See that sign there? It’s been up for close to a month now, just as I knew it would be when I decided to put it up. I intend to replace it with an “Impeach” sign tomorrow. To get to it isn’t really hard - parking’s just a block away - and you have to walk/bushwhack a bit up a steep-ish sort of hill (shown below.) But the payoff is spectacular: eye-level viewing by some 10 lanes of the bay area’s fiercest traffic, some 200,000 cars per day - all for a penny or two in paint, ten minutes of painting and a slightly-irritating-but-by-no-means-actually-difficult five minute walk.
The visceral understanding that the sign would stay up has become second nature to me now: the peripheral placement coupled with the density of the foliage, angle of the slope, etc. are, while by no means prohibitive, just annoying enough to dissuade… But there’s something else too: a gut-level understanding that nobody’s going to go up there because, simply, nobody goes there! You’ve never seen anyone there but highway workers, and even they seemed a little out of place. Nobody really belongs there, there’s no flat ground, or any reason for anybody to be there. Least of all you.
Apart from being angular and bushy though, there’s nothing physically preventing someone from going there and putting up, or taking down, a sign. No fences, no “Trespassing Prohibited” signs… just a tacit understanding that you don’t go there because, my dear, it simply isn’t done.
And this is where the parable part comes in. Because it’s exactly that same subconscious dynamic at work that’s keeping all of you from following my footsteps. It’s not that there’s anything physically stopping you from painting signs and putting them up, if not on freeways, then somewhere. And with even the most rudimentary understanding of the First Amendment you should understand there’s no law against it. What there is though is a deep-seated aversion to doing what simply isn’t done. I get that. And even after 7,734 signs now I still feel it myself. I’ll feel it tomorrow when I climb that hill again. But for me, and about nine other people I know of, that particular societal transgression is also a thrill.
When I start climbing that hill I’ll know that in five or six minutes I’ll be done and in five or six days that sign’s still gonna be there, and as far as I’m concerned that sign looks damn good. It looks damn good because I took a bit of time to make it look that way, but most of all it looks good because it’s saying something that needs to be said, and it’s being said by a citizen goddammit! Not another paid flak or another goddam asshole on TV.
So when I climb that hill, do I feel patriotic? Is it righteous blood coursing through my veins? No. If you want to know the truth, I feel fucking silly, that’s what I feel. Why? Because when you’re doing something nobody else does, you tend to feel silly doing it - I don’t know why. But I’ve learned to accept it as a pretty small price to pay for days and weeks of freeway-side advertising. Plus I feel protected: partly by the First Amendment that gives me the expressed right to do precisely what I’m doing, partly because I wear a highway vest so I at least look like I belong there, but mostly by the fact that nobody even fucking knows it’s me! I can’t stress enough how helpful that is when you’re doing something that’s socially aberrant.
Okay, that’s our sermon for today. I’ll leave you with Kate Bush because it’s appropriate, motivating, and been stuck in my head for most of the time I’ve been writing this.