The other day I went into one of those big-box antique stores, the kind with forty or fifty separate vendors, to look around. There was a middle-aged-to-elderly woman stationed on a chair near the door; you could tell she was there in some sort of official capacity. Another woman came up to me and asked if I was a first-time visitor or had been there before. I said I'd been there before. She was tall, slender, with longish grey hair loosely tied back, likely past seventy but under eighty; she'd probably been pretty in years past. She told the first woman she'd need to ask incoming visitors what she herself had asked me and keep track; there was a list on a clipboard. “Oh, Big Brother is watching,” said I. The tall woman replied, in a friendly enough tone, that she didn't feel much like Big Brother. “Well, Big Sister then.” She was fine with that. And it struck me that the sinister connotations of the former epithet do not carry over to the latter one, not at all.

One of the vendors, who was not present, sells Trump memorabilia and little else. He had put on display a roll of paper towels, on which I wrote “DEATH TO FASCISM.” The tall woman might have seen me, or seen my words later and connected the dots, but I don't care.