Cerise and I were enjoying breakfast in bed Sunday morning when the caller ID displayed a familiar number which, nevertheless, had not appeared there for quite a while – it was the mobile phone number of my dear brother-in-law, Hank. As regular readers of this Web log know, Hank ran off to West Virginia with his brother Arthur’s wife, Shannon, there to prepare along with their fellow like-minded conservative survivalists for the advent of the Apocalypse and Armageddon, events they are all certain President Obama, whom they are similarly convinced is the Antichrist, will bring about as part of his worldwide Satanic liberal conspiracy. This has left my dear sister Rose and Arthur to care for their two families’ huge Catholic broods of children in a single large, but by no means palatial suburban home in Fairfax, Virginia. These being the circumstances, my first impulse, naturally, was try to convince Hank and Shannon to come home and resume their proper responsibilities as soon as I answered and put the call on speaker phone. I never got the chance, however.
Tom: Hello, Hank?
Shannon: No, this is Shannon.
Cerise: Hi, Shannon.
Shannon: Hi, Cerise. You and Tom still living in sin?
Cerise: That’s rather presumptuous, coming from a woman who eloped to the boondocks with her husband’s brother, don’t you think?
Shannon: Hank and I did not elope – to the boondocks or anywhere else! We’ve been much too busy preparing for military takeover, martial law, race war, inner city rebellion, Islamic jihadi invasion and the collapse of American civilization to become romantically involved!
Tom: And how’s that going?
Shannon: We have sufficient food, water, tools, equipment, arms, ammunition and secure underground bunker space for everybody, including you and Cerise, Tom. Don’t bother to thank us – we’re content to wait until you show up here fleeing the burning, smoking ruins of Washington DC swarming with murdering, raping hordes of urban gang members fighting with jackbooted federal thugs, rogue National Guard, Army and Marine units, marauding bands of bloodthirsty illegal immigrants and patriot militias for control of the city!
Cerise: Honestly, Shannon, just listen to you. It’s pathetic. How did a couple of middle class professional people with masters degrees like you and Hank end up armed to the teeth, stocking hidey-holes in the mountains with freeze-dried beef stroganoff and automatic weapons conversion kits?
Shannon: Forget about it, Cerise, I wouldn’t expect an overpaid liberal with a doctoral degree like you to understand the explanation! Tom, the reason I’m calling is I need to talk to you about Confederate flags.
Tom: Confederate flags? Good lord, what about them?
Shannon: Well, you know how that Dylann Roof guy – the one who shot nine people at a church…
Cerise: An African-American Episcopal church – in South Carolina! And he shot ten people. Nine of them died.
Shannon: Yeah, well, whatever. My point is, before doing that, he posed with a Confederate flag and posted the picture on Facebook.
Tom: Actually, he posted a picture of himself posing with Rhodesian and apartheid Union of South Africa flags on Facebook and posted a picture of himself with a Confederate flag on his personal Web site.
Shannon: Okay, fine, now that we have all the details straight here, my point is, he made the Confederate flag very controversial.
Cerise: Controversial? Like the Nazis made the swastika “controversial” I suppose? The Confederate flag is hate speech, and that’s all there is to it!
Shannon: Cerise, the Confederate flag can’t be hate speech because it doesn’t have any words on it.
Cerise: Semiotically speaking, the Confederate flag is speech, and it’s hate speech.
Shannon: Typical simplistic liberal thinking, Cerise. And leave it to a liberal to drag semiotics into the conversation.
Cerise: Might as well. We’re talking about flags, aren’t we? And flags are the quintessential semiotical objects. And Confederate flags are a semiotic for racism, bigotry, slavery and oppression.
Shannon: Says you. Many Southerners consider them to be emblems of a noble military tradition.
Cerise: Show me one black Southerner who considers the battle flag of the Rebel army to be an emblem of anything but a tradition of false imprisonment, fiendish brutality and the most evil form of economic exploitation ever conceived by the mind of man.
Shannon: Oh, there are bound to be a few. After all, there were free blacks and Indians in the South who owned slaves.
Cerise: And some Jewish people fought for the Confederacy, too, but that doesn’t mean the Confederate flag stands for a tradition of celebrating Passover, now does it? And come to think of it, Shannon, you and Hank are both Catholics, and the last time I checked, the Confederate flag didn’t exactly stand for unconditional love of Papists, either.
