Near the end of Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell’s memoir of his service in the Spanish Civil War, Orwell confesses that he was not above resorting to graffiti. He had retreated to Barcelona, waiting for an opportunity to get home. At night, he and his compatriots slept in the open. By day, they hid in plain sight, posing as English tourists, strolling through the posh districts as if they were seeing the sights. He writes:
“It was an extraordinary, insane existence that we were leading. By night we were criminals, but by day we were prosperous English visitors—that was our pose, anyway. Even after a night in the open, a shave, a bath, and a shoe-shine do wonders with your appearance. The safest thing at present was to look as bourgeois as possible. We frequented the fashionable residential quarter of the town, where our faces were not known, went to expensive restaurants, and were very English with the waiters. For the first time in my life I took to writing things on walls. The passage-ways of several smart restaurants had ‘Visca P.O.U.M.!’ scrawled on them as large as I could write it. All the while, though I was technically in hiding, I could not feel myself in danger. The whole thing seemed too absurd. I had the ineradicable English belief that ‘they’ cannot arrest you unless you have broken the law. It is a most dangerous belief to have during a political pogrom.”
P.O.U.M. was the acronym for Partit Obrer d’Unificació Marxista (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification) formed in 1935 as a communist party opposed to the Stalinist form of communism promoted by the Soviet Union.
I find it heartening to learn that Orwell scrawled his politics on walls. Although he was by no means a saint, I find myself continually turning to him for moral direction. Nowadays, people scrawl on walls for all kinds of reasons that are only marginally political. But whatever the message, the simple fact that it is unauthorized and appears on private property is itself a statement that places it well within Orwell’s thinking.
This week we have witnessed an extraordinary clarification south of the border. What we suspected, Trump has confirmed: his presidential priority is his own interest and that of his cronies at the expense of everyone else. He makes no effort to hide the fact that he is using a global emergency as an opportunity for personal enrichment, even if it costs countless lives amongst his own electorate. Protest seems a moral imperative. In these times, graffiti strikes me as almost a hallowed expression in the prophetic tradition. Let’s use it to expose a power so corrupt it would value personal gain over human lives.
