The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Okay, the verdict is in, the election is over, it’s all over but the shouting. Or at least the celebration by the billionaires. All of you who voted for the winner, maybe you thought he would unleash capitalism, deregulate the poor hamstrung corporations and bring riches to your small towns and rural communities. Let the captains of industry loose, you figure, and they will pull all of us up on a rising tide that has nothing to do with fake global warming.

Trickle down economics will unleash a flood of wealth, lifting all our boats. Just let the tech boyz and the corporations have their way, unfettered by pesky rules and regulations, and the engines of capitalism will bring untold wealth and prosperity to our land. If government was the problem, the obstacle, the elephant in the boardroom, then by god, government has to be dismantled department by department. Or at the very least it has to be hobbled. Put in charge the most incompetent people possible, fire the deep state employees, drown the damn beast in the bathtub when its size is reduced. Drain the swamp and let the corporations run free. After all, isn’t that what it means to make America great again?

If the rich don’t know how to make money, who does? YOU? No, your job is to get out of the way, let the corporations do their job competently and no doubt whatsoever with your best interests in mind too. If competition was once thought the way to keep your prices down, be advised, it’s a brave new world now. Apple, Google, Nvidia, Microsoft, Tesla, they’re all gobbling up the little companies. Banks are consolidating, grocery chains are buying up the losers, airlines are merging. The New Capitalists aren’t wasting time competing with the hangers-on, they got bottom lines to watch, stocks to tend, CEO salaries to pay. Don’t worry, you’ll get yours too. Eventually. Didn’t we just raise the federal minimum wage? Sure we did. Some states even raised it more than that. The red states didn’t but that’s because they understand the importance of letting business run business, not government run business. Just the way you voted.

Sit back and get ready for your votes to pay dividends. First to the wealthy, sure, but down the road, you’ll get yours. Truth is, you’ll get exactly what you deserve….

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The South End String Band didn’t start out planning to be a band — they were mostly a back porch drinking society with music as a viable excuse to offer their wives for staying out til after midnight. What most of them didn’t know was how grateful the mizzus was to have a peaceful evening to herself. Well, at least until Shelly joined the band.

For years the boys hauled out their guitars and banjos, pulled their fiddles off the wall and strung up all those mandolin strings, met up down at the South End Grange Hall where Tommy the fiddler was Master. In the beginning they were all much more proficient on the jug than on their own instruments, but as often happens with practice, they got better. And as they got more proficient, they drank a little less and began to talk playing in public. When the South End Historical Society asked them to perform for their annual salmon bake fundraiser, they jumped on the opportunity. “Can’t pay you anything,” Edith Wonkszeski told the boys, “but we’ll feed you. And the beers are on us.” That sounded more than fair, Tommy told her and warned her to stock up on those beers, you might lose money on this band.

And so the newly named South End String Band went public. If they liked drinking and strumming, they loved live performances for an appreciative audience twice as much as both put together. Trouble was, they soon found out, none of the boys could sing outside a shower worth a hoot or a holler. Billy on the banjo tried, but he sort of talked his way through, not really sang. And then Shelly came up to them after a gig at the Mabana Sunset Villa Nursing Home and said, “You ought to give me a listen.”
Which they did. She came to the next practice wearing a low cut cowgirl dress and even if she’d sung out of tune, the boys knew she’d be their new vocalist. It didn’t hurt either she could outdrink every manjack of them.

The South End String Band still performs, but after a couple of divorces, the personnel have shifted frequently. Shelly fronts the band now and she’s pretty much the last remaining original member. You can always find a banjo picker in the backwash here, but not another Shelly. The Band practices at her cabin these days and when the night winds down past midnight, Shelly shows the boys the door and always says, “Jug’s empty, boys, time to face the music.” It would be funnier if it wasn’t so godawful true.

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I drove my jalopy down to Bellevue and Babylon this week. They got a new Pay-as-you-Drive lane system now, fast lanes for the folks willing to pay up to $10 for a commute to Microsoft and the high tech cubicles, more if you’re like me, the occasional traveler without a transponder and a special bank account. I thought I’d already paid my gas tax and license fees, maybe now I could drive the same roads as the rich, especially since percentage-wise, I was paying even more than them.

I figured wrong. As usual. I’m used to sitting in the back seats of planes jammed in like a chick in the crate going to the slaughterhouse. I’m growing accustomed to feeling second class. Nobody said life was fair, even in a democracy. You pay to play. College. Jewelry shops. Opera. State parks. National parks too. High speed internet. Politics. You maybe thought your taxes give you a free pass to Yellowstone or equal opportunity at the ballot box, think again. It costs $10 to drive into the State Park and I not only throw more optional money at them on my driver’s license fees, I maintain a county park us Friends of Camano Island Parks maintain so the county can use the saved dollars to enforce boat launch fees when I haul my sailboat down.

Maybe the rich do deserve their own lane for commuting. Maybe they deserve every break we can give them. When the King’s carriage rolled through on the highway to the castle, you better believe us peasants pulled over, doffed our caps and bowed ceremoniously to M’Lord. Call me cantankerous and slap me with a macaroni, but I don’t like it.

Probably won’t be too long, though, the gated communities down here will demand their own lane over the bridge onto the island. That, or they’ll go whole hog and insist the state retrofit a drawbridge, just for them, the rest of us, buy a boat. It is, after all, an island. If the riffraff can’t swim, all the better. A few less of us and the property values will go up. The free ride is over. For now, the boat ride’s fairly cheap.

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If you didn’t know it before, after this last election, you do now. Billionaires are running the country. Truth be told, they always have, but occasionally we get a President or a Senator who came up from more modest means and worked their way up the social and economic ladder. Not this time in the year of our Lord, 2024. Nobody said life was fair. And yeah, I know, it could be a lot fairer than it is.

What we need to understand about our very very rich overlords is that they are not like you and me. Do you think Donald Trump has ever gone shopping in a Safeway? Maybe get a hankering for a diet Coke after the servants have gone to bed and thought, gee, why wake the cook up, I’ll just pop over to the all night Quickie-Mart and grab a cold one, maybe rub shoulders with some nocturnal citizens, might even chat it up with the Pakistani graveyard shift guy, see what’s on his mind these days. Might buy a Slim Jim while I’m at it….

First of all, these billionaires don’t walk to … well, anywhere. And if you think they drive themselves to that anywhere, smarten up, they summon the chauffeur to fetch the limo or the town car. Buses, taxis, light rail … think some more. The rich don’t use mass transit. They have their own private jets for anything beyond the city limits. These are privileged people. They do not venture into drug stores, they do not shop at Target, they have their people do that stuff. Sure, you say you saw Trump serving hamburgers and fries at MacDonalds’ drive up window, just a regular joe, the guy who called his opponent a liar for claiming she had actually worked at a MacDonalds. C’mon, how gullible are we? They closed that store, put him at the window, handpicked the customers and videotaped the ad. Unless he had his team of accountants with him, he probably couldn’t make change for the ten dollar bill that got pushed at him.

George Bush Sr. tried the plebian act too. Went into a grocery store like nearly every other American, probably figured playing the Common Man would get a few votes, but embarrassed himself at the checkout when he admitted he’d never seen a scanning machine before. Apparently they don’t use scanning devices in the mansions of the rich. And even more apparently he’d never been shopping in a store that had one.

No, my friend, the rich are a bit different. They don’t know what the price of milk is, what a dozen eggs go for, how much hamburger costs a pound, what a gallon of gas is at the pump. They don’t have to. But when they tell you they feel your pain, well, they don’t feel any pain at all. They have someone on staff for that.

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