A saguaro cactus spray-painted by Robert Baratheon
When I read this article about vandals tagging saguaro cacti in national parks, I immediately considered capital punishment. That would not be appropriate, I thought, almost entirely convinced. Vandalism makes me angry in a way that more serious crimes do not. I can totally understand why people steal things, and murder makes sense to me whenever someone, say, puts “Hotel California” on the jukebox or spray-paints over a petroglyph. But vandalism is one of the few crimes that confers almost no benefit on the person who commits it. At best, the mastermind who wrote “Nevada has cronic” over 1,000 year-old cave drawings got the memory of a fun caper. Oh yeah—and he wrote his name on something other people think is important.