In the London Telegraph, Theodore Dalrymple asks, “Why has Britain turned into a giant rubbish bin?”
An Englishman’s street is now his dining room, and his country is his litter-bin. When Englishmen – or a sizeable number to judge by the results – arrive at a beauty-spot their first impulse is to chuck at it a vividly coloured empty bottle or tin of revolting drink with which they have recently refreshed themselves.
Drive down the A14 from the M6 to Huntingdon or Cambridge and every verge, every roundabout, is littered by the thousand, or the million. Such filth is not the handiwork of a handful. Until I drove down and saw it flapping in the trees, I hadn’t appreciated how much polythene there was in the world. Where does it come from? Who knows? Even more to the point, who cares? Certainly not the local authorities, that have so many other bigger worries – like how to pay the pensions of staff who took early retirement.
AdvertisementDreadfully incompetent and dishonest as public authorities are, our pavements are not mottled by discarded chewing gum because of them; and it is not only because of them that our streets are the filthiest in Europe, if not the world.
Not long ago I had the humiliation of being answered with an aggressive and flat refusal. Perfectly politely, I asked a woman, who threw her cigarette end down at my feet as we entered Euston Station, to pick it up. If in retaliation I had criticised her slovenliness, I should no doubt have been arrested for insulting behaviour. In the absence of any sense of civic duty, we have no defence against litterers.
Britain was not always so filthy. I suspect that it is the result of a toxic mixture of excessive individualism (there is no such thing as society), and of an easily inflamed awareness of inalienable rights (who are you to tell me what to do? I know my rights). What I do is right because it is I who do it; the customer is always right, and life is my supermarket.
The virtual world has become more real and all-encompassing to us than what used to be called the real world. Those who toss rubbish from cars are in a bubble, and in a trance; separated physically from the world, bathed in music, usually trance-inducing, they glide past everything around them like ghosts in haunted houses.
Overall, I don’t think America has a similar level of garbage; 35 years before Ward Churchill became a household name, by and large, Americans heeded the silent tears of proto-phony Indian Espera Oscar de Corti, better known as “Iron Eyes Cody.” But it certainly has a graffiti problem. Unlike litter, which “liberal” elites have always publicly frowned upon, many “progressives” see graffiti not as the vandalism it is, but as some sort of “free expression” by overzealous youth and/or an oppressed underclass. (Doubly ironic when otherwise they’d be complaining about spray cans of paint damaging the ozone layer.) You can see how bad graffiti has gotten when you drive by virtually any railroad yard or watch a freight train pass by — seemingly every railroad car has been vandalized with gallons of spray paint.
In his newest “Best of the Web” column (also the source of our headline above), James Taranto describes the problem getting worse, because, not coincidentally, the left is happy to give vandalism a free pass:
Heather Mac Donald will love this one: The New York Times reports on a disturbing new trend of vandalism against trees. In San Francisco, “every tree” on one block “has been spray-painted in shades of purple, red, white and black.” The reason? “Graffiti, taggers believe, is not easily covered or removed from trees without harming them.”
But here’s the part that tells you everything about the Times’s worldview:
The vandalism has angered residents, and possibly threatened the health of some trees, which are remarkably rare in San Francisco because very few tree species are indigenous. The tagging also appears to violate one of the tenets of the graffiti subculture: it is supposed to be a reaction to urban life, not an attack on nature.
We would describe the people who create graffiti as vandals damaging the property of others. The Times sees them as a “subculture” that has “tenets,” one of which is that you do not vandalize trees. Even more hilarious, it informs us of these alleged tenets in an article that proves they do not exist.