Shannon: Look, Cerise, frankly, Hank and I don’t care what it stands for. The fact is, Dylann Roof disrupted the market for Confederate flags. Weenies like you, obsessed with political correctness, have raised such a ruckus that the big flag manufacturing firms like Annin Flagmakers, Eder Flag Manufacturing, and Valley Forge Flag have stopped making them. Even Dixie Flag Manufacturing Company pulled out of the market last week.
Tom: After first declaring that they wouldn’t and subsequently receiving an order from a liberal who wanted to buy one hundred Confederate flags so he could burn them all in a YouTube video.
Shannon: Right! And what did they teach us at business school? That every problem is an opportunity! The liberal do-gooders have created an artificial shortage of Confederate flags.
Tom: Shortage?
Shannon: Of course! And just as the major manufacturers are cutting production to zero, the demand for Confederate flags is skyrocketing!
Cerise: Really? How so?
Tom: Because no sooner do you tell the average American redneck that something is utterly offensive and in extremely bad taste, than they immediately decide they want as much of it as they can get, and as soon as possible. Right, Shannon?
Shannon: I’d say, when the average patriot sees their hallowed traditions trampled by meddling, self-righteous socialist know-it-alls, they immediately react in the name of truth, justice and the American way. Ergo, as Tom would say, the demand for Confederate flags is going through the roof even as we speak!
Tom: Come on – I don’t say “ergo” all that often.
Shannon: Often enough to qualify as a bonafide East Coast Liberal Elitist, that’s for sure.
Tom: Oh, snap! So – you called me up on a Sunday morning in the midst of my duck eggs Benedict with Mangalica ham and grass-fed organic Cotswold cheese on toasted red quinoa, flaxseed, farrow and spelt muffins, a medley of steamed New Zealand fern fiddle heads and wild mushrooms in black Périgord truffle Bearnaise sauce, blood orange mimosa and cappuccino ristretto accompanied by hand made Tuscan almond biscotti to remind me that, unlike the vast majority of the citizens of our great Republic, I know who Jean-Paul Sartre was, can appreciate performance art, have studied enough science to confirm that anthropogenic global warming is real and am aware an economist can be a Marxist without that constituting a threat to national security?
Shannon: No, although I don’t think it would do any harm for you to be reminded that there are millions of patriotic Americans who go out in the woods and shoot their own venison, pheasant and antelope with the guns the Second Amendment guarantees them the right to have – instead of buying it at gourmet meat markets like you do. But the reason I called is that I know you like to make money.
Tom: Who doesn’t?
Shannon: Exactly. So here’s my proposal – lend Hank and me thirty-five thousand dollars to set up a Confederate flag factory.
Tom: And what, pray tell, do you and Hank know about making flags?
Shannon: Well, there’s sewn flags – made of nylon, with special orders for cotton, silk, linen or blended fabrics. Then there’s silk screen on nylon or cotton, usually, cotton being the cheapest. But the state of the art is computer controlled dye sublimation digital ink jets – they can be used with a wide variety of fabrics and produce large format flags or large pieces with multiple smaller flags that can be cut out.
Tom: And where do you get these large format computer controlled dye sublimation digital ink jets?
Shannon: Um… well… China.
Cerise: Nothing ironic there, huh?
Shannon: Look, I’m no big fan of the Red Chinese, okay? But when it comes to large format computer controlled dye sublimation ink jet flag printers, nobody else comes anywhere near their prices. What am I supposed to do – ask Tom for fifty thousand dollars so we can get a machine from Germany?
Tom: Spare me. A good one of these Chinese machines costs how much?
Shannon: About twenty-six thousand dollars.
Tom: Plus another nine thousand for supplies, I suppose?
Shannon: Yeah, that’s about what we figured we’d need to get started.
Tom: So where’s your business plan?
Shannon: Plan? I just told you what Hank and I plan to do.
Tom: Look, Shannon, what I’m hearing from you right now sounds like an idea. And ideas are like arm pits – everybody’s got a couple of them. Have you done a market analysis? Have you assessed your competition? What if there’s a hundred other people out there with the same idea who already have thirty-five thousand dollars, or maybe even already own a large format computer controlled dye sublimation digital ink jet fabric printer? Or, God forbid, also have several years, or even decades of experience in the flag manufacturing business and a two megabyte file of business contacts to go with it? How can you convince me that you and Hank will be able to sell Confederate flags at a profit, or for that matter, how can you tell me what I can expect that profit margin to be?
