SECTION SEVEN

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COLUMN SEVENTY, APRIL 1, 2002
(Copyright © 2002 Al Aronowitz)

LETTER FROM NASHVILLE:
OLD GLORY

 

Subject: off-kilter
Date: Sat, 12 Jan 2002 09:37:47 -0800 (PST)
From: Panama Red deramanap@yahoo.com
To: Jim Terr bluecanyon2@juno.com  

Hey Termite:

Now you've done it.  I've just wasted a whole hour at least going to this guy's archives.  My favorite: Bigfoot Kept Lumberjack as Love Slave

There's something about that...the image of this Paul Bunyan dude with a three-day shadow being kept in absolute terror by Bigfoot...not to mention the pain. I feel like I've been hit by a truck indeed.  Do you think America is ever gonna come out of this madness long enough to elect a REAL government? Yesterday I was in a narrowed traffic lane (they're building a new bridge over the street (road? thoroughfare? whatever...oh, yeah, pike. They have pikes in Nashburg) anyway the pike I was on and I spotted an American flag lying on the roadway there, its cheap plastic staff's having been exposed to enough sunlight to cause molecular breakdown and being therefore broken and its having as a result fallen off its respective patriotic automobile...anyway laying there on the road, so I stopped and retrieved it, being a veteran an all, and let me tell you it was pretty sad, frayed right up to the blue-with-white-stars part. I'm pretty sure that, being as I say a veteran an all, I'm gonna be kept goddamned busy these next few months stopping the car an getting out and retrieving these slipstream-abused symbols of one Nation, under God. I love


Straighten up
and
fly it right!


writing these you know what really frosts my ass kinda letters.  But what REALLY frosts my ass about this patriotic flag-waving shit is the fact that these dumbasses flying their goddamned Old Glories display complete ignorance of flag etiquette.  For instance: If you fly Old Glory at night, you MUST put a spotlight on it; the ambient light from the Kmart next door will not serve. If it rains, you're supposed to haul the motherfucker down till the rain goes away. The flag is never supposed to touch the ground, EVER.  The assholes who DO take it down at night, and there are damn few of them, invariably drag it on the ground, which, when I served anyway was grounds for an Article 15 at least. Fort McHenry notwithstanding, the flag should be kept in pristine condition.  The poor fucker I rescued from the roadbed was shredded like taco cheese. So it all seems a little stupid to me.  I've noticed that there is a flag competition going on between two used car dealerships down the "pike" from where I live.  It started, the Captain says, right after 911 (of course).  The car lot of the first part installed a flagpole and ran up a flag.  The car lot of the second part the next day installed a flagpole and ran up a BIGGER flag, which provoked #1 to run back to Flags 'R' Us and buy an even B I G G E R symbol of might and glory, and the game went on until now each car lot has the absolute B  I  G  G  E  S  T fuckin flag money can buy, except maybe for the one over the Pentagon, which I think is special-made.  These flags are so big that, using that triangulation thing I learned in the Boy Scouts while waiting to have sex, I've determined that they are about forty feet high by whatever the appropriate dimension the other way is. Sixty feet, I think.  Anyway the flags are so B   I   G  that the poles can barely support them: the bottoms of the flags are nearly halfway down the poles they are affixed to.  They are so big that they constitute a visibility hazard if the wind is blowing the wrong way. God Bless America. Patriotism on a stick.  ##

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