And this isn’t the first time that Gray Lady has given such vandalism a pass. As Mark Steyn writes in After America, “sometimes there’s so much writing you can barely see the wall:”
On my last brief visit, Athens was a visibly decrepit dump: a town with a handful of splendid ancient ruins surrounded by a multitude of hideous graffiti covered contemporary ruins. Sit at an elegant cafĂ© in Florence, Barcelona, Lisbon, Brussels, almost any Continental city. If you’re an American tourist, what do you notice? Beautiful buildings, designer stores, modern bus and streetcar shelters…and all covered in graffiti from top to toe. The grander the city, the more profuse the desecration. Go to Rome, the imperial capital, the heart of Christendom: the entire city is daubed like a giant New York subway car from the Seventies. Look at your souvenir snaps: here’s me and the missus standing by the graffiti at the Trevi Fountain; there we are admiring the graffiti at the Coliseum.
A New York Times feature on Berlin graffiti reported it as an art event, a story about “an integral component of Berliner Strassenkultur.” But it’s actually a tale of civic death, of public space claimed in perpetuity by the vandals (like graffiti, another word Italy gave the world, as it were). At the sidewalk cafés, Europeans no longer notice it. But it is in a small, aesthetically painful way a surrender to barbarism—and one made even more pathetic by the cultural commentators desperate to pass it off as “art.” And it sends a signal to predators of less artistic bent: if you’re unwilling to defend the civic space from these coarse provocations, what others will you give in to?
For the Times, I’d say the answer to that is endless. And if you can’t see the wall for all the handwriting upon it, you can thank the newspaper and its staff for the aesthetic “privilege” they’ve bequeathed to you.
(Thumbnail on PJM homepage by Shutterstock.com.)
If they would just graffit (new verb, that) where it is needed. Like on all the rusty old bridges and such. Graffiti on rail cars saves the need for routine paint jobs, don’t ya know.
Actually, it’s just the reverse, since the graffiti routinely covers over reporting marks such as the car number and the like. And again, it’s destruction of private property. Though as we’ve seen with OWS, that’s not much of a concern for papers like the NYT these days.
Reporting marks are a conservative neo-con trick. They want us to think it makes rail freight more efficient, but all is does is make it harder to miss-route cars (for theft) and cuts jobs for people with degrees in xyz studies to do clerical work for high pay…It’s our right to work at a non-job, inefficiently.
Go graffiti
sarc/
ta
My husband and I recently took a Mediterranean cruise. And what amazed us about the graffiti we encountered in nearly every port of call and tour stop was not that it was there, or even that there was so much of it, but that it was absolutely indistinguishable in style from the graffiti we knew back home in the LA area. Free expression of individualism my arse, I’d never seen a more conformist “art” in my life. (Sort of like how every liberal thinks he’s being groundbreaking and revolutionary when he’s parroting every other liberal who thinks he’s being groundbreaking and revolutionary when he’s really mouthing reheated century-old theories.)
LA used to have some wonderful murals along the freeways near the downtown area, and the taggers would respect them. Then they realized that if they sprayed their stuff on them it couldn’t be painted over by the road crews so easily. Once or twice there were attempts at restoring them, but eventually they gave up. And we lost something wonderful.
Nothing says old Europe or third-world like graffiti.
The Unconscionable Lack of Liberal Conscience
“Let your conscience be your guide” is an outdated axiom for Catholics in the Democrat Party, as is the concept of moral and ethical conduct as they apply to their religion.
True and unfortunately, morality and ethics are antithetical constructs in any political context and “ethics committees” seem out of place in political bodies and largely exist as pro-forma charades to satisfy a gullible public but many liberal Catholic Dems go further by overtly flaunting their contempt for ethical behavior.
Of course, relativists reject the idea of any absolutes in life, which is a nifty excuse for avoiding condemnation for violating established societal norms of decency since they absolutely disagree with those dictates.
Thus, Catholic and non-Catholic Democrats alike are able to campaign against what reasonable individuals understand intuitively, the existence of living, human life in the womb, on the bases of debatable claims that it is not a human life, that it’s not viable, that a woman’s right to privacy takes precedence over pre-born life.
The moral-ethical relativists absolutely believe all that and, though I think their beliefs are absurd, I can consider the source and accept them. If their faiths condone the murder of innocent pre-borns, who am I to disagree? The prudent approach of opting for sparing lives when there is any doubt as to when life begins in-utero is inapplicable to relativists.
