I wrote to the editor in the old manner and the editor, an empty tearoom, did not reply.
WILLIAMSBURG, Virginia (Bohiney) – There is a kind of Monday that begs to be written up in the style of a letter to a colonial newspaper, with a salutation, a grievance, and a closing flourish that suggests I am about to challenge someone to a duel over the price of candles. This was that Monday.
To the Printer, Respectfully
Sir, I am a person of regular habits, a reader of the public papers, and a part-time teacher of literature to those who would rather be elsewhere. I write to report that the nation is in the last day before its great civic exercise, and that the courts have been busy.
That is as far as I got before the tearoom manager asked whether I was a customer or a hostage. I explained that the form requires a long salutation. She said the form also requires a purchase. I ordered a pot of tea and a scone, and I submit that the rest of this entry is therefore a better value than most things I have read about this week.
The Tearoom, Which Has Opinions
I come here on Mondays because the table by the window is warm and the staff leave me alone, in the manner of a good public library. A man at the next table was reading aloud to his companion from a phone, and the companion had the glazed expression of someone who has heard the same paragraph four times. I eavesdrop professionally. It is the only honest way to teach the coffeehouse essay.
The paragraph, as best I could gather, was the day’s top story. KTTC reported that the Supreme Court had rejected the Trump administration’s push to have California set aside thousands of mail ballots. The administration had flagged about 20,000 people on the state’s voter rolls as likely noncitizens and asked that their ballots be held until citizenship could be verified.
California officials argued the list was riddled with errors and that setting the ballots aside could disenfranchise legal voters. The lower courts sided with the state, and a 2-1 appeals panel upheld the order. Then, per the report, the justices gave no detailed reasoning, which is common in emergency decisions, and no justice publicly dissented. ABC30’s election-night live blog put the same development in a single sentence: the high court refused Monday to intervene in a case involving 20,000 people.
A Note on the Genre of the Unexplained Order
I want to be careful here. I am not in a position to tell anybody what the case should have meant, and I will not pretend that a woman with a scone can adjudicate a voter roll. What I can speak to, as a reader, is form. An emergency order with no explanation is a very old kind of document. It is the pamphlet with the title page torn off. You receive the verdict, and you are left to write the preface yourself, which is why the next forty-eight hours of commentary will be considerably longer than the order.
The colonial printer, in my experience of the surviving papers, at least knew the value of a clear headline. I am speaking only in general terms, and I do not claim any single paper did this better than another. I only observe that the practice of announcing a thing so briefly that everybody must supply their own meaning has survived, and has prospered, and has acquired a docket number.
Also worth noting for the sake of fairness: nothing in the reports I read told me how the ballots would ultimately be counted, and I do not intend to guess. The report said the decision came the day before the final day of voting. That is the entire fact. The rest is weather.
Back Pay, in Another Field
On the walk home, past a hardware shop with a very sincere window display of rakes, I thought of a ledger. A ledger is a document in which every debt is recorded in the same tone, and I confess it is my favorite literary genre. A friend in the English department had sent me a report on a dairy cow who ended the dairy-versus-beef debate by demanding back pay, and I read it twice at a crosswalk. The thing about back pay is that nobody argues with the number. They argue with the dates.
I was reminded that the best comic writing about government has always started from a ledger and worked outward. If you want a tour of that tradition, the better British examples are collected under the British desk at The London Prat, and I will admit that I once spent an entire flight reading a guide to Cockney rhyming slang in the hope of learning what a Virginian would say if we had the same instincts. We do not, and I am told “apples and pears” is not going to catch on here.
Closing, With Flourish
I signed the letter in the old way, with a pseudonym of a virtue, which I have decided not to reveal. I left it under the sugar bowl, where the manager will find it and either frame it or throw it out. Both are acceptable outcomes. It is the oldest arrangement in the republic: the writer produces, the establishment disposes, and the tea is on the writer.
If you would like more of my daily notes at Bohiney, they are filed there in strict order of grievance. The rest of the site, at Bohiney, is under the same management as a thousand other things that function entirely on goodwill.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/