The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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I guess if protesters are clamoring to have Confederate traitors’ statues removed, the correct response from the White House obviously is to commission new statues to replace the old ones. Why not? Who doesn’t love Davy Crockett? The President no doubt watched those TV shows with Fess Parker, probably should make a statue of Fess too. Or Daniel Boone who ‘killed a ‘bar’ when he was only 3.’ I know plenty of guyz who have closed a bar at only midnight, earlier than 3, probably not heroic enough to get them into the National Garden, I’m betting. Billy Graham is on the list. Everybody loves old Billy, who beget Franklin, who beget the religion of hate. Plenty of folks on that wishlist, some sort of controversial, like Douglas MacArthur, the General who wanted to bomb the Chinese back to the Ming Dynasty. Or Ronald Reagan who was beloved by the Republicans even as he cut deals with the Iranians before he was elected President.

But my purpose isn’t to make the list shorter by questioning the nominees we have now. No, the more the merrier, I say, so let’s add more to the Garden. Why limit our heroes? Why not create a Pantheon of Popularity? If need be, if space is a limiting factor and the White House lawn doesn’t have room for Rushmore sized monuments, we could always downsize a bit, maybe hundreds of bobble-heads lined up by the security fences. Kanye West and Kim Kardashian. The Three Stooges. Stormy Daniels! Definitely Stormy Daniels. Ooh, Rambo, who doesn’t like Rambo? But hey, why should I be the arbiter of national popularity? We could have American Idols winners sculpted, soap opera stars, Academy Award nominees, lottery winners, beauty pageant contestants, NASCAR drivers, even fictional characters. Billy Jack, Rocky, Bullwinkle too!, Donald Duck, Jared Kushner (I know, he’s supposed to be real but he’s practically a plastic cutout now), Rooster Cogburn, Beaver Cleaver, Maynard G. Krebs, hell, the list could go on and on. What a Garden!!! What a Pantheon!!!

Plenty of work here for all those unemployed artists, that’s maybe the best part. Set up a public works project, hire sculptors, put em to work the way we did during the Great Depression. They’ll work for peanuts and fame, count on that. Maybe get the kids working on this too, from grade school on up, plenty of public participation, every parent proud of their little progeny. A Garden of Idol in every town! Forget about Christopher Columbus and those rebel generals, time to upgrade! Time to celebrate new heroes! Every citizen can nominate his or her favorite. Hell, each of us could nominate ourselves. Hero Worship, is that so bad?

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KINK, the 500 watt AM radio for the South End, recently received its FCC certification to broadcast as a bona fide public radio station. The station manager, Rhonda Bodley, made a short introduction yesterday morning at 8 a.m., something to the effect that finally the South End had its own voice. Course, for the last two years, that voice was intermittent, coming as it did from pirate broadcasts. If you happened to turn your AM dial to 490, you would have thought the Dark Ages had come to a crashing conclusion, that the rock had rolled off our cave entrance and that finally we had joined civilization. Never mind that podcasting had rolled the rock back.
Wolfman Chuck volunteered to be KINK’s first DJ. Well, the first legitimate disc jockey, spinning platters of his favorite old stuff, Jefferson Airplane and B.B. King, Van Morrison and Bonnie Raitt, all the albums and 8 tracks he’d listened to stoned out of his head, at least any that were now out on CD’s. The first song to hit the South End airwaves was White Rabbit which he introduced as ‘our theme song’. “If you remember where you were when you first heard this,” he declared, “you didn’t hear it in the 60’s. Those memories were all … ERASED!” Wolfman would laugh his psycho laugh, usually ending in a coughing jag interrupted by another song.
Wolfman’s program is called Radio Free South End. “Where the truth comes to die.” Wolfman likes to announce it as four hours of Not-So-Easy-Listening, which is true, not so much for the music format as Chuck himself. He tends to ramble between songs, reminisces about the Golden Age of the sixties, extols acid rock and waxes nostalgic over everything from the Peace Movement to Timothy Leary, all in a sleepy stoner baritone punctuated by embarrassingly long pauses. He screws up the song credits, mangles syntax and punches wrong buttons for station ID when he meant to hit a public service announcement.
But … as Wolfman likes to tell us every few hours, “They pay me exactly what I’m worth. Nada. Zilch. Zip and zero. Speakin of which, this next tune is a million dollar winner … Cripple Creek with our own South End String Band!”
Like the man sez: not so easy listening.

