I'm not going to be cute and try to keep you guessing on this. What I mean is, this glossy postcard comes in the mail about a week before 11/11:
... and three days later, sure enough, you wake up to find a small American flag has been planted in your lawn, between your mailbox post and the street.
And your street looks Oh-So-Patriotic as you drive off to work admiring everybody's identical little American flags, and dreaming of the "Happy Veterans' Day!" just days ahead...
There's more to this story, or at least there are the details. For one thing, I live in... drumroll, please... Massachusetts!, just twenty minutes outside of Boston (or two hours, depending on traffic).
Follow me beneath the fold for more tales of my flaggings...
The first time it happened was last year. Do you remember what else happened last year, just before Veteran's Day? I knew you did. That was when George W. Bush "beat" John Kerry in that election that, at the time, disemboweled our faith in our own American wisdom and goodness and democracy like a suicide bomb that had been forcibly strapped right around our guts and detonated on the world stage. Can you say 'disemboweled'? I knew you could...
On the morning of Wednesday, Nov. 3, we all knew what had happened, to the extent we could face it. I spent Thursday dead numb, too, like everyone else... and then came home from work on Friday, just beginning to regain my senses, to:
Fuckin' surreal. I'm living in suburban Boston, it's the twenty-first century, Bush the Lesser has just re-"elected," and little American flags are being planted in my lawn in the middle of the night.
Well, my own situation happens to be this: I bought this house to have a place big enough to move my elderly mom into; I'm the only child, and my dad died thirty years ago. And she's such a raving Depression-era radical that she's not about to brook flag-waving on our property when America is behaving like it is right now. She's 81 years old and tiny, so of course I can't stop her. So our little American flag doesn't stay out there too long.
So now I'm faced with driving to work in the morning along our Oh-So-Patriotic-Except-For-Me street, along with other flagged streets as well (really), wondering when some neighbor is going to accost me while I'm up on a ladder cleaning the gutters with questions as to where my flag went, watching as I drive to work for any other houses whose flags have disappeared, in case I need to flee somewhere and seek allies when the ugly mob forms and comes for me.
But nobody else's flag disappears. Almost literally without exception, the flagged homeowners won't take their little flags down. Most of the poor little American flags (about 24" high) end up getting buried in the dirty snow berms the plows build higher and higher over the course of the winter, only to emerge in the late, gray, reluctant New England Spring, soggy, sagging, and filthy.
At my house our own little unrequested flag doesn't suffer that abuse, but I honest-to-Jesus wonder if someday I'm going to suffer abuse at the hands of some nearby Good American who lets his flag pickle in the grimy slushpile all winter long, and doesn't appreciate that I fail to emulate his impressive display of patriotism.
By the way, it's a branch of Coldwell-Banker, the real estate hucksters, that does this. In the picture of the card they sent me this year I've blurred the phone number of the branch I was invited to call if I had "objections," because I really do worry about recriminations in these near-fascist times, but that doesn't mean you can't communicate your musings on this to Coldwell-Banker's higher authorities, should you wish.
And oh yeah, the "again" part is because to my surprise this year -- last week -- they flagged me and my street again. I'd thought surely their marketing technique involved flagging different streets each year, but this year they've flagged exactly the same streets they flagged last year, including mine. If this were the Soviet Union -- and it may be any day now -- I'd conclude they were trying to tell me something.
Anyway, I promised a Flag Poll just to work a cute pun into my title, so...