Defacing a Sign

In junior high school, I never understood the lure of vandalism. I just didn’t get it: in what way was it fun to make something ugly? I suppose, as with many things, the main kick was the getting away with it, and there weren’t too many opportunities in junior high school for the kind of surreptitious splendor that awaited us in the back seats of cars or unsupervised basements when we finally got to high school.

To a certain extent, I understand graffiti, at least inasmuch as it’s often a functional demarcation of territory or – in very rare cases – actual art. At the least it has the potential, albeit seldom realized, of improving its canvas. One could make the argument that the majority of our highways and cities are littered with acts of corporate and municipal vandalism, the constant visual noise of advertising and civics. In a more extreme example, when protests turn to riot (or, more often than not, when law enforcement incites a riot), you could consider the ensuing damage a type of vandalism even though it lacks the limited foresight and planning of an 8^th grader with a can of spray paint. Still, protesters and even rioters are exercising a kind of free if not protected speech when they destroy or deface symbols of the things they oppose.

It was this rather specious line of reasoning that led me to vandalize a sign Saturday night. Actually, I set out to do it more because I was tired of having public land so close to my house commandeered for rightwing propaganda. The philosophical underpinnings emerged about three drinks into my deliberations on methodology. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

From the highway, one enters my neighborhood through a long boulevard filled with hundred year old trees aligned neatly and receding into perspective just like the most domestically tranquil picture you could imagine. Real Norman Rockwell stuff. However, for the last year, someone has been placing signs on the first tree you see as you leave highway and enter the boulevard. First, a yellow ribbon after the invasion of Iraq; next, an American flag. After president Reagan died, they put up a large photo of him. The yellow ribbon I can let go, if for no other reason than its mighty cliché value. The American flag gave me more trouble – I recall in the weeks after 9/11 the number and size of American flags in New York, seemingly on every building and some several stories high, reminded me of nothing so much as pictures of the Nuremberg rallies. Still, I suppose I can live with one relatively small flag on the public property leading to my house. I had considered taking the Reagan picture down; I still have difficulty believing that man was our president for 8 years. As incredible as it seems, he was in fact the president, and as distasteful as I found our nation’s collective double think after his death, some folks were in mourning, so I let it go. But when they took down the picture the Gipper and put up a Bush/Cheney sign, I knew I had to do something.

As I mentioned, this sign is in a highly visible place. It is also on public property. That this person (or people) had decided to treat the entrance to my neighborhood as their own private soap box offended me. Moreover, I knew it offended some of my neighbors who also share the view that it would be better to vote for Satan than reelect our current batch of war criminals, thugs, and idiots. So it was clear to me that this sign needed fixin’.

Initially, I thought I’d just tear it down. However, after my first Fine Kentucky Bourbon and upon reflection, I realized that tearing the sign down was not so much a statement as a negation. If Joe Lockstep wanted to make a political statement on public property – and law enforcement was apparently OK with this – than why couldn’t I? The problem was, there wasn’t any room to write anything on the sign. I considered putting a up Kerry/Edwards sign on top of it, but that idea struck me as a little petty, not to mention predictable. Besides, I didn’t have a Kerry/Edwards sign. After my second drink of Fine Kentucky Bourbon, the solution, elegant and simple, presented itself: an X. I’d take the fattest Sharpie from my wife’s rather formidable arsenal of all things graphic and deploy an inescapable geometry to express the will of the people.

Trouble is, that Bush/Cheney sign already represented the will of the people, at least half of them anyway. I had no hope, really, of changing their minds. I had to be honest with myself, after my third drink of Fine Kentucky Bourbon: I was doing this to extract a little vengeance and to show that some Liberals are ready to mix it up a bit. Which brought me to my next problem. What if I did have to mix it up a bit? What if the, no doubt, knuckle dragging, barely post-Neolithic “artist” spotted me and decided to give challenge? I’m not a great runner, and the boulevard is quite exposed with few places to run and hide anyway. I’ve handled myself in a couple of street fights, but I had no idea how many troglodytes might assail me. I could arrive armed with a large Mag Lite, one of those 18 inch jobbies, but that would be cumbersome during the actual defacement. I could bring my easily concealed yet very efficacious ASP telescoping baton or even my tension assisted lockback knife. However, bringing any kind of weapon could create all kinds of other problems. First and potentially most disastrously, I’d be cockier during a confrontation. Next, if law enforcement got involved – either because of an actual fight or because someone called in my “suspicious” behavior – having any kind of weapon would make the situation vastly worse. I might be able to point out that I was only exercising my right to free speech on public property, but if a passing police patrol discovered I was armed, than the conversation would no longer be about free speech.

And that reminded me of the principals at stake. I thought of Jesus and Gandhi. Why should I be afraid of confrontation when I was in the right? Moreover, this was a public place with lots of passing traffic. Short of being shot on sight, anyone who decided to attack me wouldn’t have enough time to do real damage before the police arrived. Really, I should wait until tomorrow morning and march on over in broad daylight to do this thing as publicly as possible. I was in the right; I should renounce my fears and have the courage of my convictions.

So I took the baton. Jesus and Gandhi never had to deal with Bush/Cheney supporters.

The sign is about a ten minute walk from my house (one and a half cigarettes to be exact.) I set off around 10:30. I walked calmly and slowly, savoring the notion that I was about to correct a small injustice in a personal and hopefully private way. At the corner of my street where I would turn to walk the half block up the boulevard to the offending sign, a group of young men, ruffians my father would call them, were hanging around a tricked out Civic and talking loudly. I was glad I didn’t have to walk on that side of the street, but it ruined my Zen-like protest-samurai groove, and my heart started pumping a wee bit faster, little rushes of adrenalin sending flashes down my back. I was seconds away from the big oak and conditions were perfect: no traffic and few lights in the adjacent houses. I crossed the street, unsheathed my Sharpie and looked up.

And of course the sign was gone. Somebody had beat me to it in the six hours since I first spotted it. I wasn’t sure whether to be disappointed or relieved. Walking home, it occurred to me then that I’m not really as alone as I sometimes feel, that it’s not just my circle of friends and the folks I read on the internet who loathe the slights and outright slanders of the Right and their merry bandwagon. Someone else was with me and took the opportunity to confront the Right’s appropriation of our public spaces and discourse, at least in some miniscule way. The next afternoon, at the annual neighborhood picnic, I told a friend about the sign. He laughed and said “You’ll get another shot. Somebody put a new one up today.” So, minus the Bourbon, I walked out again last night, Sharpie in hand, to discover that once again someone had already torn it down.