You see, it’s all relative, whatever that means.
What I find totally unacceptable are politicians, especially ostensibly-Catholic politicians, who preach civil rights yet advocate in favor of denying the most fundamental civil entitlement, the constitutionally-guaranteed “right to life” through abortion. When they complain about Catholic consciences inhibiting their unorthodox views, they are hypocrites verging on apostasy.
Dozens of current Catholic politicians have been lectured . . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=6647.)
Two criticisms of your remarks:
1. They have absolutely nothing to do with the subject at hand, namely graffiti.
2. Being pro-life or anti-abortion is not exclusively a Catholic concern.
Graffiti is for people that don’t have a message board. For example….
That was a notably immoral era too.
These days, anybody who wants to can get a blog for free from Blogger or WordPress. They can easily put up art on deviantArt, again for free. But unless they put up something halfway interesting on a regular basis, it’s unlikely they’ll get many viewers, and they can’t force anybody else to look at their site.
Graffiti (as well as the #Occupy movement) is a way for people to garner attention even when they have nothing worthwhile to offer.
As you say, Ed, this is the logical culmination of people’s “expressing themselves.”
If there was ever a symptom of a degenerating society, that might be it. “MY rights,” “MY expressing myself,” stepping all over anything in their way.
It’s just like the Occupoopers who claim the “right” to drop a deuce whenever and wherever they feel the urge to empty their bowels.
If local authorities enforced existing laws against littering, dumping, or improper sewage disposal, and made them pay for the cleanup, it’d stop. [LINK]
Same with the spray paint vandals.
The obvious objection to your suggestion is that cops are not going to be very eager to drop investigations of murders or other serious crimes for the sake of setting up stakeouts to catch graffitists. The citizens who pay their salaries would also NOT be happy about their tax dollars being used to chase graffitists while unsolved murders, rapes, assaults, and so forth are in the media….
On the other hand, if the “broken windows” theory has anything to it – and cities like New York and their experiences with it suggest it does – graffiti should be a higher priority than it is.
I confronted a tagger in San Francisco who was defacing a bus shelter, asking him how he would react if I spray painted his bedroom; “”I wouldn’t like it,” he responded. “But this doesn’t belong to anyone,” he replied—never having paid taxes.
I wouldn’t even call them “taggers.” It gives them a degree of respect they don’t deserve. Call them what they are – vandals.
I agree — good point.
Many years ago, when my parent’s dog was still alive, I would take him for walks on occasion and was constantly amazed to find that he managed to urinate on every tree and shrub that we passed. I didn’t know why he chose to urinate on some many trees. I learned eventually that this is how he “marked his territory” so that other dogs would know that he considered this his turf.
Ever since that point, every time I see graffiti, I remember that dog and find myself equating the graffiti to his urine. The graffiti is just another inarticulate creature’s way of indicating what he considers his.
Exactly. Every piece of graffiti is a fancy way of saying “I was here!”
You Promenaded the Pooch to Piss on Public Property whilst Gazing at Graffiti?
You jive me do you not?
Actually, I walked the dog around my parents’ suburban neighborhood, which was pretty much free of graffiti at the time – this is a good 25 years ago – and he peed on the neighbors trees and shrubs. (Trees between the sidewalk and the curb were public property and he may have whizzed on the odd one of those too but they were few and far between as I recall.)
I made the connection between dogs urinating and graffiti a few years later when I saw how widespread graffiti was becoming in the urban neighborhood where I was living at the time. It seemed like exactly the same phenomenon: someone marking their territory with a squiggle but the humans used paint while the dogs used urine.
