Flag ships

 

15 April 2022

So that’s what flagship means, says the child-self to the curmudgeon watching the news: the commanding officer carries the flag on the lead ship. Not to be confused, in this instance, with leadership. A cartoon shows mermaids underwater beside a gun turret, marveling at how they always wanted to see Moscow. Ship stands in for, sinks for, the place, which stands in for the nation, sinking. In the line-up of rhetorical tropes, only one commits the crime.

So that’s what a flagship is, a metaphor on top of a symbol on top of a military reference. The provost of our flagship university writes to a woman who told him about her mother’s suicide, “there is simply no truth to this.” After the vice chancellor, on reading my email about a suicide on campus responded, “Enjoy your retirement!” one noted that the exclamation point was shrapnel.

One cat attacks another cat. Second cat taken to vet, where he bites a tech. Vet tech taken to the hospital. Second cat sits on the left side of the lanai. First cat moves from right to left side, stares, her tail wiggling. Words wouldn’t end this hostility; they never do. “Should we take Putin seriously when he warns of unpredictable actions?” No, says the pundit.

Offending cat drinks from the deck, dawdles before she stares. The cats are more interested in each other than in the birds. Offending cat leaps on the table under a folded umbrella, sniffs the plants. She turns her stare toward me.

Age creates a gap between cause and effect. Get your certificate in self-detection. Trace back the symptom (wrenched back) to cause (pulling morning glory vines) as if to freshly discover a link. The pundit knows better. It’s a proxy war, ginned up by NATO. There is always someone at the controls, even when the ship sinks. It’s genocide, if that word means anything. It’s a series of war crimes, as if one did not mandate the next. It’s something we can name, because naming it marks it like a flag. The unmarked graves are lines on a map, as are the convoys of trucks through a forest. But lines used to make sense.

The historian geometer gets out her ruler and traces patterns. Lines become angles become triangles become shattered squares. Lines cross the map like a Trail of Tears; one of them is the Trail of Tears. Ain’t no real big secret all the same.

Y’s new photo looks out from the middle of a giant skyscraper on other looming apartment blocks. The new photo is as banal as the old, just taken from higher up. She’s back in Kyiv, inviting us to share her #warcoffee. The offending cat has come in from the deck to eat the other cat’s food. The other cat sits beneath a railing, out of sight. What he can’t see won’t hurt him.

A friend lashes out about platitudes. Life is suffering, he says, and no prayer to end it will ever succeed. He’s suffering, and that becomes his title, because titles comfort us. Another friend reminds me that a dog talks in Anna Karenina. A third friend doesn’t name his dog Tolstoy. My screen fills with other peoples’ flowers, cherry blossoms mostly. Gratitude is one of these platitudes, but like any, it’s harder to breathe in than to spit out.

--for Patrick P.