The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Up behind us and through our woods there’s a road that snakes into the interior, got a few houses back there, even some folks who live there full time. Marge was one of those. She moved here when the clearcut ruined her own woods down by Lake Stevens. Course, about a year later, two or three of her neighbors cleared their 2 and a half acres and she felt like there was really nowhere to hide anymore.

She asked me to come up one day. Her husband was there in the livingroom with a whisky glass and the TV tuned to a game show. It was about 10 in the morning and he was drunk as a purple skunk and friendly as most alcoholics, meaning he wouldn’t say hello or shake hands. Marge made muted apologies, said he was a boat skipper, gone a lot of the time. From what I could see he was gone most of the time, even when he was in the room.

Marge shot herself a few years later, I can pretty much guess why, sad deal, sad woman. Her husband offered the place to his no-account kin, some punk pedophile the sheriff warned us neighbors about. The kid ran around with a crossbow, putting arrows into the neighbors’ houses, killing deer and leaving them to rot. He had parties the neighbors complained about, but he told them to jam it, he’d do what he wanted. The cops weren’t much help, pretty typical, so for four or five years we had this drug addict Chester the Molester for a roommate on the South End.

A few years ago Marge’s husband stopped by my shack during our annual Ma Day Studio Art Tour. Said he was moving, just wanted to say so long. “I haven’t been much of a neighbor,” he said sheepishly, “but I’ve quit drinking and I’m starting over. Wanted to apologize and say goodbye.”

A better man might’ve accepted that hand and that apology. But … I’m not that man. I leaned in on him and said, “I’m sorry too, Charlie, but it’ll be a better place with your sorry ass gone and your evil kin too. Adios, man. Move a long ways away, be all right with me.”

I believe in second chances, I really do. But I’m not one who believes an apology necessarily makes things right. I know he didn’t hold the gun to Marge’s head. I know he didn’t kill her, she killed herself. But I’ll be damned if I’d shake his hand and say good luck. I said instead, good riddance. Like I mentioned before, a better man …. that’s not me.

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Joe Camel, oops, I mean, Joe Facebook, has announced recently that the app they were developing for Instagram for Kids, suddenly under fire by critics accusing them of child brainwashing, wasn’t really meant for kids, it was meant for teens. Teens, to Mark Zuckerberg, are apparently adults. Mark Zuckerberg is the Purdue Pharma of the social media world, the man whose company knowingly addicts its clients in order to monetize their dependency. Facebook is the digital Oxycontin, advertising as a benign entity but in reality a purveyor of hate, bigotry, violence, conspiracy theories, bullying and disinformation. He knows the nastier the feeds, the more the revenue. Simple as that. Give them more Oxy and they can’t help but come back for more. Sweet deal if you have no ethics.

They know what they’re doing, known it for a long time. Trouble is, they’re addicted too. To profits. At any cost. Are they evil people, the folks who run Facebook? Hell yes, they’re evil people. Were the tobacco folks evil people? Damn right they were, simple salesmen of death, fully knowledgeable about the cancer rates and they knew how to jack up the nicotine in more ways than one. Evil, definitely, or evil has no meaning. Was Purdue Pharma and the Sacklers evil? C’mon, they pushed the sales, they knew the addiction rates and the death count. Evil? What do you call it when hundreds of thousands of lives were sacrificed for their bottom line?

And what do we call it when profits trump ethics? Was Facebook the only one running Russian bots, jumping conspiracy theories to the top of their feeds, playing off hate and bigotry? No, they weren’t. And are the good people who feast on this clickbait, are they just poor innocent victims? No sir, they’re culpable too. Facebook understands Pavlovian conditioning. Our society is made up of bored folks with nothing better to do than check their feeds, see if their classmates think they’re fat or ugly, click on vitriol and disinformation, spend their lives pumping crap into their brains. They follow the blood, the venom, the gossip, the bigotry and all the rest while they’re connecting with their grandkids, just harmless diversions. Meanwhile, the politics turn toxic, the democracy teeters on failure and Zuckerberg is contemplating hooking the kids. Just the teens, not the real little tykes, not yet anyway. You tell me if this is evil….

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Sometime back I donated stained glass to the new Island County Administration Building, a 7 foot tall by 21 foot long window facing the highway. The editor of the Crab Cracker sent me a link to the Facebook threads from concerned citizens with a note: Don’t know whether this will make you laugh or cry. Or both. I’m not a subscriber to any social media and after reading a couple dozen comments from my fellow islanders, I remembered why.

