PHILOSCRIBE writes:

I thank Dr. Thomas F. Bertonneau and Laura Wood and the other commentators for the recent posts on the rising prevalence of tattoos and scarification among people in our society. It so happens that I had been thinking a lot about this lately.

I live in the rural northeast, in a part of the country that decades ago was hallowed out by the disappearance of manufacturing, leaving communities abandoned and mired in borderline poverty and families barely hanging on to a decent existence. Many of my neighbors and their families live in trailers. There is a segment of the population that is affluent, but the “middle” is nearly gone, leaving the communities polarized by extremes.

This is the background from which I write.

The other day I walked into a chain hair salon found in every strip mall in America (I know, I should have patronized the town barber …) to get a quick haircut. The first thing I noticed was the three other customers waiting their turn with the “stylists.” One was a hideously overweight woman, her arms encased in a sleeve of tattoos that extended across her exposed upper chest. The second was a man in his early 20s with a ring under his nostril and washer-size rings in the lobes of his ears. The third, a man in his 40s, didn’t sport any tattoos or piercings. He was simply wearing the male equivalent of a tank top T-shirt, baggy cargo shorts and sandals that amply exposed his corpulent physique and body hair. The woman had an expression of anger and meanness in her face; the young man was staring vacantly into space; and the older man was absorbed with the screen on his phone. A waiting area felt saddled in sadness.

It was a horrific scene, and it required all of three seconds to leave an unpleasant imprint in my memory.

The thought came to me and has been lingering ever since: When did all this become okay? When did it become okay to dress, to be blunt, like slobs? When did it become okay, indeed fashionable, to desecrate the body with metal penetrations? When did it become okay, even preferable, to imitate the lowest rather than emulate the highest in fashion? When did it become okay for adult men to wear baseball caps and dress like little boys in public? When did it become okay for women and girls to wear shirts and shorts of such limited covering that it doesn’t amount to much more than a bathing suit? Moreover, why is it okay, and why would expressing my dismay over this trend become an invitation to rebuke and ridicule from others?

I remember when I was young — during the 1960s — my parents required us to wear a tie or a dress whenever we ventured out even for mundane travel. Getting on a plane? Put on a tie, boys! Visiting relatives? Wear a dress, girls! And my parents were not even religious. It was just the way we presented ourselves in public. And, it seemed, the way most everyone else did, too.

The collapse of comportment in the public square has been remarked upon earlier in TH — I recall a photo that Laura Wood posted of some dispossessed men during the 1940s in which they were decently attired, clean shaven and projected an air of dignity about their person despite their impoverishment — and I suspect there is no simple explanation to the decline and overthrow of dress and fashion in contemporary America. It goes hand-in-hand with the decline in manners and the rise of the hoodlum culture.

I would like to pause a moment to emphasize that I do not link this decline to immigration of families and people from non-Western cultures into our country. It is my distinct observation that sons and daughters of immigrants in fact are the better behaved, more appropriately dressed, and harder-working students at my daughter’s high school. My daughter’s favorite boy is from a first-generation Iranian family, and he treats her with the utmost respect and courtesy. His parents run a strict and observant household. They don’t wear blue jeans, the father wears a tie at the dinner table, and I’ve never seen the mother wear anything other than a dress — and they are young parents in their early 40s!

It is hard to trace the origin of the decline in public comportment and dress. I suspect the seeds of it are to be found in the advent of T-shirts and jeans – the “greaser” look – among young men in the 1950s. It took decades for this ethos (or pathos) to seep into broader society and the middle and upper classes. The abandonment of ties among men in the workplace is a natural outgrowth. Even though I work a night shift in my office job, I still wore a tie to work — until I couldn’t take the ridicule any longer, I am ashamed to say. The pressure to conform to the majority fashion is intense, even among the unwilling (imagine the comments I received when I had the audacity to wear a bow tie).

Along with the decline in respectable and respectful dress, there has been a concurrent rise in the strange phenomenon of printed slogans and words and trademarks on clothing, as if we are walking advertisements. This baffles me, but perhaps it is related to the “mediated” environment in which we live that Mr. Berttonneau refers to in his excellent observations. Those of us who wear clothing with external insignias as trying to attain a higher “being.” This is not limited to the lower classes. Ralph Lauren’s Polo logo on clothing is an upper class version of people trying to attain higher being via their choice in fashion.

I am nor arguing for a return to frockcoats and wool suits during the summer as existed in prior times. I support the right to wear comfortable and informal clothing in the workplace that is so often stifling in all other particulars. And I can even accept a discreet tattoo that would be covered from public view (unless you are a sailor, construction worker or motorbike outlaw — acceptable among men in those cases). But the wholesale destruction of the body through piercings and other accoutrements, and the indiscriminate stenciling of the skin in permanent ink, is nothing else but the desecration and destruction of the body. And our willingness to expose the body to public view through skimpy covering and “branded” fashion, reveals only a society and people sinking to our baser instincts. And it makes me sad.

Thank you.

Buck writes:

There was another excellent discussion about tattoos at VFR two years ago.

What we glimpse in our everyday-to-day, even mid-summer at a beach, is a drop in the ink bucket. Search for “best” or “worst” tattoos at Youtube. Unbelievable.

Mary writes:

Eric wrote: “It occurs to me that tattoos, for many people, are a way of claiming and declaring a tribal identity…This has always been most common among people whose social networks are the weakest – convicts, for instance…This is how people struggle to build social context in a world that no longer offers them any institutions which they can naturally occupy…”

Tattoos used to be worn mostly by, as Eric said, convicts, men in the military, longshoremen, etc. (if a woman had one there was little doubt her boyfriend was in Hell’s Angels or she was in the circus). Through the associated pain and resulting low-culture ugliness a tattoo said “don’t mess with me”, serving as part of a cloak of protection donned by persons in hard circumstances to ensure their toughness was obvious and ostensibly keep trouble at bay.

With the culture’s focus on ugliness and sexuality the tattoo has morphed into something suburban kids now wear for, as Eric stated, “tribal identity”, the cool factor, to enhance one’s sexual cred, etc. On a sailor, a tattoo gives accurate information about the man’s way of life; on a white, suburban, middle-class young adult a tattoo is part of a pathetic costume. I imagine this person saying, “I’m trying to trump up an identity for myself because I live in a culture devoid of beauty, ritual and meaning. I want to seem edgy and brooding so I listen to rap, watch Breaking Bad and sport tattoos.” To me a tattoo communicates not the darkness and depth that the bearer is often aiming for but a superficiality and focus on externals; but that’s not at all surprising because this is how people, to use Eric’s phrase, “build social context”, working only from a debased popular culture and bankrupt public school system.

Flannery O’Connor wrote a short story called “Parker’s Back” a tattooed man who finds his way to Christ.

Don Vincenzo writes:

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