Joelle's I-Day-eve walk: the flag action on Shaw's monument, and its futility
Shaw’s metal head and raised sword illicitly draped in a large Québecois fleur-de-lis flag with all four irises’ stems altered to red blades, so it’s absurdly now a red white and blue flag; three Boston cops on ladders with poles and shears; the Canadian militants come in the night, on the eve of Interdependence, thinking anyone cares whether they hang things from historic icons, hang anti-O.N.A.N. flags, as if anyone not paid to remove them cares one way or the other.
Context
Separatist street-theater met by civic indifference: on the eve of Interdependence the militants deface Boston's Colonel Shaw / MA-54th monument with an altered fleur-de-lis (the irises' stems turned to "red blades"), and the only response is "three Boston cops on ladders with poles and shears." The political gesture is real — an anti-O.N.A.N. flag on a Union war memorial — but the scene's verdict is that the reconfigured nation has passed into a stage where such acts land on no one, symbolic warfare against a public too anhedonic to register it. (The suicidal-lens framing is depression-anhedonia's; landed here is the flag action and the polity's non-response.)