#chalk_for_america
An Introspective Photo-Essay of the Local Alt-Right Propaganda
A sidewalk in front of an empty storefront. Two chalked messages in all caps: “Free your Face” and “BLM Is A Marxist Movement.” On the far left is a food drive donation bin.
In the last two years or so, I began to notice chalkings appearing around the small desert college town where I live. The messages are invariably short, written in a quick single-stroke, all-cap font with letters about a foot high on residential and storefront sidewalks which receive above-average foot traffic. Rhymes are frequent and direct calls to action, at least at first, were rare: broad, easy-to-affirm-or-reject-slogans are the agenda, not calls to action per se. In the early months, I only ever saw two statements: END THE FED (the Federal Reserve, the Federal Government, or another agency entirely I cannot say) and INFO WARS.
“Info Wars.” It would appear the writer abruptly ran out of chalk partway through the second letter.
While I cannot say for sure when I began to notice the messages, I suspect that my observation coincided with their first appearances. Then even more than now, I was in the habit of taking long, rambling walk-abouts, sometimes lasting over seven hours long, during which I would frequently circumnavigate much of the town. To this day, I have only ever seen the messages in three areas: near the local supermarket, along the roads south of the college (which for one summer made up most of my commute to work), and (much more recently) the northern end of Main Street. Because of the consistency in handwriting and location, I have come to believe that they are written by a single individual who lives or works near one of these areas—though of course I do not know for sure.
“Fake Pandemic,” written on the curb adjoining a supermarket where many of the chalkings occur. This photo was taken in the late spring of 2020 and was, to the best of my memory, the first chalking to make reference to the Covid-19 pandemic.
This past summer the chalkings diversified, in content if not form or location. Initially I had guessed that the chalker was a libertarian of some kind. Ending the Federal Reserve is a fairly obscure demand usually proclaimed by a particular kind of monetarily-obsessed small government advocate, the kind of guy who corners you at your brother-in-law’s birthday party and starts talking your ear off about why the US needs to go back to the gold standard. To this was added imperatives to “Free Your Face”, as well as the sentiment that “Masks Don’t Work” and “Masks Make You Slaves.” Prior to November of last year “Trump 2020” slogans were frequent, as were run-of-the-mill Evangelical slogans like “Jesus Is King” and anti-abortionist rhetoric. I have to wonder whether I am watching, in real time, the ideological evolution of a DIY right-wing activist.
“666 Mark of the Beast Coming,” chalked the same day as the “Fake Pandemic” message above, August 2, 2020. Unfortunately I didn’t take a picture of whatever the arrow points towards—possibly just the store itself. However, I seem to recall that flu shots were being advertised at the time, which would make sense given the high degree of overlap in the Anti-Mask/Anti-Vax communities.
Last spring I had an extended conversation with a friend in which we attempted, half-in-jest, to psychoanalyze the author of the chalkings. I theorized a frustrated young man of high school to college age, probably still residing in the home of his upper-middle class family, who estimates himself to be of above average intelligence. My friend guessed that he (we both felt very confident assuming the writer’s gender) is fairly unsuccessful interacting with women socially or romantically, to which I speculated that he derives far more enjoyment (in the formal sense) from contemplating this fact than he actually would from a relationship should one actually manifest. Lacking any real demographic data to speak of, we instead drew on the archetype of the Incel, a trope Spencer had become aware of only in recent months.
We couldn’t make up our minds as to the motivations of the chalkings, though I think I projected a degree of nihilism onto our fictional propagandist. I didn’t have it in me to construct so pathetic a figure as one who actually believed his messages were doing something, probably because in such naivete I could imagine too much of myself. My companion on the other hand was rather taken by the chalkings (not in their content so much as the gesture of the thing). We are both unapologetic fans of vandalism, of the artistic disruption of lived space, which probably made us more likely to take an interest in the messages than the average observer, regardless one’s ideological positions. Though such a claim makes it sound as if one’s discursive Ways and Means can be separated from their ideological context, which is of course precisely what this essay argues against.
“Masks Do Not Make Us Slaves, The Keep Us Virus Free!”
Though the chalkings have been appearing for several years, it is only in recent months that they have taken on a collaborative nature. In November of the past year, I stumbled across a slew of the messages at the northern terminus of Main Street, far more than I had ever seen together. Likewise unprecedented: the chalkings had been edited, usually with about as clever a rebuttal as “No, you are!”
