Before this, I belabored our posters. Even using fat, chisel-type Sharpies, it took me forever. But a couple of days ago, lecturing myself on slobbiness’s advantages, I simply patched and pasted and Scotch-taped together enough pieces of paper with words on and put them in the car.

An oldish fellow—one of the regulars, which I’m not—was already there when I turned into the parking lot next to Representative Cline’s office. You’d think Oldish has a degree in law or maybe political science. He’s precise about his knowledge, genteel, yet blunt. His posters are never spectacular. When I got out of my car with my poor excuse of a billboard, he was photographing a man in an orange T-shirt.

Orange looked at me. “You can’t park here.”

“Who are you?” I asked, in my best belligerent good-Christian voice. Between the two of them, something unpleasant was going on. In front of Cline’s office, all over the sidewalk, lay construction-worker equipment.

“The owner. You have to move your car.”

“But there’s no sign!” Heading back, I kept arguing, in hopes that Oldish was catching all this. Building owner? Parking-lot owner? “How’s anybody supposed to know?” I screeched.

“He said he’s calling the police,” said Oldish. By the time I got my keys in the ignition, Orange had moved his pickup truck to block the parking-lot entrance/exit. However, I was able to weasel my car through a gap and into the weedy adjacent lot.

Other regulars arrived, enough so they made a small knot on the embankment northward of Cline’s office. Try to picture it, maybe. 1) Them, and 2) poking around on the cluttered sidewalk, where anybody assembling would’ve been transgressing, even had it been bare, the property owner’s little repair crew, and 3) the actual highway smack next to the sidewalk, four lanes, but two closed to traffic for proposed alterations by the city, allowing a few of us to wander the median strip or the barricaded southbound lane and, like the others, aim our claims at the motorists whizzing by.

Here came Sam’s van. He likes to drive it around town, STOP GENOCIDE painted on it, readable from an airplane, and STOP GAZA’S STARVATION. He pulled into our roped-off lane and just sat for a while, not far from Johann and me. Johann had brought a square piece of cardboard, the line on it innocuous. Informed of the run-in with Orange, Johann ambled over to the sidewalk. He spoke with Orange for a bit, both of them amicable.

“You’re a good friend,” I said, when Johann returned. “Yeah,” he said. “We know each other. Our kids went to the same school. The political melee bugs him. I can understand that.”

Orange’s complaint had brought a pair of cop cars. The dispute over his turf had been settled, not unkindly. The cops had left. But now they came back—or maybe it was a different cop team—to tell Sam, who’d gotten out of the van, to move it. Reasonable, certainly. They didn’t try once to push us off the street.

As for the traffic, few problems. Honking horns, smiles flashing. Sometimes drivers just kept their eyes on the road. Somebody zooming past yelled, “Jesus is the answer, not the politicians!” and a protester yelled back, “Thank you Jesus!”

The awful thing was when a man put his head out his window and hollered, “F--- Palestine! F--- (something else, I couldn’t hear),” and one of the sign wavers in the group apart from mine yelled back the same obscenity. “No no,” said Johann quietly, beside me. “Now I don’t like that. That’s not the way to do it. The signs that one woman’s holding—see her signs? Slogans like that are too mean. They’re not helpful.”

I tried to look, see for myself.

I said to Johann, “What about my sign? Is mine okay?”

Without really looking, he started to say yes, but then he took a second glance. CLINE LIKES LIAR TRUMP. “Eh. I don’t know. Not sure.”

“Well,” I said, “you have to say it.” The liar word—that bothered him. It somewhat bothered me, too. You’re not supposed to go around calling somebody a liar. But, good grief. As suckered in as people are, how can anybody not say it?

I turned my sign around, made Johann read the other side.

“You talked to Cline?” he asked. “You ran into him somewhere? Or what? You talked with him here at the office?”

“Yes.”

He reread my back-and-forth with Cline. He pondered. He kept trying to take it in.

“You have to say it, don’t you?” I asked.

My remaining errands in town, I kept the poster in the rear of the car, the small-print side visible through the window. Finished at Food Lion, paused behind the car, I saw spots on the glass, blocking the shine. I’d not noticed them before. Someone threw their coffee? But wouldn’t it have left dribble trails, too?

I wondered, later, whether I should’ve just written GREEDY. But that would’ve been ugly, too. Just as ugly, really. Truth is, CLINE LIKES TRUMP should’ve been enough. It should’ve been so enough. Enough, yet nobody I know, including me, believes should is much relevant. It’s too big a beast. 

The quotes from the meeting with Cline are verbatim, to my best knowledge (I was scribbling furiously, unable to keep up). Although the rest here is jumbled, an approximation, you get the idea.