The first critic demanded to know what my window cost us taxpayers and who authorized it and what the hell anyway? Damn government! Damn county! The usual, followed by a few more of the same angry tirades before someone mentioned they thought maybe it was a donation by a local artist. The first writer responded with outrage over what upkeep and maintenance would cost. Are county employees going to do that on the taxpayer dime? A few folks mentioned the artist in question had donated a few other artworks to the area, one even said he was a pretty generous fellow, but mostly the subsequent threads were pissed off screeds. No good deed goes unpunished, not in these partisan times. There’s an anger seeping over the land that corrodes any potential for approval or appreciation. That, or the neighbors just don’t care for my idea of art, free or not.

Back when we built the Visitor Center I became the de-facto contractor when all I hoped to do was donate the 15 foot by 12 foot stained glass front. I got hate letters, the glass was shot with small caliber bullets, the building itself was the target for repeated assaults by bottles thrown from vehicles by irate taxpayers, some who, in their rage, stopped by to give me a piece of their mind. “Who’s paying for this?” they wanted to know. “Are my taxes paying for this??”
Invariably I would put down the hammer and reply cheerfully, “It’s your lucky day. Not a dime out of your pocket, pal, all donations, all volunteer labor.” To which, almost without fail, they would stomp back to their vehicle, turn and say with no little bitterness, “I still don’t like it!!”

I’m betting they still don’t.

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Well, six months and a few audits later, the votes in Arizona’s most populous county were counted again, third time, this last by Republican yahoos and backers who were absolutely certain they’d find the fraud that gave Sleepy Joe the election. Not only didn’t they find evidence for that, they actually found more votes for Joe and a few less for the man who told us days before the results were released, this would show absolutely that he won Arizona.

Some folks would be humiliated by this and most folks would be embarrassed. But not the True Believers. Now they’re telling us the forensic audit was run by amateurs and hacks and they would need to get some auditors who were professional vote counters and voting machine analysts. Then we’d get the proof they know is out there, that their man won fair and square. Fourth time is a charm in their playbook.

Trump and his minions hired Cyber Ninja to get to the bottom of this fraudulent election, an outfit with no experience in the voting game, whose CEO announced prior to the investigation that the election was definitely rigged. God only knows he tried. So what if the team of investigators never realized, in their final report, that there actually was a paper trail when they suggested Arizona create one to prevent future irregularities, what we out here in the mail-in state of Washington would call Egg on Yer Face.

Course now we have other states, from Wisconsin to Texas, scrambling to help find those missing votes for the President-in-Exile. What we here on the South End call Slow Learners. You can lead a horse to water, but you sure can’t make him think….

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I love a good hypocrite as much as the next fellow. Show me a man who hollers bloody murder about the damn guvmint, Big Brother, state overreach and I’ll show you a yahoo who wants laws that prevent minorities from voting, women from getting abortions, mandates against mask mandates and laws to keep history from being taught unless it toes the jingoist line. My favorite, and believe me, it’s hard to pick among all these, is the latest out of Texas that bans abortions after 6 weeks, a timeline that insures the woman hasn’t even realized she’s pregnant yet. Pregnancies from rape or incest, doesn’t matter to the Lone Star state.

And better … Texas wants your neighbor to do the snitching. Even offers up to 10,000 dollars for a successful private lawsuit to convict that woman, or anybody who might be helping her, in a court of law. In Orwell’s 1984 it was the neighbor and the friend who ratted out Winston, the luckless protagonist of the book. That would be true of Eastern Germany in the Cold War. Turn citizen against citizen. Who needs a camera in every house and apartment when your neighbor can keep an eye on your comings and goings. Not even Orwell imagined a reward bounty for this. Only Texas. And now, of course, the Supreme Court.

I guess these persons’ idea of freedom isn’t necessarily mine. These folks’ idea of democracy isn’t necessarily mine. I doubt the Taliban would pay a bounty as reward for informants, but they might. If they had the money. Texas, I’m guessing, would rather spend theirs on abortion rewards than health care or education. Give them a few more legislative sessions, after they’re done ramming through voter suppression laws, and they’ll probably make birth control pills a felony too. Use a condom, go to jail. Maybe charge the store that sold them with criminal charges too. And don’t forget the stockholders in the condom company. Possibly the stock exchange as well. If all else fails for these Texan Big Brothers, they just passed a law that lets you carry a handgun, concealed or open carry, without a license. Citizens can not only act as law enforcement, they can be their own judge and jury. Texas, the pro-life state. If you survive Covid.

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