“Antifa Really Are Fascists!”
More than the counter-chalkings themselves, what I found particularly interesting was which messages had been left unedited—or, in one case, reinforced! One truly is glad to see that there are some things on which we can still come together as a country! 🤗
“BLM Is Not A Marxist Movement”
The choice and manner of annotation suggested to me two things: first, that the self-apointed editors were of a liberal disposition (how else to make sense of the need to denounce the allegation that Black Lives Matter is a Marxist organization, as if that would be a thing to be ashamed of), and second, that they do not operate along the same ideo-aesthetic sensibilities as myself. For while the original chalker had written messages which promoted ignorant and discriminatory ideas (anti-masker sentiments, the curtailing of reproductive rights), their unexpected collaborator had, as the kids say these days, posted cringe.
“We Did MAGA, He Lost!”
What is cringe? It is my serious belief that entire dissertations can and perhaps will be written on this question in the areas of political aesthetics, rhetorical theory, and recursive metabolic processes which undergird the ever-accelerating formation and breakdown of global internet culture. An essay of this length can therefore only glance across the subject, observing its rough outlines and effects in much the same way that one driving down a street might notice the fact of a chalk message without taking in the content of the phrase. Cringe is associated with something embarrassing, but something being embarrassing is by no means sufficient to generate cringe. Cringe is frequently generational: many millennials and zoomers all but equate the baby boomer generation with cringy-ness, associating them with painfully intense displays of earnestness, a total lack of subtly or self-awareness, self-entitlement to a toddler-esque degree, and above all the belief that they are being clever or original when the effect is anything but. Consider Hillary Clinton’s 2016 injunction—by now memefied to the point of affective sassiation—to “Pokemon-GO to the polls!” Meanwhile, the cringe worthiness of TikTok—the user base of which( according to the logic of its critics, which skew millenial and up) is by and large young, hyper-confident, and altogether unsubtle—is so heavily documented that to actively find and promote such content as cringeworthy can itself ascend to what one might call second-order cringe. Pathetic attempts to win someone over and barely concealed disdain are equally capable of generating the almost voyeuristic feelings of revulsion which accompanies the cringe-reaction, as do puritanical moralizing and hyper-absurdity for absurdity’s sake alike. The unifying factor might be something which approaches irreverence which casts itself as its opposite, though that is a thesis which I have by no means fully explored and would probably abandon quickly were I obliged to defend it.
There is probably not a universalizable theory of cringe. The cringiness of these messages, for me at least, stems from a tone of superiority and self-assured cleverness which must be to large degree the product of my own reading of them. What is so offensive about demonstrating one’s disagreement with the chalkings? The insistence that antifa are the real fascists is, by any historically grounded theory of fascism, an empirically wrong assertion, but for what do I care of the aesthetics of the thing, other than that such middle-of-the-road, well-actually, oh-so-reasonable posturing resonates with every other declaration by thoughtful, Concerned™ liberals I’ve ever encountered. If the contributors to this bit of municipal sidewalk discourse disagree over the morality of taxation but happily come together in their implied denunciations of Marxism, then surely the relevant conclusion is that they are fascists and liberals respectively, nothing more.
“Abortion Is Not Black Genocide”
That the arguments are trite should neither add nor take away from the horrific content of the original chalkings, nor belittle the fact that someone was willing to go to some effort (more effort than I myself went to) to counter them. If I find myself frustrated by the affective implications of the thing, surely that tells me more about myself then it does about my local political reality—indeed, it probably tells me that I’m spending too much time on the internet. And yet yet the framing does impact the content. The above assertion that abortion is black genocide is disgusting in no small part because of the casualness of the medium, the absurdly covert framing of an anonymous message on the sidewalk, the utter banality by which discourse aimed at stripping the basic rights of women is deployed in America in the twenty-first century, be it on line or on the sidewalk. I find that I cannot look away from the lazy scrawl of the letters, nor the slapdash rebuttal which does nothing to counter the sentiment, but only declare oneself against it. Somehow, the overall effect is to normalize a debate, to treat with the casual attitude of a red pen wielding editor what should be opposed with militant organizing and deliberate power. One feels so adrift in this concrete-and-chalk politics, adrift in the familiar-but-displaced way which I at least have become over accustomed to the point of not feeling on twitter. The paradox of censorship is that one is permitted to say everything, such that that which is not permitted will be removed, removed passively but unseen forces, or countered by dispassionate correction. It allows the speaker to make a double statement: a now-you-here-me, now-you-don’t declaration which draws attention not so much to any argument it makes, but rather to the fact that one can trigger a whole mechanism of speech and counter speech, can make a post which deletes itself. Or something. Such top-down censorship bespeaks no conflict, only a world in which all political decisions have been already determined—first among them, that we will never cease to argue over these most basic of principles.
