Somewhere, Herve Villechaize Is Spinning In His Little Grave/The Adults Are Talking
In Teddy "Dalrymple's" latest piece he takes a much-needed shot at a trend that does not want to die: tats.
Being that my television consumption is second only to The Nihilist In Golf Pants', I like to watch a reality show called Miami Ink.
The show follows the travails of a group of misfits who run a Miami Tattoo Parlor. These people are seriously talented artists as their work attests, but what is interesting from a sociological standpoint is the constant repetition of cliches from those getting tats.
They speak of how getting ink sets them apart from others. How it lets them show their true personalities. How it shows that they are true individuals and don't care about what others think, man.
Teddy is having none of it as he explains one of the reasons he moved from the fast-declining Britain to the less-fast-declining France:
Another straw in the wind was the rising number of tattooed and pierced young people on view, as well as tattoo and piercing parlors. Ten years ago, you hardly ever saw a tattooed person in France: now they are everywhere. The small and ancient town, solidly bourgeois, near where I live has such a parlor, purveying savage kitsch to young fools.
Ted is not a man to trifle or suffer fools gladly as he clearly lays out the case that tattoos are juvenile expressions of an unhealthy and immature mind:
First, it was aesthetically worse than worthless. Tattoos were always kitsch, implying not only the absence of taste but the presence of dishonest emotion.
Second, the vogue represented a desperate (and rather sad) attempt on a mass scale to achieve individuality and character by means of mere adornment, which implied both intellectual vacuity and unhealthy self-absorption.
And third, it represented mass downward cultural and social aspiration, since everyone understood that tattooing had a traditional association with low social class and, above all, with aggression and criminality. It was, in effect, a visible symbol of the greatest, though totally ersatz, virtue of our time: an inclusive unwillingness to make judgments of morality or value.
Like I said, the man doesn't mince words. Interestingly enough, even one of the owners of the Miami tattoo parlor admits that he wishes he hadn't gotten the one on his neck. Even a man steeped in this bizarre little subculture knows that a neck tattoo denotes anti-social attitudes and pretty much bars employment in places other than record stores and used clothing shops.
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