USA is everywhere. He must be the most prolific tagger out there - on every street in Berkeley, Oakland, SF. You’ll see him the next time you look.

Objectively, I know that USA is some guy working for the utility district. He mostly only marks up pieces of street that are on their way to repavement. But I prefer to think that USA has an agenda. Sometimes he’s shedding light on the state of America’s crumbling infrastructure: look at this shitty sidewalk, these potholes. Do you see them? They’re here, in the USA. Sometimes I think USA is remarking on our country’s rampant culture of entitlement, the way he casually scrawls his name over a whole chunk of sidewalk, claiming ownership. Other times he brackets out an area for himself, defining his existence spatially. He does this with an insidiousness reminiscent of Israeli settlement-building. Sometimes I think he’s commenting on American imperialism. “USA —>” as if to say, everything from here to the setting sun is mine, in the name of manifest destiny. And he always writes in white.