When Quality Kills

A few days ago I was in the Worcestershire town of Stourport-On-Severn. I waited for a bus to Kidderminster at a bus shelter decorated with grafitti. Among the usual obscenities was a grafitto simply consisting of the letters "RSC".

They have a better class of grafitti vandal in Stourport. In other towns grafittists extoll the names of their mates or football teams. In Stourport they declare their undying love for the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Few at the bus stop would have realised that this is a modern manifestation of an particular ancient phenomenon. The original Vandals are often thought to have destroyed the civilized Roman Empire by force of arms. Nothing could be further from the truth. Grafitti was their main weapon in the struggle against Imperial oppression. From humble beginnings in the plains of Germany they spread their literate cancer throughout the Western Empire until it became an unstoppable force. Who is to say that from its tentative revival at one bus stop in Stourport the same will not happen again?

The Vandal tribes were citizens of Rome. Although living in the remote northern fastnesses of the Empire they were educated according to the best Roman models. They were therefore highly civilized and cultured people who spoke fluent Latin in addition to a primitive form of pig German known as "Danish Bacon". Like all peoples they were led by an intellectual elite with a superior education and refined political skills. It was among this elite that grafitti first developed. Danish Bacon was only a spoken language for about three hundred years with no written form. In the fourth century A.D. the Vandal elite began to give it one by subtly altering documents in classical Latin to conform with Danish Bacon pronounciations and incorporating a few Danish Bacon words. The hybrid language thus created was called Vanman or Essexman. Initially it was intended purely for domestic consumption as a way of redacting Roman laws in a language all the natives could understand. Soon however its potential as a weapon of war became obvious.

The elite of the Vandals owed their position to deals with the Roman state. If they opposed them too openly the superior Roman armies could crush them without breaking sweat. So to show their subservience they sent copies of their legal documents with the added Vanman grafitti to Rome. On unrolling the scrolls the Roman legal clerks had a considerable shock. No one had warned them that in place of the scrupulously correct Latin which Vandal documents had once contained they would find inelegant overdaubings of rough new grammatical forms and low phrases they had only ever heard from the mouths of slaves. Such things had never previously been contemplated in official documents. Contemporary reports speak of whole squadra of legal clerks dying on opening these documents and being buried with their filofaxes on Capitoline Hill. These reports were long regarded as spurious. The recent discovery of skeletons inside the hill buried with rolls of leather-bound vellum fiercely inscribed with corrections to still-extant Vandal hybrid documents suggest that if anything these reports are too conservative in their claims for the effect this mutilation of Latin had on the educated Romans of the day.

The Vandals heard the reports too. Suddenly an opportunity to collapse the Roman state from within and free themselves from its domination presented itself. Soon undercover teams of Vandal scribes began getting government jobs in Rome and applying Vanman grafitti to official reports which were to be read in the Senate. The barbarous alterations had the same effect on the Senators as they had on the legal clerks. Before long the common people were afflicted by a plague of Vanmanised inscriptions in public squares. Their Latin protestations were silenced by the undercover agents whispering Vanman phrases in the ears. The linguistic plague decimated the once-proud civilization built upon the polishing and codifying of Latin. Soon the Empire was open to attack by all comers and many tribes availed themselves of the opportunity. It is significant that it was the Vandals themselves who were first to actually reach Rome. The Sack of Rome was perpetrated by Vanman scholars spouting their twisted phrases at shopkeepers and requisitioning their goods as they fled. Soon they had enough materials to destroy the few citizens who had become immune to their deLatinizing. The glory of Rome was gone. Byzantium with its Greek culture became the centre of the world and the Western peoples could take what they wanted undisturbed as they have continued to do in Italian cities to this day.

The Vandals understood that to destroy a state you had to destroy its institutions from the top down. Their grafitti destroyed the educated classes and soon the common people too. Modern grafitti has not had that effect. This is because it is aimed at the wrong target. Nowadays the common people use it to show off to or offend their own kind. If the educated and cultured take over grafitti for their own purposes the history of the Vandals shows us what will happen. Today the RSC is celebrated in Stourport. Soon it will be obscure philosophers or composers in central London. Then it will be handwritten misspellings in theatre and concert programes. Then it will be parliamentary scribes misquoting debates. Soon reporting news in English will be impossible. Soon the life will be suffocated out of the people as they are unable to use their language for basic requests. Soon teachers and other propogators of English will be shooting themselves in despair and shame. Soon the invaders will walk in. Soon everything we know will be destroyed by the modern Vandals. Soon we will be left without any language with which to resist. Soon the chaos that followed the Sack of Rome will envelop the whole English-speaking world and the fundamentals of our existence will be lost forever.

The worst thing is that we know who is behind this. They are a separate tribe who speak perfectly good English but think and act differently to the rest of the population. We call them Wolverhampton Wanderers or Wolves Fans. We treat their idiosyncracies as football-induced eccentricities. How long must we remain blind? The people of Stourport who are predominantly Wolves Fans have not removed this superior class of grafitti. Global warming will provide us with one form of death. This one grafitto in charming Stourport and the inevitable consequences of ignoring it have every chance of getting us first.