GRAFFITI-MAN EXPOSEDWho, pray tell, is that urban outlaw with the grease crayon? Ithaca's indefatigable graffiti bandit? The person responsible for scribbling
BUSH IS A NAZI on storefronts, banks, parking garage walls, Ithaca Journal dispensers around town? Is he/she a lone scribbler or a vast army of hieroglyphic hitmen? Prophet, insurgent, existential hero, cartoon character, juvenile deliquent? Is Graffiti-man a tribune of truth or a public menace?
The truth may never be known about his/her identity. Victor Loo, Ithaca's new police chief, has publicly vowed to track Graffiti-man down and put an end to his reign of scribbling. So far Graffiti -Man has eluded capture, probably because he has never ventured down to Rt 13 where all the cops hang out at the diners and donut shops. GM has also been aided by the unseasonably cold weather in Ithaca which makes it doubly likely no self-respecting officer of the law will step out on the Commons at night. It only takes a few seconds for GM to complete his work - he is a premature ejaculator of words and not an artist of the blank wall. GM's work would never make it in the NYC subway - America's rolling museum of Underground Art, or be exhibited in the Graffiti Hall of Fame. Graffiti-man may not be the stuff of legend he thinks he is.
Bush is a Nazi
Think about it. What does that even mean? What level of discourse would you put a statement like that on? Certainly, George Bush acts like a fascist. He has reinstituted the Gestapo in the form of the Department of Homeland Security, pushed the nation into an
aggressive and possibly catastrophic foreign policy mode, rigged an election which brought his right wing thugs into power.and is attempting to suppress civil liberties in the US. He surrounds himself with henchman like Rumsfield, Wolfowitz, Cheney, Perle, Powell, Condolezza etc who certainly resemble the Nuremburg Twelve. Rumsfield is acting more and more like Himmler or Goering each day with his swaggering bravura and offensive rhetoric. The US already has concentration camps on the coast of Cuba. and every day is taking obscene liberties with international law. The state of Texas, which certainly comes closest to being America's Prussia, has already taken nearly 300 lives under the guise of legalized ethnic cleansing. So, yeah, fascism seems to be on the comeback trail. Nobody argues with that except the folks who are too blind to see it or the folks who have the most to gain from a return to totalitarianism.
So is Graffiti-Man's tag line a wakeup call? The tocsin of freedom? The moniker of the new Resistance? Or is it an infantile prank? (Here he goes again with the questions.)
In Ezra's considered opinion, the latter. Let's face it. Most people walking around the Commons don't have a clue what a nazi even is. Sure, people may have seen Schindler's List, some may even be old enough to remember WW2. But most high school or college kids have not been exposed to enough history to know even who George Washington was let alone Adolf Hitler. America is a historical black hole where every piece of information is sucked into a vaccuum to be replaced by today's trivia off the Internet. History has lost its meaning in the Information Age. There's just too much data being churned out for anyone to remember what happened in 1939 or 1959 or 1999. Words like 'nazi' become glyphs, words to be translated from some Rosetta Stone of the past and taken out of context, deprived of historical context.
So Seinfeld popularized the expression 'soup nazi.' He made the word funny and robbed it of the sinister connotations it had in the 1940's. That's what people think of when they see "Bush is a Nazi." Now we're getting somewhere! Maybe Graffiti-Man intends to say that Bush won't give us enough of what we want, he's a miser, a stingy old bastard. Is that it?
Hey, Ezra didn't go to Cornell. He never studied critical theory or semiotics, never read more than two sentences of Derrida, Judith Butler, Baudrillard, Lyotard or any of those other post-modernist stars in the hyper-intellectual stratosphere. He don't know a signifier from a flashlight battery. And he doesn't pretend that he does.
But Ezra does know that "Bush is a Nazi" is not what you would call considered speech. If Graffiti-Man and his readers don't really know what a nazi is, how can that statement be said to communicate anything except a personal rant? I could say that my boss is a nazi (and many people would agree) but that doesn't mean my boss is a member of the National Socialist Party, or wears a swastika on his Target sweater, or is even an adherent of Adolf Hitler (even though his methods are somewhat similiar.)
Prior to the explosion of "Bush is a Nazi' s around town, other graffiti campaigns had started up. Ezra is talking about the "Dig that Jive" tag line. Ok, that says something. It's mysterious, thought provoking, tantalizing, conveys a sense of joy and the richness of experience. Maybe it comes from Langston Hughes or another member of the Black Renaissance group of writers? That particular phrase doesn't make you think of a Seinfeld comedy or make you think that the author is an overgrown juvenile deliquent. It doesn't shut down discussion, it opens dialogue.
Hey, Graffiti-Man, what's with it? Ezra has seen a bunch of Ithaca businessmen walk past your handiwork and actually laugh. Are they laughing at you? Maybe you're giving graffiti a bad name in a town that has hardly been exposed to any real cutting edge graffiti.
Why do you confine your work to a three block area? What about the old public library? That building's got a nice blank white surface. Are you just an opportunist who has a few beers at Moonshadow or someplace, goes out to the Commons, looks around and impresses your friends with a little zip and zap. Hey, dude, you're pissing in the wind!
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 5:50 AM