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Those were some good times in the plantation mansions of Dixie before the War ruined everything. Manners, gentility, mint juleps, ballgowns flowing, pickaninnies cavorting, cotton harvested, banjos playing with cicadas thrumming accompaniment and happy Negroes dancing. What’s not to love? What’s not to feel nostalgia for? Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben in the summer kitchen, preparing dinners for Massa, I know it makes my pea pickin heart yearn for the antebellum paradise lost after those Yankee invaders burned Atlanta and most of the rest of the Deep South.

And now they want to take down the statues of fallen heroes, ban the movie with Vivian and Clark, purge the sweet potato memories of good old boys from Georgia to Virginny. Oh, the horror, the horror! They even want to remove that last vestige of the Confederacy from the flag of the great state of Mississippi! Is there no shame, you carpetbaggers, you Union jackals, is there no limit to the perfidy of you and these protesters and their pals?

You never really surrendered, did you? You never gave up the dream of owning other people, maybe not outright, but as sharecroppers, indentured servants, minimum wage earners. You never believed those Africans were people like you were, just folks beneath you, beneath your bootheel. You didn’t believe they should be emancipated much less given the right to vote. You don’t want your kids going to school with their kids, you don’t want them living in your suburb, you don’t really want them living in your country. When one of them, a half black man, was elected President of your conquerors’ United States, you didn’t accept that any more than you accepted Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. You still believe in the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation, the Posse Comitatus. If the police kill an unarmed black man, no big deal, just cops protecting your property rights, right? Black Lives Matter? You don’t think so, you never did.

So now the country is finally waking up to you, finally staring at the redneck face of racism. Hell if I know where they’ve been, watching too much TV maybe, binging on internet, too busy to notice that you never really gave up, just kept suppressing votes, kept fighting against segregation and civil rights, kept going to your pretty steepled churches. But they seem to be paying attention now and they want your statues taken down, your flags relegated to the moths, your Jim Crow sent packing. And oh my, how you wail, how you cry. Well, frankly, my dears, we don’t give a damn.

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“The president does read,” (Press Secretary)McEnany responded. “And he also consumes intelligence verbally. This president, I’ll tell you, is the most informed person on planet earth when it comes to the threats that we face.”

Earth to Kayleigh, Earth to Kayleigh, please check your GPS, you have the wrong planet. I live on planet Earth. I was born on planet Earth. And you, obviously, have never visited planet Earth. What celestial body you are talking about, the one where Donald Trump is literate, the one where he receives intelligence reports and is more informed about threats to his minions, may not even exist in this solar system, possibly not even this galaxy? If you mean the planet Trump Tower, okay, that we might believe. Smarter than Jared and Ivanka, Don Jr., that other mouth-breathing kid of his, sure… Probably not the doorman, though.

We all watch these press conferences, whether it’s Kayleigh or Mike the Veep, and the embarrassment factor is off the charts. Reporters develop skin rashes just being in that kind of proximity to idiocy. The most informed person on the planet? Seriously? The man who won’t wear a plague mask? The guy who can’t read an intel briefing report, the goof who prefers Fox and Friends to Cabinet meetings, the dope who thinks the coronavirus can be eliminated with ingested hand sanitizer and ultraviolet probes? C’mon, Ms. McNinny, this is one of the most clueless, ignorant, narcissistic chuckleheads from here to Alpha Centuri. It isn’t that the Emperor is missing his clothes, it’s that he’s missing a brain that functions. Even his admirers are catching on to the ruse lately.

We don’t necessarily need Einstein as President, Kayleigh. But we need someone who can listen, read, process information, gather advice, analyze, reflect, then make a decision based on, oh, more than what he feels in his gut. Decisions based on Big Macs and fries? Not gonna cut it. All those adults in the room are gone now, fired or quit. The Daycare only has tots in cribs now. The man is impervious to facts, reason, clear thinking, intelligence reports and just about anything approaching rationality. He orbits the gravitational field of Fox, listens to the advice of Sean Hannity over his generals or his advisors or his Cabinet. He left the atmosphere of Planet Earth long long ago. And pretty obviously he’s not planning to return. Godspeed Donald Trump, please go where no man has gone before….

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