BWare

This fellow gets fined an undisclosed amount for tagging a boulder in Joshua Tree. When the story is reported, you always see this photo:

These folks are just super upset about this. As are these. Holy cow! Some furriner tagging the natural landscape in a national park!

Get a rope!

Of course there is no comment that the landscape actually looked like this [1]:

Yes, that’s right. The boulder that was tagged was brought to that location by a NPS frontloader. All those boulders in the parking lot have in fact been vandalized by the NPS originally to demarcate… a parking lot. After the NPS bulldozed the desert to install a fucking parking lot. And interpretive fucking signage.

But no, let’s not question the NPS destruction of natural features in order to build a parking lot for Priuses. Let’s hang the dang Frenchman [2] for marking one of these already un-natural boulders with art.

I’m not actually in favor of tagging in the desert (even though, chyeah, right, try and stop it), but the hypocrisy of the National Fucking Park Service fining someone for painting a boulder that the NFPS already desecrated by moving it from its original location [3] to be a marker for a… parking lot… for fucking cars… that drive in on roads paved through bulldozed Joshua trees… is just rich beyond belief.

I hope the tagger becomes another Banksy and the NPS can take credit for destroying a one of a kind artwork.

It’s the same kind of chutzpah that forbids bolts in the wilderness because you might be able to see them from the Winona Tunnel turnout for chrissake.

[1] Well, they show the picture, but don’t actually look at it to see what it represents. An already altered landscape.

[2] I think actually Swiss, but they’re all furriners aren’t they.

[3] Because that’s not its original location. I have in fact found JT monzonite boulders used for parking markers as far away as Barstow. The NPS hypocrisy, unlike Doc Hollidays’, knows no bounds.