Tarred And Feathered For Flying The American Flag - The Witches' Coven Of St. Michael's Park

Andrew Figgins replaced the flag on his front lawn and adjusted the one on the masthead above his front door.  It was not the Fourth of July, Veterans Day, or Memorial Day when he put out the flag, a banner, and stars and stripes festoons on his dormers, but just any day of the week.  

He lived in an upscale, progressive corner of Washington where no one doubted the liberal canon, the man in the White House, or the direction of the country.  Politics was a settled argument, an a priori assumption of good, an internalized sense of justice and righteousness.

There was a political certainty about St. Michael's Park, a solid foundation of secular, liberal values that gave the residents a sense of pride, satisfaction, and well-being, all of which derived from a sense of desperation over the state of the country, one infected by anti-democratic, insurrectionist values of crass individualism and disregard for the 'other' - the poor, the disadvantaged, and the marginalized.  

They abhorred the word 'market', and 'supply and demand' was the cry only of those who wanted to dismantle the correctional mechanisms of government and to return the nation to the raw capitalism of laissez-faire. 

The flags flying on the lawn of Andrew Figgins' house were stark reminders that their job was far from over.  This moral recidivist, this Klansman of the deep state didn't belong in St. Michael's Park, didn't belong anywhere for that matter so retrograde and brutally misanthropic were his beliefs - or so they imagined, for none of the residents of St. Michael's Park every confronted him. 

They parked bumper to bumper with his car, hemming him in when they could, picked up after their dogs everywhere except in front of his house, and snipped and snarled when they passed him on the sidewalk but nothing more. 

There was something very Stephen King or Macbeth 'something wicked this way comes' about St. Michael's Park, a kind of moral cabal, an underlying defensive rectitude, a 'Don't Cross This Line' defiance.  It was the silent hatred that was all the more troubling.  A clenched-teeth, tight-lipped, smiling resentment of any interloper, any outsider that dared entry; and so it was that the residents of St. Michael's collectively decided to run Andrew Figgins out of town. 

The rot would only fester unless it was removed. The flags so prominently and defiantly flown shouted far-right hatred, symbols of blatant defiance of American values, an in your face angry resentment of communalism and social progress.  Figgins had to go. 

The residents of St. Michael's Park, however, were not the kind of people to resort to angry confrontation or violence.  They were the ones who, in defense of playground civility, had run away from bullies, hated the idea of contentiousness or argument, and preferred symbolism and 'suggestive demurral'.  So the lawns of St. Michael's Park  sprouted rainbow 'Hatred Has No Home Here' signs, and gay pride flags flew from front porches.  Let him see what we're made of! 

The neighborhood felt good about this convinced sense of purpose.  It was enough to smirk and laugh at Donald Trump at lawn parties, another to go to the barricades with their own defiance and statements of commitment and patriotism.  

Now, many of St. Michael's Park residents had come only lately to progressivism and so were more Catholic than the Pope.  How they and their liberal confreres came to discard all the New England Anglo-Saxon aristocratic ways of their childhood was a mystery debated by historians of the era.

How did this adolescent idealism begin, and more importantly what kept it alive for so long? Why was political fancy perpetuated so long after it should have gone the way of toy swords, buckles, and princess outfits? Why have history books remained gathering dust on bottom shelves? What has fed such dreams?  A recent observer of the phenomenon wrote, somewhat unkindly but with no small degree of insight:

Progressivism today is a circus side show, a shell game, all quick fingers and no substance; a burlesque show with tits and pasties, booty and promise but nothing for sale but wiggle; a vaudevillian act with a pull-by date, an exhausting show of face-paint and mime; a familiar, predictable, crude repertoire. 

Bob Mason had been born and brought up in one of Boston's finest families, educated at St. Paul's and Yale, heir to a fortune and a family legacy that went back to the Earl of Northumberland.  He was on track for a seat on the NY stock exchange, partner at Bear Stearns, and homes in Wellesley, St. Barts, and Nantucket.

Until he met the Reverend Stallworth Marshall, Chaplain of Yale, Freedom Rider, civil rights activist, peacenik, and gay rights supporter who in one fell swoop disabused him of his claim to social priority, reduced him to the people's level, and turned him from prep school Fence Club layabout to a committed progressive. 

There must have been something loose in Bob's rigging for him to have fallen so fast and so far, but there he was on the front line of every progressive cause that could be imagined - women, gays, peace, the climate, and economic equality.  His whole life had been given up to progressive ideals, and now next door was the very enemy against whom he had fought since Yale. 

Bob had always lived within tight, homogeneous intellectual communities and had moved early on to St. Michael's Park because of its reputation for doctrinal purity and good, common, progressive sense.  So to have this bloody reminder that the job he had assumed was finished - the demise of right wing conservatism and the rise of a new, reformist, Utopian-minded society - was not only not done and gone but alive and well. 

Andrew knew nothing of the simmering rage among his neighbors and had no idea of the animus for which he was responsible.  Yes, the sprouting of No Hate Here rainbow signs was surprising.  Anyone brought up in the elbow-patched tweed and country club reserve of good captain of industry stock would never show their colors so cheaply; but there they were, pinwheels, bobbing and dipping lawn flamingos, used car lot inflated caricatures and all.  Something was up. 

'Why the flags, Andy?', said his two-doors-down neighbor who had festooned his house with a giant Black Lives Matter banner and 'Democracy Matters' pennant.

Andrew's answer, noncommittal but intentional was, 'America, Jack' to which the neighbor, stymied, could only manage, 'How 'bout 'em Steelers', move on to intermittent trash pickup problems and the weather. 

The umbrage! The offense, the downright gall of the man to flaunt his MAGA, right wing sympathies here of all places.  There was no room on the rainbow's prism for homophobic nationalists. 

The anger seethed.  It was painful to drive past the house of this self-assured, cock-of-the-walk bigot, and drivers swerved deliberately close to his car, hoping to sideswipe it, run, and laugh, but at the last minute had second thoughts about propriety and the due course of justice. 

More BLM signs, All Are Welcome Here yard displays, and odd secularized manger scenes of black people and Asian infants, until the lawns of St. Michael's were unmowable; but still no moving trucks at the Figgins residence, no sign of any intent of leaving. 

The election came and went and Donald Trump was back in the White House.  Andrew, never one to gloat, did nothing in particular except replace one slightly muddied flag with a brand new one.  His neighbors' kept their festoons and banners, now irrelevant and useless, for a few weeks after the election.  They had some pride after all; but by Inauguration Day they were gone, trashed in alleyway dumpsters.  If this....this tragedy could happen in America, than new banners and festoons would have to be confected and arrayed.