Editor’s Note
I was thinking it might be fun and interesting and appropriate under the weather we have all been currently living under, and, for myself, having an interest in the idea of writing things and studying writers and writing things myself often through the practice of collage, to try a news reporting experiment in the fashion of James Joyces’s Finnigan’s Wake while listening to it on this podcast:
Finnegans Wake Book 1: Complete Cold Reading (10 hours, WAKE Podcast)
So I went on the internet and decided to hunt down a random news story and ended up with this article
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/17/politics/justice-samuel-alito-flag-home
Then I copied and pasted some of it into a Chatwick and Co (chatGPT) chat window and asked for a reshuffling of the story into a Finnegans Wake style story a couple of times with slighly different prompts and then collaged together bits and bobs, added some extra stuff, took out a few things and came up with the following ‘Fake New’s Story for the Court of History based on actual events.”
It could make a fun book idea for chronicling loosely and with artistic license the tragic absurdity we are living through on the national politics scale. As we know, there is an endless supply of material to work with at this point. Hope you enjoy if you have the fortitude to make your way through it.
I. Emily of the Signyard and the Cul-de-Sacrum Beef
Pull up a lawnchair, all ye porchsitters and blindpeekers, to the House of the Upsydownsy Flag, there had already been, simmering and sputtering in that same neighborhood stewpot, a prior outbreak of hedgewarfare and politicosignhostility, one of those all-American front-yard feudlets that begins in cardboard and ends in civic psychomania.
For down the bend and around the curvehook of that little Potomac cul-de-sanctum, where every driveway is a minor principality and every mailbox is a customs checkpoint for local feeling, there dwelt one Emily of the Badenfolk, leftleaning by self-declaration, actorwaitress by trade, and not at first especially concerned with the robehousen further down the lane where the Alitogethers kept their chambers and their atmosphericly patriotic convictions.
But then came Election’s Endgame, when the orange claimant was declared defeated and half the country started acting like reality had pulled a fast one and the nation split itself into two giant emotional casserole dishes - one hot with relief, the other boiling over with denialgravy and ballotvapors - and Emily, in the plain citizen spirit of homemade American commentary, did hammer into the family grassplot a hand-lettered yardoracle.
On one side:
BYE-DON
And on the reverseflip: FUCK TRUMP, the great old republic monosyllablast, the hand-painted civic exhale aimed squarely at the soon to be disentrenched would-be king and all his tailpipe mythology.
And there it stood in the frontyard of freedom, a cardboard declaration staked in dirt, wobbling a little in the passing storm but holding its ground like a cussing little scarecrow of electoral closure.
Until one day the wind, that old nonpartisan meddler, knocked the thing flat.
And just then by carriagecar there happened to pass the Madam of Highbench Hill herself, the Wraithwife of Wavington, the future Bannerbanshee of the Flagstorm, who, seeing the sign gone horizontal in the lawn, mistook meteorology for ideological surrender to the shitshow, neighborly decorum or something similar perhaps and offered an embittered thanks of possible victorious owning of a libtard as one might congratulate history for finally coming to its senses. But no such concession from the popcorn seats was intended.
“I’m keeping the sign up,” Emily replied in the clipped plainspake of a person who does not yet realize she has just entered somebody else’s private civil war.
And from that small exchange there began the stare, the glare of contemptuous pityment toward a serf of the realm with an implied threat of a you’ll-get-yours implication. Not a look to gather intelligence. Not a glance from the side of the eye. But the stare of passive aggressive I-am-greater-than-thou arrogance.
The long windshield glarethru, the freeze-frame of neighborly judgment, the weird lingering eyehold that says, ‘I now have you on my radar and promoted you from local residential irritant to active participant in my persecution mythology. Beware.’.
And the one stared-at knows it too. One feels it in a tremor of the ribcage. One texts friends about it immediately. One says to oneself, Well now, that was some Grade-A weirdness right there.
And weirdness, once seeded, is a volunteer crop that grows with little effort.
That should have been the end of it. In a normal world, it would have been. But this was not a normal world. This was post-election America, where every lawn had become a little embassy and every neighbor a possible enemy combatant, spy or traitor and everyone seems confused about what being a patriot looks like.