NYC had a terrible graffiti problem from the late 1960s to the 1980s. In the last 20 years the problem has diminished, due to 1)strict enforcement of anti graffiti/vandalism laws on the subways, which used to be a disaster, but are now virtually graffiti-free; 2)quick painting over/removal of graffiti, so the slobs can’t see their “work”; 3)most important, welfare reform, which NYC has remained true to, under both mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg. Welfare reform has reduced the number of NYC residents on welfare from 1.2 million (out of a population then of 6.8 million) to 500,000 (out of a population now of 8.25 million). Working people respect their surroundings, since they work and know the work involved in cleaning and maintaining them. Welfare bums in CA or the UK respect nothing, since they are paid to sit around on their butts and feel sorry for themselves, dreaming up new ways to be obnoxious. Welfare is not merciful; it is a life sentence to failure.
The NYC graffiti problem was also a great look into the minds of upper-class intellectual liberals.
One of the MTA’s inexplicable options during the height of the epidemic was to paint trains all white, under the idea that graffiti artists wouldn’t spray paint a blank white train (as opposed to ones that bore the state agency’s blue-and-silver corporate colors of the time). You can guess how well that worked out, while at the same time, the rich liberals who lived in Manhattan and did not have to ride the subway because cabs and/or limos were available actually celebrated the graffiti artists’ work. Norman Mailer co-authored a whole tome on its wonderfulness no doubt in part because Mr. Mailer didn’t have to ride the same marked-up subway cars five days a week between Brooklyn Heights and Manhattan.
Correct me if I’m wrong but I seem to remember reading that one of the things that helped keep the NY subway cars graffiti-free was the use of new subway cars made with special materials to which paint would not stick. Apparently, NYC was replacing a lot of the cars anyway – due to advanced age, not because they were covered in graffiti – and bought their new subway cars from Bombardier in Montreal which used an exotic new coating on the exterior (and maybe interior?) of the cars.
If that’s correct, it shows that sometimes the answer to a problem is REAL engineering, as opposed to “social engineering”….
New York had been buying stainless steel cars since the mid-1960s, and eventually opted not to do any decorative striping or door painting and just leave the steel exposed because there was no point in repainting it if it was just going to get graffitied up again. They also eventually found a solvent that would clean the spray paint quickly on the older carbon steel cars (the “Redbirds”), but the extended trips to the rail car washers caused a lot of those cars to rust prematurely, forcing premature replacement of the cars, which cost money.
Once the MTA got the spray paint problem under control, the graffiti artists in the city went to a new tactic — using commercial acid for etching glass and metal on the subway car windows and bodies. In the past few years, the MTA has come up with special materials and glass covering films that can be used to absorb the acid so it doesn’t damage the cars themselves. All this stuff of course costs even more $$$ that could be best spent elsewhere, but scratch a NYC liberal with a high enough income and strategic enough home to have the option not to ride the trains, and you’ll still get the warmed over 1960s-70s notion that the system was more “vibrant” when you couldn’t see in and out of the cars or read the route signs due to all the paint on the windows (and while they’re at it, they’ll also tell you how much Giuliani screwed up be chasing the hookers and drug dealers out of Times Square).
Interesting! Thanks for correcting my understanding of what happened with regards to the subway cars in NYC.
Going back to the Sixties, the progressive view has been that graffiti is yet another hallmark of the “underclass claiming its rightful place”- all part of what they regard as a “vibrant street culture” which will sweep all before it in remaking the world into something more to the progressive elite’s liking. (I.e., one in which all that matters is what they believe is good, because they’ll be in charge.)
The only problem with this grand Unified Theory of Tagging is that those doing it aren’t much interested in “changing the world”- or, indeed, even working for a living. Or even being able to form coherent sentences, for that matter.
Graffiti is the hallmark of somebody with nothing to do, and no noticeable talent for doing anything useful, anyway. To put it bluntly, they’d rather be getting stoned and f**king off. And maybe beating up somebody they don’t like.
Progressives love graffiti. Its actual meaning (if any) doesn’t matter; all that matters is that it’s giving a middle-finger flagdown to a culture they hate. Namely, ours. They love it because they love anything which they see as increasing the chaos in society. Hoping for a final, total collapse, so they can build their Brave New World on the ruins.
