skit #45: dispense slogies on hoagies

Their postcards read 'Greetings, from Nowtown!' The neighborhood bustles industriously, with lawnmowers, with carpools, with paper routes. Crime, carnality, and idleness not invisible but absent. Men wear hats, women wear aprons. Rain gutters are leafless. Cars stop at stop signs. Opinions are heard at town meetings, whoops are heard at town picnics. An olden elm stands rooted in the town center, in it a treehouse, a calico, redolent peaches. The poster hugs the bark like a bandaid.

Before the town had postcards, it had misery: craters, censorship, general dissent met by indiscriminate oppression. Dogmatic wars roared while people starved. Corned beef tins and bread loaves were scarce, but there was never a shortage of propaganda pamphlets for bathroom tissue. The malnourished serfs of Thensdale sardonically coined the saying, 'Dispense slogies [slogans] on hoagies.' The poster was not a bandaid, but the scar.

The scar was an patient man's face. Under the elm's umbrage, he darkened to stoicism, then darkened further to insidiously calculating. His face inspired trust in his reason more than in his intent. Some nights, the moonglow bestowed such a glowering look that even the drunkards avoided the poster's gaze. That his brow never furrowed made him appear less of a man and more of an unavoidable force.

A scab picked makes a wound. A wound healed makes a scab. So, none of the citizens removed the poster for fear a new poster would replace it. There is no shame in a sightly scab.

And is not a scab growth? The reaffirmation of national identity? What of the federally usurped economy? The defeat of corporate health care? The The democratically-earned suicide of those fickle general elections? The grand unification of bipartisanship to totalitarianism? The voluntarily relinquished rights? These wounds the scab protects. This scab the elm wears as a badge.

The geezers regard the poster's depth with its due reverence. The young Nowtownian vandals see only its surface, a defeated politician-turned-tyrant. The face that once procured national trust and produced national pride had been repeatedly defaced with an inked toothbrush mustache, diabolic horns, hopelessly academic glasses. A graffitist corrected the boldface slogan's initial H to read COPE.