Soon followed the attempted coup, January 6th, that hogwild pageant of grievance and flagrant idiocy, a new date for the history books and the great unveiling of traitors in neckties and flag capes among us, that day when the republic got to watch itself nearly mugged in broad daylight by its own patriotically inflamed discount militia and cosplay minutemen, all worked into a foam over one man’s inability to lose with even a teaspoon of dignity.
It was the last ditch effort after a long chain of jackassed attempts in an effort to repeat the shenanigans of the 2000 election that placed ‘W’ in the people’s house through a similar questionable hanging chads conspiracy.
There they came, the insurrectionist picnic at the Capitol, the red-hatted hollerfolk and tactical uncles and beardo patriots and prayer-warrior paramilitaries, dragging coolers of grievance and sack lunches of constitutional confusion up to the seat of government like they were attending some sort of liberty jamboree, except with more zip ties, more bear spray, more body armor, more Jesus signs, more traitor merch, more gallows carpentry, more live-streaming, more testosterone theater, more tactical cosplay from folks whose previous battlefield experience had mostly been yelling at teenagers in Olive Garden parking lots. It was all stars, bars, stripes, screams, shofar horns, selfies, stolen valor, Confederate side-drapery, and one giant national bellyflop into the reflecting pool of disgrace.
And where, at this grand climax of the long election tantrum, was the great orange grievance emperor himself, the man who had spent months pumping the bellows and pouring moonshine into the civic carburetor? Why, nowhere useful of course. Not at the breach. Not at the barricades. Not in handcuffs. Not even at the transfer of power. He sat watching the whole think on TV for hours to the great concern and consternation of his staff. But this was all part of the plan.
Come Inauguration Day he lit out early like a man sneaking out the back door of his own bankruptcy banquet, skipping town before the new management arrived, absent from the proceedings in a huff of wounded vanity and spray-tan melancholy, leaving behind a smoking civic crater and a country wrapped in razorwire and bad nerves with a ‘If I can’t have it, burn it to the ground’ attitude as he huffed off like a spoiled three year old.
For Washington by then had gone full embunkerment. The city of marble and pomp, the shining city on the hill, had been transformed into a hardhat fortress, a no-glo snowglobe of democracy that had been driven off the road to a brighter future, flipped over in a ditch and still smoking by a car full of drunks on hooch, fools out on a joy ride in a stolen 1950’s Cadillac sedan.
Miles of black fencing went up around the Capitol like the world’s grimmest county fair, like sealed off area of a crime scene or national disaster. Jersey barriers, concrete blocks, National Guard in every direction, camouflage in the corridors, armored trucks idling under the monuments, checkpoints upon checkpoints, razor ribbon curled like metallic kudzu around the seat of government, and the whole ceremonial transfer of power carried out not in the easy confidence of a stable republic but in the jumpy, overlit atmosphere of a hostage exchange supervised by the ghost of Abraham Lincoln and a thousand heavily armed babysitters. It looked less like the peaceful continuation of constitutional order than the reopening of a casino after tsunami followed by a riot.
The whole capital city had that weird aftertaste of having seen too much of a complicated, convoluted, uninvited hostile takeover of the People’s House by a cadre of criminal misfits claiming, in the attempt, to be the victims of the situation.
Office workers peered through windows at troops. Statues looked embarrassed. The flags still waved, but now they seemed to be doing it with a certain strained self-consciousness, like they knew they had recently been misused by a mob of yahoos in tactical fleece. The republic had not exactly fallen, but it had definitely slipped on its own front steps and gone down hard enough to hear the crack.
So then came Inauguration Day, the Janutwentieth, and Emily and her husbandfellow, moved by curiosity, caution, and the uniquely American instinct to drive past trouble just to see what flavor it is today, took a little loop around the cul-de-sac to observe the emotional barometrical pressuration down by the Alito jurisresidence.
And lo! There she was. Martha-Ann of the Future Flag, already stationed near the housefront, who upon spotting the passing vehicle sprang forth into the streetspace in a flurry of armfling and mouthmotion, shouting things unheard through rolled-up windows like a woman trying to personally object to the transfer of power with nothing but vocal steam and cul-de-sac acoustics.
