In Your Face

I can understand how it happens. I can understand how it can be addictive in the fashion of assorted drugs, chocolate, coffee and, in my case, slaggng off Hamilton. I can also understand how some would get a degree of self-aggrandisement from it. But I don’t understand it at all. I cannot get my head around Facebook. Nor Twitter nor the myriad of other social networking methods that seemingly now dominate the Internet. I know how to use Facebook. Mostly. What I don’t know or understand is its attraction to its millions of users. Perhaps I cannot understand why anyone is in the least interested in “What’s on (my) mind” or maybe I find the predominantly congratulatory and laudatory messages somewhat implausible—I know that there a lot of nice people out there, but that many that often? One section of Facebook interests me though; it’s called The Wall. People leave messages on it. And in that, they are carrying on one of the longest traditions known to man—leaving a message for someone else to read at their leisure if that is their wish and their will. One knows that earliest Man did it and the tradition carries on today. I honour that, and I acknowledge the role Facebook has in that. But I did wonder what, of all the messages left through the aeons, which was the most famous and most resilient. It would depend on the language of course, but of English my vote would go to the ubiquitous Kilroy. Nobody knows who he was—if indeed there was a “he.” The not always reliable Wikipedia attributes the phrase and its associated graffiti to “calling cards” left by American servicemen serving in WWII. There are many urban legends attached to the Kilroy graffiti. One states that Adolf Hitler believed that Kilroy was some kind of American super spy because the graffiti kept turning up in secure Nazi installations, presumably having been actually brought on captured Allied military equipment. Another states that Stalin was the first to enter an outhouse especially built for the leaders at the Potsdam conference. Upon exiting, Stalin asked an aide: "Who is this Kilroy?" Another legend states that a German officer, having seen frequent "Kilroys" posted in different cities, told all of his men that if they happened to come across a "Kilroy" he wanted to question him personally. The graffiti is supposedly located on various significant or difficult-to-reach places such as on the torch of the Statue of Liberty, on the Marco Polo Bridge in China, in huts in Polynesia, on a high girder on the George Washington Bridge in New York, at the peak of Mt. Everest, on the underside of the Arc de Triomphe, scribbled in the dust on the moon, in World War II pillboxes scattered around Germany, on a tile in the bathroom of a Grainger in Baltimore, around the sewers of Paris, and, in tribute to its origin, engraved in the National World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C. So, this Kilroy, whomever he may be, seems to have been here, there and everywhere. Except on Facebook. I am yet to see him make an appearance there—other than a site in homage to him. Perhaps he has passed on. Or simply perhaps the world has passed him by and he, like me, finds Facebook’s Wall sends him…well…up the wall.

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