Graffiti A Sign of Cultural Decay

It was a bad sign and disheartening to see. While strolling along the new, upper-cliff walk at Fort Williams in Cape Elizabeth, Maine — one of my favorite places — I saw the graffiti. Park officials had cleared brush from a small level area and put in a picnic table surrounded by a semicircle of ten or twelve boulders rolled into place. Then some selfish, depraved individual came along with a can of red spray paint and defaced them.

It’s an otherwise lovely spot in a stunningly beautiful park with views of Portland Head Light, the shipping channel to Portland Harbor, islands in Casco Bay, and the open Atlantic beyond. Now, however, anyone enjoying a picnic there is forced to look at undecipherable symbols on most of the boulders and a good old, “F*** You” on one of them. If I were a judge and the apprehended vandal came before me, I would force him (it’s most likely a young male) to sand off every bit of that red paint by hand, however long that takes, or go to jail for the maximum sentence.

Graffiti signals a deteriorating society, the cultural equivalent of a canary in a coal mine. It should be eradicated as soon as it is detected. To leave it is to invite more. I’d liken it to the “broken window theory” first put forth by George Kelling and James Wilson in a 1982 Atlantic article: “if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken.” It’s the same with graffiti. Leave it up and it will spread.

Woodford's Corner http://portlanddaily.cradockphotography.com

I’ve witnessed the phenomenon over the past seven years driving up and down Portland, Maine’s Forest Avenue every week. Stuck in traffic, I’d stare at graffiti on buildings and rooftops. At first, property owners would hastily remove it either by sandblasting it off brick walls or painting over it on other surfaces. After a year or two, however, those efforts slowed down. Now it appears proprietors have given up and the contagion is getting out of control.

"Graffiti is Art, Not Vandalism" claims an article in the Temple University newspaper Temple News. The argument is ridiculous at best. Graffiti spoils someone else’s property. I’d liken it to a dog lifting his leg on a building to mark his territory. How would a genuine artist feel if he or she purchased a large canvas and a graffiti “artist” sprayed on it in the dark of night? If vandal “artists” won’t rent billboards, how about they walk around wearing a sandwich board to display their “art”? One commenter wrote: “Graffiti is filth, period. That is like saying I took an artistic dump on the sidewalk.”

Subway in Rome

In Rome four years ago I hired a guide to show us around the Eternal City. He pointed out endless fountains — repetitive, stone-carved, muscular nudes laying around displaying genitalia. We, especially my grandson and I, were more interested in historical sites like the Colosseum and the Vatican, but each day I would ask him his opinion of the graffiti we were seeing everywhere. “Oh, that’s art too,” he insisted. On the third day, we encountered old paintings under an archway defaced by someone with a spray can. Finally, he admitted, “That is sh*t!”

This pushed our guide over the edge

Guides are licensed by Italy’s government to comment only in certain ways, but our guide got so exasperated he finally ignored those constraints. Rome was bad, but Athens, Greece is by far the worst graffiti-ridden European city I’ve seen so far. It’s a rather ugly city anyway, apart from the Acropolis and a few other sites, and graffiti is epidemic. On that trip, I was part of a larger family group and didn’t want to rain on the parade by asking our guide about it — a lovely older woman named Dora. There was much less in the rest of Greece outside Athens which was amazingly beautiful.

Walking back from Acropolis in Athens

The graffiti I saw at Fort Williams was fresh. Park officials there are very diligent and I hope they will have either painted the stones or replaced them by the time I return next weekend. The City of Portland is attempting to alleviate their problem by advising property owners, but I’m sad to report that it seems to be losing the battle.

Historical Reckonings In Democracy's Birthplace

(This column ran last week in the newspapers. Didn't have time to post it while traveling.)

Flying over the Peloponnesus on the way to Athens from Rome, I was struck by how mountainous it was below me, much more so than New Hampshire or Maine. Zig-zagging switchback roads climbed even the biggest mountains. Some serviced the numerous windmills and cell phone towers up there, but others led to high villages on steep slopes. One of the smallest, called Magouliana, is the one from which my wife’s grandfather emigrated to America in 1902. More about Magouliana later. It needs its own column. “Wow!” I thought from the plane. “That’s rugged country.” This impression was confirmed when, two days later, we began our tour of the huge peninsula called Pelopponesus, the largest in Greece.