If they ever did, it would be interesting to see how they would react to some kid with a spray can tagging the New World People’s Egalitarian Socialist Cooperative Everything Center (I’m sure they would try to build one- they need a place to give speeches).
My guess is, the poor schlub would get a bullet, right on the spot. Because You Just Don’t Do That To Your Enlightened Overlords.
Progressives’ reaction to graffiti tells you more about their “intellectual content” than it does about the content of the graffiti itself.
clear ether
eon
If they ever did, it would be interesting to see how they would react to some kid with a spray can tagging the New World People’s Egalitarian Socialist Cooperative Everything Center (I’m sure they would try to build one- they need a place to give speeches).
I once spent most of a day in East Berlin before the Wall came down and the contrast between East and West was pretty dramatic. In the “fascist, capitalist West”, graffiti was plentiful, particular on the side of the Wall accessible from the West. In the “workers democratic republic of the East”, there was no graffiti at all. I don’t know for a fact that those attempting graffiti were actually shot but there must have been some pretty severe penalties for it otherwise I would have expected to see some graffiti. Then again, maybe spray paint wasn’t available to consumers there!
When I visited Berlin again a second time after the Wall had come down, I noticed that graffiti was starting to become noticeable in the eastern part of the city. I expect it’s quite a bit more common today, twenty years later.
I’m sure the Marxists would insist that there was no graffiti in the Soviet Bloc countries because everyone was happy and there was no desire to create graffiti.
Agree in totality. When in Montreal, a few years back, when I saw that the famous monument to Robert Burns on Ste. Catherine (the main street) had been “tagged”, I was suddenly all for the Singaporan solution. Public caning if caught. And then remove all the “tags” that remotely look like yours. May take 30 years but hey … no one asked for this “art”.
The railroads must have some responsibility to, at least, remove those messages that are obscene, profane, vulgar, racist or all of the above. We don’t see these “artworks” or messages on transport trucks. Why does the railroad get a dispensation? Giuliani’s broken window rule might actually work, if applied.
I agree that we don’t see tagging on trucks OFTEN but I have seen it.
You raise a good point though. Why is it very rare on trucks but very common on trains? If we could figure that out, maybe we could develop a strategy to keep trains tag-free once the existing tags had been removed or painted over….
Truckers tend to put people vandalizing their trucks in the hospital. Shipping companies I know frown on such tagging, and ask their drivers to “deal with it”.
Some who have been caught wish they got off as lightly as a caning.
Short of mounting guard on their trucks 24×7, just how would a trucker keep taggers off a truck for the hours of the day when it isn’t moving? It seems to me that trucks are inevitably going to be vulnerable to the attentions of a tagger when it is unattended. Putting it behind a fence with razor wire on top is going to help too but not every truck is similarly secured….
do you notice, there’s always some social center for later teenagers with a mural done in graffiti style? and half the crimes in that neighborhood are within half a block of that center?
and, well, why is it always the debased and ugly being repeated? it’s about like that video of about rumspringa- the kids run off to drugs and alcohol parties. They don’t seem to run off to a museum or an art gallery or a library, to learn the truly powerful beauties of Western Civ. I’d go hide in Amish-land if the alternative was a daily hangover or tweaking and acne.
What would happen if transfer payments stopped?
This ad hints at how to deal with graffiti “artists”:
http://adsoftheworld.com/media/print/wah_lum_kung_fu_school_graffiti?size=_original
Simple answer: we have gone from cultures that like and admire ourselves to cultures that disdain anything that is constructive.
In this new Leftist view from the 60s that has a marked disdain for conformism, anything constructive is in fact destructive and that which is destructive is constructive.
Why else would we happily import failure from the Third World in their millions and brag about it? When I was a kid the idea of importing 50 million people from the Third World was simply considered stupid.
oh, that’s not a “we” thing- that’s a straight up Ted Kennedy thing. 1965, his immigration act. There’s no “we” in that, anywhere. It was a bitter Irishman getting one over on the WASPs who wouldn’t have his family to tea. It was a deliberate defacement of regular American culture. It can be repealed, if anyone cared to try.
