just to get it down

the protesters are assembled outside the courthouse. they are assembled peacefully. at least this is how they look in photographs and video footage which misrepresent them for those unable or unwilling to protest. this is how they will be misrepresented forever--except in verbal accounts and retellings of the protest, which many will disregard for not being as reliable a document as a photograph. the truth is: they are a disorganized inventory of stock personalities, all united, at least bodily, by their presence at the courthouse on this particular day at this particular moment. irate dads with acceptable facial hair sport signs touting polically conservative slogans and catchphrases. they are dressed in golf polos which sport the isignia of their favorite football team (which just so happens to uniformly be the local football team). occupying the same general space are sexless moms with bad haircuts shouting things aggressively. the things they are shouting get drowned out easily by the things the dads and other men are not shouting aggressively but shouting all the same. young hippies and old new-agers pass through the scattered clusters of protesters lazily. some decide to sit. they sit on blankets. they sit on quilts, beach towels. some are shirtless--male and female both. though the women wear bikini tops and the men exhibit pefect medical textbook illustration bodies and nipples which are too youthfully round and too youthfully red-plum colored to suggest that they are true hippies--that they don't spend hours in the gym instead of reading Ginsburg's lesser known works or Hesse's Siddhartha. in this carnival of archetypes--the grotesque amusement park line of stereotypes--Martha Goodnight is trying to convince herself to hold up the shoddy sign that she's brought with her from home. the sign says something unoriginal--a borrowed phrase from television: the 24 hour news network she watches exclusively. the one with the conservative slant. she didn't start watching it until she met her husband--and even then, it took years before she realized that he'd been a habitual viewer--or a loyal one. she just assumed that he was watching "the news." after the divorce: she continued watching it, though now paying more attention. she no longer passively listened to the day to day stories and tuned out anything political which she could not understand or chose not to understand because it was too hard to understand, not being properly versed in the language. like some women watch daytime soaps or some men watch their favorite sports teams, she watched this particular news network fanatically. some of the terms were lost on her--mostly financial terms but some political. her understanding of the government was crude at best. but she liked that the talking heads at this network were so passionate about what they said--it was like church. or church as she rememberd: the fiery baptist preacher condemning lazy sinners to eternity in the fires of hell.