II. The Upsydownsy Flag and the Reporter at Highbench Hill
(Companion to “Emily of the Signyard and the Cul-de-Sacrum Beef”)
‘Fake New’s Story for the Court of History based on actual events.”
II. The Upsydownsy Flag and the Reporter at Highbench Hill
(Companion to “Emily of the Signyard and the Cul-de-Sacrum Beef”)
And then, after the Signyard Beef and the curbside cursements and all the prior rounds of hedgehostility, there came the day when the wider world, having finally caught wind of the little domestic weather system swirling around the House of the Benchbeard, sent forth one reporterfellow to ask the obvious.
That is to say:
What in tarnation is going on over there?
And so he came, this newspapyrat of the inkquisition, notebook in paw and scandaloculums in spirit, tiptoeing up toward the porchline of Highbench Hill in pursuit of the flappity truth concerning the now-famous flaggone all wrangly and wrungabout, the one hoisted heel-over-head in a posture of maritime distress and modern rightwing aggrievance.
For in olden sailor days, an upside-down flag meant:
Help.
We are in trouble.
Things have gone cattywampus at sea.
But in these latter-day republic spasms, it had also become one of the chosen laundry-signals of the Stop-the-Steal crowd, the election-denial enthusiasts, the forever-unconvinced, the folks who think democracy is valid only when their horse crosses the finish line first.
So naturally the sight of such a flag on the property of a Supreme Court justice raised a few eyebrows, not to mention a few constitutional blood pressures.
And when the reporterfellow came to inquire into this little matter of upside-down patriot laundering, out she burst again - the Madammast of the Manor, the Wrathwife of Wavington, the vexillovatic herself - not in the spirit of calm clarification, nor even in the more ordinary American register of I ain’t got nothing to say to you, but in a full rolling boil of grievancefroth and porchside prosecutorial weather.
Out she came in a pother and a clabber, all indignashuns and shrillabyrations, the eyes of one who had been privately beefing with invisible enemies for some time and had finally been gifted a visible one onto whom the whole invisible pile might be flung.
And she did not so much address the man as use him for directional purposes.
“Ask THEM!” she cried.
THEM.
A dangerous little word once it starts wearing steel-toed boots.
For Them is the all-purpose ghostcoach of grievance. Them is whoever one has been arguing with in the privacy of one’s own weather system. Them is the cable shadows, the neighboring liberals, the badthought Americans, the anti-usians, the wokeanti-USians, the newspaperfinks, the cul-de-sac unbelievers, the assorted and unsorted enemies of one’s own emotional republic.
“Ask THEM!” she cried, as if the peonies themselves had gone over to the opposition and the azaleas were feeding state secrets to MSNBC.
And there he stood, the poor scribblerman, notebooked and blinking in the blast radius of a grievancegale he had not personally manufactured but had somehow been drafted to absorb.
Then from within the portico of solemnities there emerged, as if reluctantly summoned from the velvet interior chambers of constitutional hushdom, the Husband of the House - the Benchbearded, Lawly One, he of the solemn browbeatitudes and the invisible linens of judicial remove.
And yes indeedly, he had to come calm her down.
Which is itself one of the funniest and most revealing details in the whole absurd pageant.
There he was, a justice of the United States Supreme Court, not in chambers weighing questions of law and liberty, but on the front lawn doing husbandly de-escalation, murmuring little lawsy lullabyes and trying to there-there the tempestwife back from the brink of public combustibelle while the reporter stood there in his driveway bewilderment, absorbing the full civic weather report.
And for a blinkspan it looked as though the stormette might pass.
But grievance, once winded, is a boomerangry.
Back she came.
Yes, back from the inner chambers, not cooled but coaled, not lessened but leavened, returning with a fresh flapdoodle standard in hand - some decorative gobbledygardenflap, some semaphoolery of suburban heraldics, some cloth-based rebuttal to reality itself.
And with all the ceremonipomp of a woman who had decided that what this moment really needed was more flag, she hoistled the thing into the dirt and shouted:
“There! Is that better?”
And truly, if one were tasked with composing a single line to summarize the civic psychology of the age, one would be hard pressed to improve on that.
There!
Is that better?
As though symbolic overproduction were a form of argument. As though emotional escalation could somehow sort itself into coherence if only enough fabric were involved. As though a front yard, properly accessorized, might yet triumph over public interpretation.
But the flag was no answer.
The shout was no thought.
And the gesture was all gesture and no gentlesense.
It was a full-blown flagstravaganza in the theater of selfregard.
And all the while the birdbath cherubim and little statuary saints of the justiceyard kept their stone peepers on the scene, knowing as only limestone knows that the people who sermon hardest on order and decorum and lawliness and old-timey American standards are often one microphone away from a begonian coup d’petunia.
For here, once again, was the true tatterdemalion of our age:
They who lecture the republic on seriousness seem perpetually one mild question away from turning the front yard into a one-house constitutional emergency.
And if the nation, watching from the roadside with its coffee gone cold, were to ask in one exhausted little voice:
“Well is it?”
I believe the hedges would answer first.
No.
No it is not.
No, no and again, no.
Help me maintain the illusion of being a professional writer by becoming a paid subscriber and thanks to my patrons who support this publication!
Leave a comment and restack
This is an independent fake news report.
