Carved in Stone

  Two American tourists were arrested in Italy for allegedly carving their names into the walls of the Coliseum. Good. It is wonderful to see the preservation of history, rather than the defacing and destruction of it.
  Such vandalism was once the norm for tourists. The Temple of Dendur, which now rests in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is covered with carved names from the 19th century. Mark Twain made the following observation, and wish, in Innocents Abroad: " One might swear that all the John Smiths and George Wilkinsons, and all the other pitiful nobodies between Kingdom Come and Baalbec would inscribe their poor little names on the walls of Baalbec's magnificent ruins, and would add the town, the county and the state they came from- and swearing thus, be infallibly correct. It is a pity some great ruin does not fall in and flatten some of these reptiles, and scare their kind out of ever giving their names to fame upon any walls or monuments again, forever."
  The bitterest irony, of course, is the complete, and deliberate destruction being committed by the reptiles of ISIS, while the case in Italy plays out.