Tagged and bound

Thank you for printing the "Taggers Unite" letter in the Nov. 11 issue and demonstrating how empty-headed these vandals are. None of the 50 people who passed him tagging in broad daylight on the Main was me, or he would have been busted or ball-busted.

The letter gives a clue as to how to fix the problem. If the perp has a permanent address, make them spend 100 hours cleaning this crap off the walls. The savings in cleaning costs would pay for the effort. If they don't have an address, fine them--cash immediately--failing which, a couple of weeks in Bordeaux or maybe boot camp.

As a final thought, someone once suggested to me a return to capital punishment. Not for murder, which will happen notwithstanding, but for taggers and illegal parking! It would solve those problems instantly!

--Ken Frankel

The letter written by D. Yrubme appears at first as a kind of fiery call to arms--or rather "call to paint cans"--presenting taggers as romantic heroes in the struggle against corporate power. Underneath the bombastic facade ("Bomb the world!"), however, one only finds the most reactionary and even fascist conception of society.

Reactionary because one may well ask where this graffiti takes place? Of course not on the walls of the mansions in Westmount or Outremont, but on the few spaces of public property that are left in the city: metro stations, bus shelters, facilities in public parks. Not places that are used by the rich.

Taggers are attacking the most vulnerable sectors of society--the poor, elderly women, children--by vandalizing those public places and making them unsafe and ugly for those people. Is that an expression of rebellion, or is it rather a purely irrational behaviour closer to fascism than to any socially progressive statement?

In calling on taggers to continue their vandalism, Mr. Yrubme admits that those members of the public who witness these actions "are probably more scared of you than you are of them." And not surprisingly, since everybody knows that these graffiti vandals are members of juvenile gangs which mark territory and are already involved in violent actions on the metro ("taxing" younger students, for instance).

Taggers are nothing more than what sociologists call "lumpenproletariat." It is wrong to call them graffiti artists, since they have no creative talent; some simply imitate the lettering style of commercial products to mark their territory. You would have to stretch the meaning of "art" too much in order to accept those tags as art. I would bet money that they are not the future artists of this society, but much more likely the future rapists, drug dealers and police informers. These lumpen pretending to be artists do not deserve any glorification, and it is unfortunate that some misguided progressive individuals sometimes join in their defence.

In Latin America I met people like those taggers, apparently irreverent critics of the old order, disdainful of the political organizations of the Left, who in the end, for a price, were quick to perform the dirty job for the fascist dictators of the day.

These poor devils with a can of paint sinister fascists? Change the can for a gun and you will see.

--Sergio Martinez

With every passing week, the Mirror seems to slip deeper and deeper into a morass of adolescent foolishness, bad taste, impropriety and irresponsibility. What prompted me to write this letter was your decision to print that ridiculous letter that encouraged taggers (spray-painters) to vandalize illegal surfaces. Give us a break! Montreal has enough problems without the Mirror publicizing some idiot ranter's wish to create more.

--Q. Colburn

In his rant, D. Yrubme encourages all writers, taggers and bombers to tag everything in broad daylight. By saying, "They are probably more scared of you than you are of them," he goes right to the mark. Yes, we are scared of him, but not for any reasons he is capable of imagining. Representing the fragility of "free expression" in contemporary democratic societies, he may just be a harbinger of the future. Though I am puzzled by Mirror's allotting so much space to such misanthropic babbling, there is one consolation: we can always line the garbage can with his moronic manifesto. His tags, unfortunately, will linger on for a long, long time as visual urban pollution.

--T. McKeown