Graffiti Snob
Happy New Year ! (!)
The local store I tend to go to most often [*] has a cash machine on its outside wall. In the evenings and night-time, various 'hooded youths' [**] tend to congregate around the machine, as if doing so will make them richer by proxy.
The machine has been helpfully annotated with some graffiti: on the metal frame at the top, in faded black felt tip pen, is a sentence based around a transitive verb: of the form 'A verbs B'. I neither know nor care about A or B, so don't care how and in what order they verb, so long as it isn't too loud.
On the right side of the frame, is the following declaration:
AZBO Kid!
This piece of graffiti infuriates me: surely one doesn't have to be the bastard lovechild of Adolf Hitler and Margaret Thatcher to believe that "there's no such thing as Zociety!" How dare someone misspell the acronym of Anti-Social Behaviour Order!
Then, above the cash machine, clearly written in a tasteful white chalk, is the following:
Eat the Rich!
Ah!, I thought, a facsimile of the right-wing American satirist P J O'Rourke's famous allusion to Jonathan Swift's even more famous satirical 1712 pamphlet A Modest Proposal. Now that's graffiti with learning; that's graffiti I can condone.
But then, I thought, what if "AZBO Kid!" is being ironic? A send-up of the British Educational system, and its failure to provide sufficient standards of literacy to the poorest members of our society, who then, unable to persuade employers to give them work, instead turn to crime. If this were the case, then "AZBO Kid!" is the smarter graffiti.
...And then I bought some milk.
[*] There's one slightly closer, but it doesn't have the range. I suspect it's some kind of drug front, as it has very low stock levels, a thick wire mesh protecting the windows, a door that looks like it could survive an extensive kicking, and is run by a burly guy with a shaven head, who seemed surprised and faintly annoyed when I once went in to buy a Mars bar.
[**] I've now reached the age where I consider 'youths' to be a category that excludes me and is thus somewhat less than human.
The local store I tend to go to most often [*] has a cash machine on its outside wall. In the evenings and night-time, various 'hooded youths' [**] tend to congregate around the machine, as if doing so will make them richer by proxy.
The machine has been helpfully annotated with some graffiti: on the metal frame at the top, in faded black felt tip pen, is a sentence based around a transitive verb: of the form 'A verbs B'. I neither know nor care about A or B, so don't care how and in what order they verb, so long as it isn't too loud.
On the right side of the frame, is the following declaration:
AZBO Kid!
This piece of graffiti infuriates me: surely one doesn't have to be the bastard lovechild of Adolf Hitler and Margaret Thatcher to believe that "there's no such thing as Zociety!" How dare someone misspell the acronym of Anti-Social Behaviour Order!
Then, above the cash machine, clearly written in a tasteful white chalk, is the following:
Eat the Rich!
Ah!, I thought, a facsimile of the right-wing American satirist P J O'Rourke's famous allusion to Jonathan Swift's even more famous satirical 1712 pamphlet A Modest Proposal. Now that's graffiti with learning; that's graffiti I can condone.
But then, I thought, what if "AZBO Kid!" is being ironic? A send-up of the British Educational system, and its failure to provide sufficient standards of literacy to the poorest members of our society, who then, unable to persuade employers to give them work, instead turn to crime. If this were the case, then "AZBO Kid!" is the smarter graffiti.
...And then I bought some milk.
[*] There's one slightly closer, but it doesn't have the range. I suspect it's some kind of drug front, as it has very low stock levels, a thick wire mesh protecting the windows, a door that looks like it could survive an extensive kicking, and is run by a burly guy with a shaven head, who seemed surprised and faintly annoyed when I once went in to buy a Mars bar.
[**] I've now reached the age where I consider 'youths' to be a category that excludes me and is thus somewhat less than human.