14 May—It looks like the Borough of Litchfield Board of Warden and Burgesses (BOLBOWAB), the dreaded and dreadful juggernaut star chamber that goes to great lengths to irritate even people fortunate enough not to live within its dictatorial confines, is doing its very best to grease the skids for the borough-town consolidation its members claim to oppose.

The latest squirt of grease came at the BOLBOWAB meeting earlier this week, when Gayle Carr, senior burgess and acting warden, told organizers of the Litchfield Hills Road Race that they won’t be allowed to display the flags that have been a popular feature and sine qua non of the race since it was first run in 1977. The unacceptable, unlawful flags represent the countries of race participants, including, of course, the United States.

Can you imagine banning the Stars and Stripes anywhere in the United States? Oh, but the Borough of Litchfield isn’t just anywhere. And, as we know, the BOLBOWAB disdains the Constitution anyway. If the BOL had a motto, it would be “You don’t like it? Too bad!” And that’s putting it politely.

It’s evident to any observer that the Borough’s new broom is clueless, autocratic, and inflexible. A distasteful, disastrous combination. The old Borough brooms certainly were autocratic and inflexible, but not quite as clueless. And all but one of the current burgesses are newbies, with the one non-newbie, Peter Vermilyea, evidently succumbing to the clueless, inflexible authoritarianism of all the new burgesses.

Why? Guess. Remember the yellow ribbons? Remember how they’ve been unconstitutionally barred from the Litchfield Green by BOLBOWAB fiat on the advice of a mouthpiece hired as a sadistic last hurrah by the previous warden, Dirk Patterson?

That complaisant mouthpiece, Tom Gerarde, opined that if the BOLBOWAB failed to breach the First Amendment by banning yellow ribbons last year, it wouldn’t be able to breach the First Amendment by banning anything in the future.

And don’t forget that Gerarde has rewritten contract law by telling the BOLBOWAB that it didn’t—and doesn’t—have to abide by an agreement made by a previous BOLBOWAB. Unilaterally abrogating a contract because it’s inconvenient for one party to abide by its terms? One wonders what novel and arbitrary ad hoc takes and perversions BOLBOWAB’s accommodating mouthpieces will come up with next to please their maleficent client.

I don’t know which of its lawyers told the BOLBOWAB it could henceforth ban the road race flags for the same specious reason it could ban yellow ribbons. But the flags may have another factor in their favor besides the Constitution: consuetude. Consuetude is simply custom or usage, which often bears the force of law. Something like squatters’ rights. As far as the road race flags are concerned, if over four decades of regular annual use doesn’t constitute consuetude, I don’t know what does. Not that it would mean a thing to the BOLBOWAB or its mouthpieces.

The sanctimonious (and, of course, autocratic) BOLBOWAB has been a parody of itself ever since the sacrosanct BOL was incorporated or chartered in 1818 or 1879 or 1885 or 1915 or whenever, depending on whatever floats your boat. Today, Connecticut state officials wish they could ignore it and have nothing good to say about it when pressed.

Unfortunately the sickies who have kept the BOL going for far too long have been devious enough to protect and preserve their totalitarian microcosm with a super-sick joke of a charter. The last iteration of the charter was foisted on the BOL by the BOLBOWAB in 1991, before any of the current burgesses were even living in the borough. Or the town.

Given what it contains and doesn’t contain, you’d think the charter was drafted by morons and imbeciles. But in actual fact it was insidiously crafted, with the connivance of pros in Rochester, New York, to take virtually all the power from the people and give it to the BOLBOWAB. Clever bastards.

Think of Russia or China condensed into a little over a square mile and you have the Borough of Litchfield . . .