Yeah. I haven’t posted anything in awhile. I’m too busy being terrorized by the terror alerts and the anti-terror police and the terror awareness programs and the in-the-event-of-terror emergency drills and freaking cops and firemen everywhere showing us they are on the case, in the know, ready for action, ready to kick some butt when all the terror starts raining down on our asses. I know they are doing the best they can. I know it’s supposed to make me feel safer to see homeless people get wrangled and their bags emptied out onto the subway platform, but you know what? It doesn’t.
So I focus on other things when I commute. Like how, on the train this morning, if you looked down the length of the car at all the up-stretched arms with fists wrapped over poles, it looked like everybody was giving up the black power sign. You know, in honor of Louis Armstrong's birthday.
Or how some things are kept sacred. The tunnel I walk through to exit the station is flanked with advertisements --for movies, TV shows, social programs, Jennifer Convertibles couch sets-- and they’re each defaced in some way: devil horns on our local news celebrity, or “Fuck YOU Bush you fucking motherfucker!” scrawled on a Dodge truck ad. So many additions are made to the graffiti everyday, you can’t even tell what half of the posters are advertising anymore. But one ad is as pristine as the day it was stuck there with the rest of them. It’s nothing much to describe. A montage of really cute babies, words that say something about a healthcare program for newborns. The posters on either side of it are indecipherable. But no one will tag the babies.
And they say there's nothing sacred. I wonder how long a Kerry poster would stay clean?
Posted by: Michael Duff at August 26, 2004 06:33 AM