Roseann and Me at Parthenon
(That's a bra for the camera around my waist)

A small Mercedes bus met us at the airport near the sea on the outskirts of Athens. There were nine in our party, all members of my wife’s extended family making the trip. My first feeling was sadness because of the graffiti I saw defacing virtually every vertical surface as we drove to our hotel downtown near the Acropolis. The hotel was nice but a four-story building across the street was unoccupied and not well maintained either. Wherever I travel I notice how much graffiti there is because I see it as a barometer of civilizational decline. Thankfully, there was none visible at the Acropolis itself, a very impressive site, especially considering its antiquity going back three thousand years.

Parthenon from our hotel dining room in early evening

Impressive columned temples built up there by the Mycenean Greeks were destroyed by the Persians after the Battle of Thermopylae, then rebuilt during the Classical Period after 480 BC. I was impressed that people like Socrates, Plato and the Apostle Paul walked those same streets upon which I was strolling. I’d grown up reading and hearing about them over and over. It was from Socrates’ methods that I developed the teaching style I used for nearly my entire career.

People we met in Athens were friendly and most spoke English, a good thing since none of us spoke very much Greek. They made eye contact on the sidewalks, unusual for inhabitants of a big city in my limited traveling experience. Our tour guide was an older woman from the city named Dora, who had been doing that job more than forty years and spoke five languages. 

What happens when the EU closes the Euro spigot

After two days in the Athens, we headed for the Peloponnesus via Corinth, a city on the isthmus connecting to mainland Greece. All along the way were unfinished buildings: concrete skeletons with steel rebar sticking out, some with building materials stacked inside and bleaching in the sun. They were projects begun and never finished after European Union funds dried up. Many older buildings were abandoned too, some residences, but mostly businesses. Graffiti covered them. It was depressing to see it everywhere as we proceeded down the highway. Some evidently was political. Some was sprayed on in support of soccer teams. I recognized anarchy symbols and native Greeks I questioned explained symbols of soccer teams. Most, however, was mindless. Past Corinth, in rural areas of the Pelopponesus, there was considerably less of it.

Roseann, Christina, graffiti as we walk back to our hotel in Athens

My wife’s niece, Christina, who was living in Greece and visited us in Athens, told me the official unemployment rate there was 28%, but the real rate was double that. Our guide, Dora, said the economy had been depressed for about three years. As she explained it, the socialist government under Papandreou promised to eliminate poverty and for twenty years, it borrowed and spent. He knew the bill would come due eventually, but it wouldn’t be until after he was dead. I got the impression that her politics had morphed rightward as she apprehended the process Margaret Thatcher described: “Socialism works until you run out of other peoples’s money.”

Real markef forces are asserting themselves in Greece now as they inevitably must anywhere. The adjustment is quite painful, but necessary for a real economic recovery. It reminded me that we in the United States will soon run out of other people’s money as well. We’re putting off that reckoning with our “quantitative easing” policies of money-printing, but that cannot go on forever either. Postponing the inevitable only makes it more painful to bear when it finally comes. I used to think that would be after I was dead too, but now I’m thinking it will be here sooner, and I will have to watch as American decline accelerates. It will be a test of our polity. Can we withstand the crisis to come? Will the veneer of civilization keep hold over the seething mass of humanity?

Our guide was a scholar and offered perspective on Greek history though from Myceneans, to Dorians, to Persians, to Romans, to Byzantines, to Turks, to Nazis. After “periods of decadence” as she put it, come periods of decline and suffering. Greeks have endured it many times, but their history is so much longer than our own. As we toured Athens, Mycenae, Epidaurus, Olympia, Delphi, and Kalambaka, we were shown how, for millennia, people at each locale endured tumultuous reckonings after those “periods of decadence.”

Can we forestall that suffering here in the United States? In the face of mounting evidence that it may be too late for us, I continue to choose optimism. I don’t want to spend any more time than necessary in the state of mind produced by its opposite.