From a marketing standpoint, the best move ever made by the folks who enjoy defacing public property was to rebrand themselves as “graffiti artists.”
Generally speaking, it’s a tough sell convincing people that your fondness for criminal behavior is merely a creative outlet to be embraced. It’s hard to imagine, for example, a compulsive car thief passing himself off as an artist whose preferred medium happens to be “unauthorized vehicle relocation,” although I do like imagining this guy being hauled off to jail, muttering to himself, “No one understands art anymore.”
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I think we may be willing to cut some slack to these spray-can-wielding Picassos because we all understand the fundamental human impulse to vandalize. What were the original cave paintings, after all, if not a very primitive form of graffiti?
In fact, scholars now believe that many of these depictions represented an early attempt at written language. Researchers working in the caves outside Lascaux, France, recently achieved a breakthrough by identifying a series of paintings as an ongoing dialogue between competing tribes.
Even the scholars were surprised to translate the pictures as a series of lines consisting of, roughly, “Cro-Magnon Man sucks,” followed by “No, Neanderthals suck,” followed by “No, you suck,” and so on. The final line in the sequence remains undeciphered, but many experts assume that it probably reads, simply, “Zeppelin Rules.”
Of course, this urge to deface is strongest during the teen years when kids, in a form of youthful rebellion, etch their names in every nearby schoolroom desk, gym locker, patch of wet pavement or, if no other open spaces are available, their forearms. Thankfully, most of us outgrow this juvenile obsession with plastering our names everywhere, with a few pitiable exceptions (see Trump, Donald).
School administrators are, of course, all too familiar with this behavior. That’s why when I was in junior high, the first few days of the school year were always dedicated to the important educational exercise of re-covering our schoolbooks with brown grocery-bag paper.
It was hoped that by keeping kids from defacing books, the school could make it through another year with, for example, yellowing history texts that referred to war in Europe as “one of the looming problems of 1939.”
This all changed in high school when I went to a private school where we bought our books. Free to deface to our hearts’ content, my classmates and I set upon our purchases with gusto. I still recall with admiration how one of the more inspired students in my English class refashioned the cover of his copy of “The Grapes of Wrath” so it looked like he was reading a book titled, “He Rapes Rats.”
Of course, there were also academic benefits to being able to write in your schoolbooks. Since most of my books were handed down to me by my older sister, I benefited from her habit of scribbling voluminous notes in the margins.
Particularly helpful was her chemistry textbook, nearly every page of which was chock-full of insightful chemistry-related comments like, “This class is sooooo boring,” “My god, I think I’m going to die of boredom,” “Important science question: Could chemistry be any more boring?” as well as her observations on which classmates were habitual nose-pickers.
My sister’s notes notwithstanding, I don’t think I believed in an ingrained human urge to deface until I studied anthropology in college. Then one day in class, while thumbing through the pages of my used textbook, I got to the section on prehistoric man.
There, as if to demonstrate incontrovertible evidence showing just how little has changed about human nature in thousands of years, was the proof, written in the margin by the previous owner:
“Cro-Magnon Man sucks.”
Examiner columnist Malcolm Fleschner still occasionally lies awake at night worrying about that looming war in Europe.
