down at the Diner, Stanwoodopolis, wake up and smell the coffins.

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