Barbarians at the gates

A perspicacious excerpt from the brilliant Mark Steyn's After America

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 a public space claimed in perpetuity by the vandals (like graffiti, another word Italy gave the world, as it were). At the sidewalk cafes, 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 into?

It’s strange and unsettling to walk through cities with so much writing on the wall, and yet whose citizens see everything but. Bernie Wooster’s Aunt Dahlia is right: once upon a time, you were certainly an ass if you didn’t know where the ‘writing on the wall’ came from. It was part of the accumulated cultural inheritance.....

.....Instead of paintings and oratorios and other great art about the writing on the wall, Europeans have walls covered in writing, and pretend that its art. Today I doubt one in a thousand high-school students would have clue whence the expression derives. And one sign that the writing’s on the wall is when a society no longer knows what “the writing on the wall” means.
 

Do you know? That is the question.

This is a pastel drawing of an amusing but serious battle between graffiti vandals and a concerned citizen. It takes place on the flyover bridge of the Southern freeway in Adelaide on a road very close to us which is an important artery into the city. The vandals desecration usually lasts for a very short time before the citizen paints over it, and it must be very frustrating (also expensive) but the vandals do not give up that easily, this is a struggle that has gone on for more than a decade so far.
It is a visual demonstration of the need for vigilance and a dogged determination to keep the barabrians at bay.