Shannon: I knew it! He called you, didn’t he?
Tom: Who?
Shannon: The loan officer at the bank! We gave you as a reference! And you’re asking all the same questions he did!
Tom: Shannon, I promise, I swear to God, nobody has called me about this harebrained… I mean, nobody has contacted me about this… um… business proposition of yours.
Shannon: But you’re asking exactly the same questions!
Tom: I’m asking the same questions anyone to whom you came flogging a flag manufacturing business would ask. You went to a bank expecting to get an unsecured business loan for thirty-five thousand dollars?
Shannon: Our… colleagues… here in West Virginia said the loan officer at a particular bank might be sympathetic to the cause.
Cerise: Not that sympathetic, apparently.
Shannon: Well [expletive], I donno… like I said, he asked us the same questions Tom just did.
Cerise: Tom, I seem to recall that before he went off the rails with Shannon here, your brother-in-law Hank used to be an executive with Pabulex.
Tom: Before Pabulex went out of business when the market for high-end newborn, infant and toddler accessories collapsed back in 2008, yeah, he was. Shannon, I guess Cerise is asking how come Hank didn’t prepare a business plan to show the loan officer at the bank.
Shannon: He did. And the loan officer spent about half an hour looking at it, too.
Cerise: Well then, what did he say?
Shannon: He said he wasn’t convinced by our sales projections, we didn’t have a history with the bank and that meant an unsecured loan for thirty-five thousand dollars would probably never get approved by a vice president, which is what the bank rules say has to happen, and most of all, if it came out in the papers and on TV that his bank had loaned money to people so they could manufacture Confederate flags, and he was the one who did it, he would most likely get fired.
Tom: So while the loan officer might have been sympathetic, the people who actually run the bank where he works – maybe not so much?
Shannon: I guess so.
Cerise: Good for them!
Shannon: Well, I’ll tell you one thing for sure – when the [expletive] hits the fan, that son-of-a-[expletive] is not getting into our survival complex. I don’t care if he does only live thirty miles away from it!
Cerise: And when Tom turns you down, he’s not getting in either, right?
Shannon: What? No, I’d never do that! He’s family! And besides, he’s given me and Hank plenty of money since we came up here to West Virginia, haven’t you, Tom?
Cerise: Oh, my God! Tom! Is that true?
Tom: Um… well… mostly a few hundred for gas and expenses when they drive all the way down here to Washington. Like Shannon said, they’re family. But please don’t tell Rose, okay?
Cerise: Hmph! All right, I guess. But you’re not going to give those two… well… them… thirty-five grand to make Confederate flags, are you?
Tom: Well, you know, Cerise, say what you might about their politics and philosophy, Shannon and Hank have conclusively demonstrated that they are pretty determined people. Tell me Shannon, if I gave you the money, would agree to pay me back within four years?
Shannon: No problem. Hank says we can sell enough Confederate flags in West Virginia alone to pay you back in two years with fifteen percent compound interest.
Tom: Hank always was a tad too optimistic. Tell you what – make it three years at ten percent and we’ve got a…
Cerise: Tom Collins Martini! If you do this, I swear I’ll tell Rose!
Tom: Oops! Sorry Shannon, in that case – no can do.
Shannon: But… but… damn it Cerise, you meddling cow!
Tom: Gotta go now, Shannon. Say hi to Hank…
Shannon: Wait! I…
Tom: And by the way, tell him Rose says she wants a divorce.
Shannon: She can’t do that! We’re Catholics!
Tom: She converted to High Church Episcopal last March. Did I forget to tell you?
Shannon: You’re making that up!
Tom: Oh yeah? Why don’t you two come visit Fairfax and ask her yourself?
Shannon: She’s going to Hell for that, you know!
Cerise: Maybe she considers that preferable to waiting around for Hank to come back!
Shannon: That’s not funny, Cerise! Tom…
Tom: Nope, conversation over. Rose would never let me hear the end of it, even if you and Hank became Confederate flag millionaires. ‘Bye.
Cerise demurely placed her breakfast tray on the night table beside the bed and promptly doubled up in a laughing fit.
“Thanks,” I told her when she finally subsided to a series of high pitched giggles.
“You’re welcome,” she smiled, giving me an affectionate kiss.
“But you wouldn’t really tell Rose,” I asked, “would you?”
“Don’t count on it,” she chuckled, pulling me down into the sheets.