by Justice William W. Bedsworth
My first job was delivering caskets to mortuaries. My dad was a casket-maker.1 It was a family business, and when I turned sixteen and was licensed to drive, I could free up one of my uncles to do more productive work.
The shop was in Lynwood, a town in Los Angeles County. My favorite delivery was Brown’s Colonial Mortuary in Santa Ana because the round trip took up most of a morning or an afternoon. When you’re sixteen, getting paid even a pittance for driving all day is a pretty good deal.
The truck was a ¾-ton flatbed Ford. It was plenty big enough for three or four caskets, which was often the load because we’d try to route me to two or three funeral homes at a time whenever possible. Gas was like a quarter a gallon, but the profit margin for the fledgling Enterprise Casket Company was anorexically thin.
The Bedsworths did not make high-end caskets at this time. These were wooden boxes covered with decorative cloth for the most part, and Dad’s best customers served people of modest income in central Los Angeles. Remind me sometime to tell you about my attempt to deliver caskets in South Central the day the Watts Riots broke out.
One day, for reasons I cannot recall,2 we were trying to squeeze more or bigger caskets onto the truck. When we finally got them all tied down, one stuck out a few feet over the back end of the truck. Dad said it was plenty secure, but we needed a red flag.3
I looked all over the shop for something red we could hang on the truck. I found nothing. There was an old oily rag, but it was more pink and black then red. When none of us could find anything red on the premises, my uncle gave me the keys to his car and told me to drive to my grandmother’s house, just a few miles away, and get something red. The truck couldn’t leave the yard without a red flag.
That’s how important red flags were in those days. Sixty years ago, people paid attention to red flags. They were the classic way of signaling danger.
Two decades later, I found myself in the office of Marvin Baxter,4 Governor George Deukmejian’s Appointments Secretary. Hat in hand, I was in Sacramento for my appointment interview for a judgeship in the Orange County Municipal Court. It turned into my second lesson in the power of red flags.
The interview went really well. I’d scouted Marv Baxter like he was an opposing quarterback. I’d talked to everybody who’d ever seen him play. I knew how fast he was and how well he could throw deep. I knew what he ate before games and what color t-shirt he wore under his jersey. I knew everything but his ring size and favorite color.
And we hit it off. I liked the man. He was charming, friendly, and easy to talk to. We both liked sports and dogs and children. For thirty-five minutes, I was cruising.
Then the issue of handgun control came up. Next thing I knew, I was debating the Second Amendment with a man I was trying to get a job from. Vociferously. I crested the hill of a bright future and went hurtling down the other side in a handbasket with no brakes.
That enabled Marv Baxter to see the red flag attached to the back of my vehicle. As well as the rest of the interview had gone, my Second Amendment position was a red flag for him.
I did not get the appointment. Cecil Hicks, whose influence was largely responsible for me getting as far as Marv Baxter’s office, always referred to it as “the biggest flameout in the history of the appointments process.”
So I went back to the DA’s Office until my election in 1986. I went back to being an appellate attorney. And what’s the indispensable tool on any appellate attorney’s belt? Shepard’s Citations.
And what does Shepard’s do for anybody conducting legal research? IT PROVIDES RED FLAGS!
Shepard’s literally throws up red flags. That’s how they warn you one of the cases you’re researching is of questionable provenance. That’s the barrier they throw across the road when the bridge goes out; their way of saying this field has not been cleared of land mines. Your black-and-white page of type has a RED FLAG on it.
A good portion of our lives is spent learning to identify red flags. And the better we are at it, the better chance we have of surviving to see the next one. Simple as that.
But we seem to be losing our respect for red flags. We no longer react to them as precipitously as Marv Baxter and I do. I blame football.
For some reason, both the NFL and the NCAA abandoned red flags some years back and began signaling penalties with yellow flags. I don’t know why. Why did the Mighty Ducks change their name and colors, and George Clooney grow a beard?
But red flags are more important than hockey and actors.5 Red flags are important warnings. According to Wikipedia, “A red flag could be a literal red flag used for signaling or, as a metaphor, a sign of some particular problem requiring attention.” The Emoji Dictionary says a red flag emoji “is commonly used to . . . warn people of bad ideas or potential problems.”