The problem with dead-end streets, however, is that all exits are circular.
So around they had to come again.
And on the second pass there appeared in the rearview scripture what seemed to be, or almost was, or might as well have been, a spitgesture - one of those tiny bodily punctuation marks that says more than a speechwriter can fit in three paragraphs.
And off they went, no doubt saying the sort of things one says after being nearly expectorated upon by the spouse of a Supreme Court justice in broad daylight. But the roundsackrum remembers all things and forgives none of them in a timely manner.
For then shortly thereafrter came Februwary Fifteenth, trashday of destiny, when Emily and husbandfellow were out in the driveway among the bins and lids and ordinary household burdens, doing the common citizen liturgy of hauling the week’s detritus of leftover nonsense to the curb, when who should come walking by but the Alitogethers themselves - husband and wife, justice and jurist, out on a constitutional stroll through the neighborhood commons and commoners.
And it was there, amid the trashcan liturgy and curbside recycling sacrament, that the Madam of the House let fly one of the more memorable lines in the annals of cul-de-sac statesmanship:
“Well, well, well,” she says, drawing up triple from the artesian wellspring of grievance, “if it isn’t the fucking fascists!”
And not content with the accusation alone, she reportedly named names. Researched names. Full names. Firsts and lasts. The whole dossierdoodle. Emily’s name, husbandfellow’s name, motherhouse name, all conjured up from some unseen filing cabinet of local fixations gather through government channels by court clerks no doubt. And that was the point of it. To misapply the people’s governmental power and point it at a private fellow citizen.
Now isn’t that a misappropriation of funds, time and effort that will put a burr under a citizen’s saddle?
For one thing, it is unnerving enough to be cursed at by a stranger in front of your own garbage cans. But to be cursed at by a stranger who has somehow preloaded your family directory into her verbal artillery adds a little side garnish of how in the Sam Hill do you know all that?
And that was when Emily, having now been drafted against her will into a robe-adjacent neighborhood opera, spoke back in the oldest available dialect of democratic disbelief:
How dare you act like this? Which is really the whole question, isn’t it? How dare. How weird.
How far down the rabbit hole of grievance must a household travel before it starts treating random neighbors like enemy delegates from the Republic of Lawnside Dissent through acts of privileged abuse of access to the slow turning cogs of governmental procedures?
And there, all the while, stood the Highhushed Husband, the Benchbearded one, the Lawly Figure himself, silent as a grandfather clock at a funeral, saying nothing while the whole front-yard fever pageant unfolded under the open sky. Himself a victim of his own proximity and thus complicit through complacency.
And silence, when it is standing in walking shoes next to power, is never exactly silent.
Then came Janusix aftermath and a new sign, blunter now, less interested in niceties, naming complicity and fascism in plainspake black marker, as one does when the nation has just watched its own citizens storm the Capitol in a hornhelmet pageant of patriotic stupidity.
Then came another roadside encounter.
Another exchange.
Another regrettable word, sharp and ugly and later regretted by the one who said it, because language in a pressure cooker does not always emerge in its Sunday-best clothing.
Then came the phonecall to the local constabulary, who answered in the old bureaucratic gospel of mild helplessness:
Well, if they go full bananas again, give us a holler while it’s still happening.
And after all that, after the signs and the stares and the near-spits and the nameknowing and the trashcan theatrics and the justice standing there like an upholstered conscience in loafers, there appeared in due course the famous upside-down flag itself.
Distress, we were told. A household upset. A private matter. Sure. And maybe a goose can pull a plow if you hitch him right. But if a household finds itself repeatedly drifting from front-yard dispute to nationally legible symbolism, then perhaps the weather system is not as private as advertised.
For the true question of the whole Signyard Affair is not whether a sign was rude or a spit was real or a word crossed the line.
The true question is this:
What kind of inward thunderhead has to be brewing inside a house for all this to feel like a normal way to spend one’s afternoons?
That is the part worth writing down in the lawnals of the late republic.
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