Gum scum

Yesterday, chewing gum was in the Eye of the Beholder who quoted from this story, about some US-Singapore trade negotiations:

Negotiators from both countries said they hoped to resolve the issue of capital controls quickly, clearing the way for a final deal.

But Mr. Zoellick apparently did not break down Singapore’s resistance on another issue: its longtime ban on chewing gum, a prohibition ordered to keep the nation’s streets and sidewalks cleaner.

I know how the Singaporeans feel. The relentless disfiguring of London’s public spaces with chewing gum deposits is one of the things that most often makes me wish that “public” spaces were more frequently privately owned than they are. Occasionally a fresh deposit actually sticks to your shoe, which is horrible. You later have to scrape it off with a knife. Usually the deposit has dried and just remains there, a black blob on the floor.

It’s the sneakiness of it that gets me. The chewing gum droppers know that in the grand scheme of things their petty little misdemeanour doesn’t rate very high on the wickedness scale. And it is exactly this that they exploit. In a world of terrorist outrages, ever rising crime of the more usual sort, ghastly new laws that won’t do anything about crime but will be ghastly, ghastly new … well, just read every second posting on Samizdata (which seems to be going through a rather grim phase just now, for some reason), … in such a world, who has time to moan about chewing gum? Only me and the government of Singapore it would seem.

If the chewing gum miscreants don’t drop their chewing gum on the floor, they stick it on a strategically chosen spot in an advert. The first few times you see this it can be funny, but for me this joke stopped being funny years ago.

What’s going on here? No doubt a lot of chewing gum misbehaviour is sheer thoughtlessness, perpetrated by otherwise blameless and worthy people, but not nearly all, I surmise. I think what we may also have here is a particular example of the pathetic-person-making-an-impact syndrome. Another example of this is people who make a point of crossing roads just in front of motorists who they know will slow up and be inconvenienced, because that way the regular (car-owning) world is forced to pay attention to their otherwise meaningless existence, if only for a moment. Take that! I’m not so insignificant now, am I? Chewing gum misbehaviour is even sneakier, because it is anonymous. Ha! That was me, but you’ll never know, will you, hee hee hee! Chewing gum as clandestine self-expression, a subculture of secret Jackson Pollocking.

And why are there so many pathetic people who can only make an impact on the world by annoying it anonymously with chewing gum? The answer to that would be a bigger and grimmer Samizdata posting. I merely flag up the problem.

Other gum scum (I like that – that’s my heading for this) scatter their chewing gum as part of a more general pattern of nastiness and parasitism and not-so-petty aggressions. Presumably what the Singaporeans also feel, in addition to simply not liking gum dropped everywhere, is that if it’s chewing gum droppings today, it may be bricks through windows tomorrow and robbing old ladies for small or not so small change the next day. This is the “zero tolerance” theory, which I think is also right.

I know what you’ll say, all you people who can only make an impact on the world by leaving clever little comments on blogs (which I do agree is better than gum dropping). There’s a difference between possessing chewing gum and chewing chewing gum, and dropping chewing gum. (Cue the great Gum Control debate of Christmas 2002: “The majority of gum users are in fact responsible people, and we should not allow a small anti-social minority to be the excuse for suppressing the harmless pleasures of the law-abiding majority …” blah blah blah.) True. But not my point here. Have a nice day.