Flags Out Front

by Douglas Wilson

Maria, meantime, was still standing in her serenity cloud, which was moving around with her. She had found her groove, and knew that she was walking in the good works that God had prepared in advance for her to do. Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingernails, which are a classy crimson, to fight. (For the Barancho family, fingernail polish, and things like it, were the only area where fundamentalism had lost to the Italian heritage argument.)

When he had learned that they were to stay there an hour, he had accepted his fate like a man of courage, and decided simply to chat people up for the duration of his sentence.

The poet’s name, which does not matter that much to the narrative, other than to spice it up a bit, was Tingsted Taki-Smith. Her name certainly did not affect the trajectory of the cocktail glass, which bounced off her forehead, sending its contents straight up into the air, with the glass itself heading off at a ninety degree angle, parallel to the floor for a second or so. But then it hit, making a most satisfactory shattering sound, causing all conversation in that region of the party to cease.

This poor woman’s poetry—which is brought up here only to help us make sense of the larger narrative—was the kind of poetry that focused on how the poet felt. True, there is not much here to distinguish it from the vast watery sea of how all the other poets felt, but Taki-Smith had a peculiar genius for it. Her volume of verse that had won the Pulitzer Prize was not titled The Pale Parabola of Joy, but it might as well have been.

“You know why she was frantic?” Tom repeated. Maria was not really sure what to do. They had reached Tom’s floor, and he stepped out, looked both ways, still holding the elevator door open. When he looked back in, she finally said, “Well, because she wanted to get close to you and I wouldn’t let her.” Tom shook his head. “That was part of it, sure. But the main reason is that the person in between me and her was a lot more beautiful than she was.”

This was not the effect Tom had intended. He thought he had declared himself fully—no room for ambiguity. But in her modesty Maria had found room for ambiguity.

Governor Fawgee Prater was the kind of politician who was telegenic enough, but who, if you got closer than ten yards or so, was revealed to be as unctuous and oily as they come. A full crankcase had nothing on him. All the oil was necessary because without it all the moving parts of his personal ambition would burst into flame and melt down into a useless pile of metal.

He opened it, and was greeted by someone who rang no bells at all, other than the doorbell he had just rung.

These were people who just hated being led by trimmers and compromisers, and whose leaders always trimmed and compromised because that is what they thought the people were demanding. They had been let down time and over again by countless leaders who either drifted off into neoevangelical liberalism like a child’s lost carnival balloon, or who blew up in the old-school conservative fashion via sexual scandals. If ever confronted with the possibility of actual battle over the permanent things, they always found a way to avoid it.

One of the reporters there, the one from the Washington Post, described it in his article as a “go-to-hell” ovation. But that wasn’t really quite right, because no one in the room would ever talk like that, and if they had talked that way, they would have said that it was a “tired-of-being-told-to-go-to-Hell” ovation. And they would have capitalized Hell, because it was a place. Like Atlanta.

“Tom, here’s the thing. I’ll just say it. I haven’t been able to sleep since I quit. I still believe everything I told you, which is that I don’t have any professional confidence we can win this thing long term. But after listening to you tonight, I decided I would rather lose with you than win anywhere else.”

She had just graduated from Wellesley two years before. She had believed most of what she had been taught in the course of her English major, and all of what she had been taught in her women’s studies major.

Abdul nodded encouragingly, and so she continued. “We see very little difference, for example, in how blacks have been oppressed, and women, and now Muslims. I learned that at Wellesley in my feminist studies—” “Feminists are whores,” Abdul said.

Everybody said right. But nobody knew what to do, and they were divided on what they should be sure not to do.

And on top of that, it was in Narnia that you got to kiss the girl after slaying the dragon. In this world, you kissed her first. That’s what the stories plainly said.

I swear, he would have gotten some warships involved if we weren’t so far inland. It is going to be some kind of show, Trev. Not that I think you can do anything, but I thought somebody over there should know. And I wanted you to know how embarrassed I am to be associated with law enforcement. I am thinking of opening up a yarn shop instead. My mom used to knit.”

“Well, pick the one that you think would be most fun to start with. Life is uncertain. Eat dessert first.”

he dumped out two buckets of cuss words onto the carpet, and then spent a good ten minutes kicking them around the room with his cowboy boots.

It only goes to show what living two hundred miles away can do for someone.

Wendell had actually won that award, and Trevor had just laughed like it was the greatest thing in the world, and had shaken Wendell’s hand as though Wendell had just saved Trevor’s life. He was a weird guy.