April Fool Groundhog Day
I wrote here awhile back that WalMart was moving to the old Tyee Grocery strip mall. A neighbor thought it was true — and boy, howdy, did she ring my ears with outrage. She wanted that WalMart and now she’s stuck with a Marijuana Dispensary there. Course, when I wrote a year ago that South End Greenworks WAS going in there, a guy drove all the way down the island to find it. Yep, he was hacked it was all a joke.
I mentioned hunting season was opening up in a few weeks one April issue of the Crab Cracker — on alpacas. I got some serious threats from one particular herder that I would be billed for every one of the cute little buggers killed. Okay by me so long as I get the meat. When we built the new bridge onto Camano, I wrote that it would be named the Colton Harris-Moore Bridge and our commissioner at the time had his ears scorched by irate citizens. He said, Skeeter, you got to stop writing this stuff, folks think you’re serious.
Course then we ran Skeeter for mayor. Of the South End. The commissioner lost by a few votes and he thinks folks voted for me by accident. Maybe so. The line between reality and fiction is gone now. Political e-mails are so blatantly lies but nobody seems to mind. Hot talk radio has managed to pull the rug out from under what was once ‘unbiased’ reporting. If we think ALL news is skewed and biased, why not just make it ALL opinion? In an effort to give both sides, network news has quit making the call on what’s true or not. Let the Liars talk and you can make up your own mind. Except now we’re so saturated with prevarication, exaggeration and outright chicanery, half of us can no longer see the difference. Or worse, we no longer care.
Skeeter, needless to say (or so I thought), is a joker. He’s not advocating, he just thinks April Fool’s Day never ends. Sadly, in this Information Age — or Misinformation Age — it apparently doesn’t. Trouble is, folks out there on the blogosphere, on the internet, on the news, on the talk shows, they aren’t kidding.
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