FLAGPOLES
On I-78 in New Jersey, east of exit 26, there’s an oversized American flag on a very tall pole—you can’t miss it. It’s huge. Not Mexico City Zócalo huge,
but it’s still big, you can’t miss it. It flies at the back end of a luxury golf course. Members enjoy thirty-six holes, the pool, tennis, helipad for easy fly-in access,
conference center and accommodations perfect for weddings and banquets and reciprocal perks at all its sister properties round the country and world.
Its proprietor loves it so much he fought the town for several years for a variance to build his family’s mausoleum here. It’s heaven. He’ll spend eternity right here.
It reminds me of another flagpole, when I pass it back and forth to work, one I’ve never seen, but also big, an eighty-footer that flew in proud
defiance of Palm Beach ordinances. By the time it was moved, shorter now, to another spot, it had gained its owner another golf club for exclusive members.
No doubt what the free world really needs right now is someone who will stand up for principles like the right to fly big flags, to hell with anyone who doesn’t like it.
It says something, maybe a lot, about the state of things: America just chose as its leader a man who’d rather fight his neighbors in court than be sensible
about the size of his flagpole. That is just the kind of freedom we all aspire to in our greatest American dreams. It’ll be a tremendous thing to see.
(P.S. To tell the truth, one up the road in Warren Township's Flag Plaza is much much bigger, really huge, ripped, still, but colossal and grand
a sight to see, tremendous, I pass it as I drive to work, thinking or trying not to think about the other one down in Bedminster, where
the new president likes to weekend, when he’s not wandering the West Wing three A.M. tweeting, or flying south now on my dime, great deal for him,
still worried about the size of his flagpoles, pissing on his perimeters, firing America’s last great heroes, Snapchatting with Putin’s comrades
slapping his dear wife’s hand away spinning the next news cycle and musing up ways to screw NATO or fire a climate deal, just for the ratings.)
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