A New York Times feature on Berlin graffiti reported it as an art event, a story about “an integral component of Berliner Strassenkultur.”⁵² But it’s actually a tale of civic death, of public space claimed in perpetuity by the vandals (like graffiti, another word Italy gave the world, as it were). At the sidewalk cafés, Europeans no longer notice it. But it is in a small, aesthetically painful way a surrender to barbarism—and one made even more pathetic by the cultural commentators desperate to pass it off as “art.” And it sends a signal to predators of less artistic bent: if you’re unwilling to the new Athens defend the civic space from these coarse provocations, what others will you give in to?

It’s strange and unsettling to walk through cities with so much writing on the wall, and yet whose citizens see everything but. Bertie Wooster’s Aunt Dahlia is right: once upon a time, you were certainly an ass if you didn’t know where “the writing on the wall” came from. It was part of the accumulated cultural inheritance: in the old Europe, Handel and William Walton wrote oratorios about it. Rembrandt’s painting of Belshazzar’s Feast hangs in the National Gallery in a London all but oblivious to its significance. Instead of paintings and oratorios and other great art about the writing on the wall, Europeans have walls covered in writing, and pretend that it’s art. Today, I doubt one in a thousand high-school students would have a clue whence the expression derives. And one sign that the writing’s on the wall is when society no longer knows what “the writing on the wall” means.

^{CHAPTER FOUR}

DECLINE

American Idyll

We took a whirl on H. G. Wells’ famous time machine a few pages back, riding from the 1890s to the 1950s to our own time. In the original novella, a fellow in late Victorian England saddles up the eponymous contraption, propels himself forward, and finds himself in a world where humanity has divided into two: the Eloi, a small, soft, passive, decadent, vegetarian elite among whom one can scarce tell the boys from the girls; and the Morlocks, a dark, feral, subterranean underclass. This is supposedly London in the year 802,701 AD.

That’s the only thing Wells got wrong: the date. He was off by a mere 800,690 years. If he’d set his time machine to nip ahead just a hundred or so to the early twenty-first century, he’d have been bang on target. Today, an insular myopic Eloi while away the hours conversing with the flowers, while the American Morlocks are beyond the horizon and rarely glimpsed.

These groups are not yet formally divided into vegetarian on the one hand and carnivorous on the other, but they are evolving into physiognomically distinct species—an attenuated, emaciated coastal elite nibbling arugula in Malibu and Martha’s Vineyard, while the vast bulk of people with vast bulk are confined to the intervening and less fashionable zip codes waiting in the drive-thru lane for a 2,000-calorie KrappiPounder. In his Obama hagiography, the MSNBC analyst Richard Wolffe reported that, at lunch one day, a conspicuously overweight White House aide was ostentatiously presented with a light salad by the president himself. The staffer responded that he could take care of both his health and his menu selections himself, but Obama was having none of it. “I love you, man,” said the Commander-in-Chief. “Eat the salad.”¹