Blake Gopnik contemplates graffiti in the Middle East:
"Free doom — Get out Hamad," reads one spray-painted text from Bahrain. During the rebellion in Libya, "Freedom=Aljazeera" written on a wall makes the value of a free press perfectly clear; on another wall, the simple tracing of an AK-47 is enough to invoke an entire ethos of rebellion. … In all these cases, graffiti is being used as a true means of communication rather than as purely aesthetic exchange. These 21st-century scrawls leapfrog back to a prehistory of graffiti, when wall writing was mostly about voicing forbidden thoughts in public.
(Photo: Graffiti praising Al-Jazeera news channel is seen on a wall in the dissident-held Libyan city of Tobruk on February 24, 2011. By Patrick Baz/AFP/Getty Images)
The Dish 