There has been a good deal of recent interest in the outdoor written landscape of Lebanon. Studies on civil war posters (Maasri 2009), graffiti (Saleh 2009), and political and commercial advertisements (Chemaly 2009, Schmitt 2009) have proliferated in conjunction with a growing number of well informed blogs by graphic designers and artists interested in the shifting word-writ-large on outdoor surfaces in the country. While this trend indicates a broader analytic interest in the study of semiotics, it seems to also connote the fact that, in a country with more newspapers than any other in the Arab region (Rugh 2004) and a historically high literacy rate, there is a salience to the written word that ranges from the private domain out to the public landscape. Literacy activities, such as outdoor sign production and their resulting artifacts, such as billboard ads and graffiti, take the local activity of inscription into the public realm. This aspect of mediation requires attention to the notion of the public sphere in which disembodied language can be viewed as a means for political legitimization (Gal and Woolard 2001). In this paper, I take a diachronic and ethnographic look at the political rhetoric of the Lebanese political leader, General Michel Aoun, and his evolving party, the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM). Specifically, I will focus on graffiti of the FPM in 2005 and discuss its resonances with the earlier political rhetoric of Aoun during the civil war and his Paris exile, at a time when he was in a conflictual relationship with the state. In addition, I will also look at his later ad campaigns from 2008-2009 to see how some semiotic elements have been extended from this earlier time into the more recently professionally polished party image and eventual reincorporation with the state. Through the examination of linguistic strategies, such as the use of reported speech and digraphia, I argue that these textual artifacts contain the residue of contested ideologies of modernization, nationhood, and belonging. Language then, provides a medium through which political identity is formed, shaped and revised in the face of conflict