“Some particular problem requiring attention.” “Bad ideas or potential problems.” That’s what red flags identify. Football may have moved away from red flags but we can’t.
Without them, we elect people who talk about “Jewish space lasers” or have bundles of cash in their refrigerator freezers. We ignore climate change while streets submerge in Newport Beach and Miami, and Phoenix turns into the world’s largest outdoor convection oven. We ostracize and kill people—kill people—for listening to a divine interlocutor who interprets God’s word differently than our own divine interlocutor does.
These are red flags, folks. And we have to start paying more attention to them.
Shasta County’s Board of Supervisors had a vacancy on their Vector Control and Mosquito Abatement Board. The first candidate was a scientist, a retired epidemiologist who had been the county’s Health and Human Services Director until he retired. The second was a hydroponic garden store owner who was outside the nation’s capitol on January 6, wielding some questionable signage.
His pitch to the Board of Supes was a warning that Bill Gates had unleashed genetically modified mosquitoes in California. He called on his fellow citizens to do something to stop a conspiracy involving Japanese scientists,6 to let loose “flying syringes that will mass-vaccinate the population.”
Wouldn’t you think “flying syringes that will mass-vaccinate the population” would be a red flag? I mean, I love the optimism of the idea. It would be great if—instead of making an appointment at a clinic or a CVS or something—you could just go out back for the cookout and turn off the bug zapper?
“Please wear a red shirt, Mr. Bedsworth, that identifies you to the mosquitoes as a combination flu/Covid vaccine target. Are you sure you don’t want to put on the white hat for the tetanus mosquito? Or a blue armband for shingles? You could have all this done during a hot dog and some potato salad.”
That would be wonderful, but as much faith as I have in Bill Gates and Japanese science, I don’t think my future extends far enough to reach “flying vaccination syringes.” Sounds more like science fiction than science to me.
In fact, I think I’ve seen that plot line acted out. That’s an old Star Trek episode, isn’t it? Didn’t I see that in 1966?
James Tiberius Kirk: “The battle against the aliens from Zontar is going well, Bones. Apparently they’ve been watching our television programs for years and greatly underestimated our intelligence. We have, however, been somewhat hampered by unexplained swarms of mosquitoes that suddenly appeared on the battlefield. I got a couple of bites myself.”
Dr. McCoy: “OMG, Jim. Those aren’t mosquitoes. Those are flying syringes. You’ve been infected with a terrible disease; it’s going to turn your brain into the stuff that goes into Jack in the Box tacos.”7
Captain Kirk: “Oh, no; are you sure, Bones? Is there an antidote?”
Bones: “We don’t know; our attempts to study it have been enjoined as part of a trade secrets case between the Zontari and Jack. Scotty’s been trying to douse them with Antarean anti-matter, but that takes so much energy the flux capacitors are overheating. I think our only chance is for Spock to use a Vulcan mind meld on either Jack or the Zontari lawyer and get that injunction dissolved.
Either that, or you could boldly fly a shuttle into the mosquito swarm and use the q-particle generator to attach tiny corks to their proboscises.”
Hero: “Proboscises?”
I don’t know. I’m not sure I remember it exactly,8 but it was something like that. Come to think of it, they were all something like that.
But my point is that I think the phrase “flying vaccination syringes” is a red flag. It may not be as clear as “Danger, Will Robinson; danger, danger,” but it’s pretty clear. I think I would have gone with the epidemiologist.
Shasta, however, chose the flying syringe fighter. He’s now in charge of the Shasta County Mosquito and Vector Control Board. And if the warriors from Zontar land in Shasta County, the Shastans are gonna get the last laugh.
BEDS NOTES
William W. Bedsworth is an Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal. He writes this column to get it out of his system. A Criminal Waste of Space won Best Column in California in 2018 from the California Newspaper Publishers Association (CNPA). And look for his latest book, Lawyers, Gubs, and Monkeys, through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Vandeplas Publishing. He can be contacted at william.bedsworth@jud.ca.gov.