The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

By now you’ve probably concluded that the Alt-Right Apocalypse half of us predicted for 2017 didn’t materialize. Yah, shure, the boy-king hasn’t been impeached and he hasn’t shown us his taxes and he won’t distance himself from the Trump businesses and those tweets of his keep us in a constant state of near hysteria. That’s Entertainment!

I got home from most of a tweetless week without opening a newspaper or listening to the news on radio or TV. Didn’t peek at a computer once for the latest news feed. But now we’re back from the Wilderness and the daily papers arrive at our mailbox and I’ve turned the computer back on. Lots of shrieking and tearing of hair over Melania’s Santa outfit or Ivanka’s photo with a Confederate flag somewhere far behind her, statistics on the total days Donald has gone golfing after he used to criticize Obama for picking up a putter, stuff like that. If I were Trump’s publicist, I’d put out incendiary stories exactly like those, endless petty fluff to distract all us enraged snowflakes from the clause in the tax reform bill to open up the Arctic to drilling or to kill the Obamacare mandate that requires folks to buy insurance.

NOT that every perceived insult by the Trump family’s Christmas cards isn’t earth shattering and probably contributes to Global Warming, it’s just that if EVERYTHING the Trumps do is outrageous, then the really outrageous becomes trivialized. I mean, I don’t care what Melania wore yesterday. I don’t worry about a photo with a rebel flag flying from some redneck’s shanty in the distance. Call me overly insensitive, but I don’t give a good goddamn. I do care about the Russians hacking our elections. I do care about those business deals Donald may have had with Putin. I do care that half his advisors and cabinet members are incompetent or liars or both. I do care the EPA is dismantling plenty of protective regulations. I even care that all those right wing judges are being approved. And I can go half crazy thinking about these Republicans who don’t seem to mind working hand in glove with a man who systematically attacks the intelligence community, the press and the Constitution all in the course of a few tweets, daily and with impunity.

So here is my own New Year’s Resolution, a few days early. I plan to keep an ear to the ground, certainly, but I’m going to quit searching the clouds for every little chunk of cumulus that might be cracking loose. I expect soon enough the jolly rich giant will come crashing to earth and that blot overhead will disappear and the sun will shine through once more. The sky will still be intact and I bet it’ll be blue once again.

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