I’d love to try but our everlovin’ gov’t seems determined to prove how wrong the portrayal of the Third World as a paradigm of failure is by transferring those populations wholesale to the U.S.
It’s kind of an experiment and also acts a a “See-We’re Not Racists-Jim Crow/Slavery Was A Fluke” t-shirt.
The problem for committed socialists (like the NY Times) is that you can’t build your socialist utopia as long as there are pesky traditional and conservative institutions still in place. You must create the anarchy , jump in during the chaos, and make your power grab. Of course this means that they support anything that tears down civility, after all civilization is just the subjugation of anarchy.
I have pointed out for years now, that it isn’t a coincidence that the liberal media, education, and cultural entities promote any and all of the basest antisocial and destructive behavior.
I remember that when crime soared in New York City during the late 1960s and early 1970s, the New York Times actually editorialized that the high rate of violent crime was just part of New York City’s “charm” (that was the word they used).
The Left has nothing but contempt for traditional institutions or the traditional bonds that hold a society together. They want to change all that. And you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few institutions, you know the routine.
But the wealthy editors of the New York Times are the worst of the worst–because they can indulge violence and urban decay without having to live in it themselves. The editor of the New York Times doesn’t live in Brooklyn or the Bronx.
“Todays Vandals have no standards!” Unlike the vandals of the past that busted things that needed to be busted?
As I said in the post, that was Taranto’s headline, goofing on the mindset of the NYT.
Many years ago, I saw a simple and elegant solution to graffiti. Well, not a solution exactly but a way to contain it effectively.
I was visiting a friend at his campus radio station where he was doing a show and had to use the men’s room. I noticed that the walls of the stall were covered in white cardboard sheets and that there was lots of graffiti on those sheets. I asked him what the white sheets were about and he told me they were intended to address the problem of graffiti being written (or etched!) directly on the walls of the stalls. The sheets let people write graffiti on the stall walls without permanently defacing them. When the sheets filled up, they were removed and replaced with fresh new sheets, allowing people to compose new graffiti rather than forcing regular visitors to get increasingly bored with graffiti they had already seen. If the old sheets had anything particularly good on them, they were kept and archived or displayed somewhere else, perhaps on a bulletin board.
We used a similar system in my university residence. We had one of those huge pads of paper that get used on flipcharts in classrooms and as each sheet was filled up with graffiti, it would be torn off the pad and taped to the common room wall. Eventually, old sheets would be discarded or archived, depending on how good they were. Graffitists were able to exercise their “craft” without permanently defacing anything and we got a much better variety of entertainment than if every graffiti were permanently written, painted or etched on the wall.
It seems to me that a similar system could be employed today wherever graffiti is a problem. It might require sheets of plywood rather than paper for outdoor locations but at least the level of property damage would be reduced and the entertainment value would be increased as the variety of graffiti increased.
Of course, I’m thinking of graffiti that is at least witty and gives you something to think about, however briefly. Much of today’s graffiti seems to just be someone’s initials or a squiggle, which gives you nothing to think about.
Europeans, like Americans, have Brent taught since WW2 that their society is the vilest on the planet (racist, sexist, homophobic, fascist, etc.) compared to the shining path of socialism, so that who wouldn’t want to loot (Corazine) or trash it until its vileness was expunged from the Earth? Why would anyone lift a finger to save the awful society in which they live?
“San Francisco because very few tree species are indigenous. ”
As a Green, I thank the vandals for identifying the invasive species, for marking them for destruction that they might be replaced by native vegetation.
Some times the easy answer is the correct one: This graffiti and other vandalism is part of the same old anarchism and nihilism (although the pathetic examples of human debris doing it probably mostly don’t know it) which, just as in late 19th century Europe, is designed to erode the law and the mores which make for a civilized society, causing disorder and chaos, so some new leader and/or a emerging power-seeking group can take over the society and bring order (e.g. a New Order) to the system.