I Suppose This Would Be a Desirable Outcome

We Lovettsvillians are a quiet lot. Not for us are the hurly-burly of the city, the harum-scarum of the urban scene. We reject even the argy-bargy of the outer suburbs. We don't smoke marijuana in Lovettsville; we don't make a party out of lovin', and we like holdin' hands and pitchin' woo. Furthermore, leather boots are still in style for manly footwear; beads and Roman sandals won't be seen. Football's still the roughest thing on campus, and the kids here still respect the college dean. ("Dipso" Jimmy Callahan -- Dean of Your Bedroom at Patrick Henry College. Finest, most upstanding man from here all the way to Brunswick, MD -- if a bit fond of the ichors of grape and grain, he slings a mean pinochle hand.)

So it was, I must concede, a bit of a shock to find, at the convergence of Mountain Road and Morrisonville, a harbinger of the encroachment of the aforementioned hurly etc.:


That I was constrained to screech the brakes, yank the Pathfinder through 180 degrees, and photograph this graffito is evidence enough of the rarity of the malign urban influence in these parts. Not since Lovettsville Pizza and Subs added ricotta cheese to its selection of toppings has such a citified thing as the alteration of stop-signs to support some political cause or other been seen in these parts. Hens' teeth would rain from the sky before one of us began tagging public property.

But I must confess some bewilderment as to the cause being advanced here. "Stop," "Disney," and "Porn" are three words I had honestly never expected to see collected together in one sentence -- and yet there they are. A Google search suggests that they might be referring to this unfortunate yet hardly world-shaking incident, in which some narsty narsty moviefilm was accidentally transmitted over Disney's cable network. But it seems hardly worth defacing roadway signage over. Whey-faced apologies were issued and accepted. We moved on.

But it is the presence of the word "please" in the graffito that makes me glow with pride for our small-town weltanschauung. It is of no importance in what manner the Disney corporation is degrading our public airwaves with money shots and degraded-slut antics; in our from-the-bowels-of-hell outrage against it, we still remember Emily Post. If the DFHs who ended the Vietnam war with their chants and self-immolations had only included a few pleases and thank-yous in their arsenal, the war would have ended in approximately 1968.

"Hey, hey, LBJ, please be so kind as to inform us, how many kids did you kill today?"

It has a Virginia-Nice ring to it, don't you think?