“Covid 19 is Agenda 2030”
The most recent chalking occurred in front of a closed store front. The building used to be a Macey’s. Before that it was an independent movie theatre—or so I’m told. It went out of business sometime last year. I only ever shopped there once, to go buy some socks and a belt for an interview. I ended up not getting the latter, so overpriced were all on offer, though all the belts at Goodwill were either too small or too decorated and generally falling apart. This was before I had consistent access to a car and the wider array of retail options which comes with it. At time of writing the chalkings on Main Street have not been edited, though over the course of two days I did notice that a few had been scrubbed clean—one I was still able to make out with the benefit of memory read “Big Gov Sucks.” Or perhaps all of them had been scrubbed clean only some rewritten.
“BLM/Baby, Jesus is King, Shop Local”
Shopping local has become a refrain popular among the conservative and liberal petite bourgeoisie alike in recent decades, a refrain which demands little, promises nothing, and implies precisely the kind of political ideation where pro-sociality and pro-market messaging are not only seen as mutually-supportive, but where opposition between the two is hard to imagine in the first place.
“Fake News, 5G is Cancer, End The Drug War,Abolish the ATF”
I find the dissonance of this round of messages particularly interesting. Of course, such dissonance is only discernible in light of the broader ideological landscape, wherein only a small set of all possible clusters of beliefs and goals are recognized as coherent. There is nothing intrinsically contradictory between ending the war on drugs, for example, and believing that the Covid-19 virus is a hoax, even if you’re unlikely to see this pair of views espoused by the same politician or media personality.
“MAGA,1776, #2A, #NVIC” (National Vaccine Information Center?)
Much of the ordained clustering which occurs in American politics is a secondary effect of our two-party system and the accompanying media landscape which thrives off of grouping consumers of News™ into two opposed camps who can be conveniently fed simplistic negative messages about the tastes, traditions, celebrities and aesthetics of the other.
“Boycott Walmart”
Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if opposition to the mask mandate and limitations on local business (already being rapidly scaled back in the region where I live) corresponds highly with an opposition to the drug war or antipathy towards the IRS, so strong is the general pro-business, anti-government libertarain sentiment which prevails here. Likewise, why shouldn’t our chalker support both the second amendment and the boycotting of Walmart, even if the latter is one of the largest suppliers of weaponry and ammunition in the country.
What do these chalkings tell us about today’s contemporary political landscape? I honestly don’t know. I mostly wrote this piece because I’ve been depressed in recent weeks and writing something short which I find vaguely interesting but not too captivating is a good way to build up productive inertia, as opposed to losing myself in long, complexly formulated work. In that regard I’m probably more similar to our local chalker then I would care to admit—scrawling messages against the rough edge of the void not necessarily in the hopes of engendering any kind of specific effect so much as engaging in a small social performance in hopes of inciting in someone something which means more than what itself is said.
With that in mind, I leave you with a photograph I took a couple of years ago in Portland, OR. The medium is spray paint, not chalk, and though I doubt the artist spent much more time on it (given the illicit nature of the art) than the chalkings I’ve been examining here, I do not mean to wax sentimental when I say it holds much more meaning to me then do the preceding messages. I imagine the arrangement of the glyphs above the ghost’s head hold subterranean implicature, cultic references displayed plainly for those who know how to read them. The over-full expression in the phantom’s lopsided eye reminds me of the blazing, vaguely manic gaze of Klee’s Angel of History, its mouth a scar stitched shut, forbidden to recount the dyspo-utopic narratives of futures lost and yet-to-be-lost. What hyper-truths, what facts which are not factual except insofar as they assume the role of facts, insofar as that they could become true, demand to become true, does he simultaneously hold for and deny us?