"You know what I want?" Martha-Ann Alito asked a stranger who had briefly flattered her at a dinner for the Supreme Court Historical Society last week. "I want a Sacred Heart of Jesus flag, because I have to look across the lagoon at the Pride flag for the next month." The stranger was a documentary filmmaker named Lauren Windsor; the conversations Windsor and a partner recorded with Alito and her husband, Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito, have been the subject of three stories (so far) in Rolling Stone. Windsor didn't even ask Alito about flags, although the couple's high-intensity vexillological approach had been in the news thanks to recent reporting on her long-running feud with a neighbor on their suburban Virginia cul-de-sac. That feud was not really about flags, although the decision to fly an upside-down flag outside their home—the justice said it was his wife's decision; Martha-Ann, when asked about it by a reporter, started screaming and eventually hoisted another, different, flag up the flagpole—did figure in it. It was more about how the Alitos are, as neighbors and just in general.
So it fit that, when given an opportunity or just a moment of otherwise neutral space through which to charge, Martha-Ann simply ran her mania up there in the assumption that the person who had just begun talking to her at a fundraiser would salute. "I’m putting it up and I’m gonna send them a message every day, maybe every week, I’ll be changing the flags,'" she fantasized, to someone she'd never previously met. "They’ll be all kinds. I made a flag in my head. This is how I satisfy myself. I made a flag. It’s white and has yellow and orange flames around it. And in the middle is the word ‘vergogna.’ ‘Vergogna’ in Italian means shame—vergogna. V-E-R-G-O-G-N-A. Vergogna." Anyway, it's a nice thing to think about, someday being able to raise a flag above your home that tells the neighbors that you think they are disgusting and going to hell.