Tattoo You

January 29, 2020

Cathedral City, California

     Like many people over a certain age I have been watching the proliferation of tattoos among the general public with a mixture of perplexity and grim amusement.  Here's where my age really shows.  When I was growing up the only people I knew who had tattoos were veterans of World War II or Korea, and they were all men.  Usually the tattoos were fairly small and confined to the forearm or upper arm, and focused, subject-wise, on emblems of the military, like eagles or anchors or occasionally mottoes of some kind--Semper Fi, etc.  They would sometimes be a bit more fanciful than that, but not often.  An in-law of mine had acquired a skull with a dagger being driven through it on his upper arm, which he had gotten in the Philippines in 1946.  Our neighbor across the street, who had been in the Navy, had a tattoo of Betty Boop wearing a bra top and a grass skirt.  He claimed that his Betty had originally been naked, but his post-war wife had made him add the clothing.  That was about as risque and imaginative as things got where I came from.  Women most definitely did not have tattoos, at least not any of the women I ever knew, since I did not frequent New Orleans brothels as a kid growing up in the suburbs of Oakland County, Michigan, nor did I ever travel with the circus or know any Maori warriors.  I'm sure jailhouse tattoos existed back then, and that military veterans weren't the only people who got tattoos--there were bikers and other free spirits and degenerates who no doubt had them too.  But as a rule, people didn't have tattoos unless they had had some sort of rather intense experience to go with them.  Tattoos were, if you will, souvenirs of various of life's vicissitudes--warfare, confinement, degradation, solidarity, or utter depravity.  People who had been through nothing of the sort, meaning almost everyone, didn't see the point in having indelible ink on their skin for the rest of their lives, to commemorate things like, say, graduation cum laude from college, or employment at General Motors, or for losing a loved one, or for being a parent for crying out loud.

     It need hardly be said that things are different now.  Today it seems difficult for most folks to find a reason not to get a tattoo.  I chalk this current tendency up to several things.  (You'll notice that the none of the reasons I shall enumerate for the rise in tattoos are positive ones, betraying the fact that I do not view this phenomenon in a very favorable light.)  The first is simple conformism.  People see other people getting tattoos, and they want them too, just as they want to wear certain clothing or hair styles.  This is a characteristic of human behavior that is far older than tattooing, of course.  And it has analogues in the behavior of other animal species, such as lemmings.  The difference between wearing one's hair a certain fashionable way, or having a particular pair of shoes, on the one hand, and getting a tattoo, on the other hand, is or should be obvious to all concerned.  The hair grows out, the shoes can be replaced, but the tattoo will be there until the day you die unless you undergo painful surgery to remove it.  Very few people at the age of forty would wear their hair as they did when they were twenty, nor would they wear the same clothes.  People my children's age look back on photos of themselves from the 1980s and laugh at the big, overstyled and overcurled way they wore their hair, or how they tucked their leggings into their socks and affected the "preppy" look that was best embodied in the character of Ferris Bueller's sister.  My adult children wish to continue to follow fashion, to some degree, and these things just aren't fashionable any more, at their age or any other.  They understand that decisions made in adolescence are almost invariably, well, adolescent, and inherently transitory.  Life has a way of doing that to us.  We start smoking as teenagers, to be cool, and then we get addicted to nicotine, and spend the rest of our lives, sometimes successfully, and sometimes not, trying to kick the habit.  But at least it's possible to do so.  Yet somehow, in a sort of  movement of mass hysteria, teenagers and young adults are getting tattooed, thereby committing the most indelible nonlethal act of youthful indiscretion possible.  And that includes three of my four children, sadly.  True, when they are old and tattooed, they will have plenty of company.  But whatever profound or whimsical or deep meanings the tattoos once had will have gone, and only the blue will remain on their wrinkled skin, looking like irregularly-shaped bruises.  Most of our youthful indiscretions, if they are kept to ourselves, can accompany us to the grave without being noticed by others; but tattoos begotten in the prime of our lives will stay until the last, bearing mute testimony to whatever foolishness led us to get them in the first place.  Meanwhile in a generation or two tattoos will have fallen out of fashion, and will come to represent the hopelessly outdated practices of an older, misguided generation.  The main problem, besides the obvious disfiguring and embarrassing one, is that unless the tattooed people die the day after they get the tattoos, they will almost invariably live to regret them.

     The second reason people get tattoos, slightly more nuanced than the first, is that in general, people lack specific ideas and ideals around which to focus their existences, so they think that by putting some designs on their skin they have sort of joined a club, which I suppose they have done in a way.  The Club of Nincompoops.  They are thereby one with those other folks who have tattoos.  Never mind what the tattoos are, and how varied and unfocused are their messages.  The important thing is that they have ink, like everybody else (or at least everybody else within their narrow frames of reference).  I have occasion to go to a day spa hot spring from time to time, and thus have a chance to see many partially-clothed people of all ages and sizes.  Lacking any common focus for their tattoos, they tend to choose fancy dragon-like designs or collections of Chinese characters--things they saw on others that they sort of liked--or swirly cursive renditions of their children's names and dates of birth, or the dates of death of their close relatives, friends, or who knows who.  Some folks go for large lettering of the names of their wives or girlfriends, or photo-like renditions of their nearest and dearest, without regard to whether they will be so near and so dear in a few years, or will, with the inevitability of gravity, even vaguely resemble those individuals by the time their skin has loosened and sagged.  (I knew a guy about two decades ago who loved Jimi Hendrix, so he got his face tattooed on his arm.  The problem was that it didn't look all that much like Jimi Hendrix, and more like some unnamed Native American.  So he constantly had to explain what the tattoo was.  Well, at least he saw the error of his ways more or less immediately.)  Most tattoos tend to be intensely personal in nature, doubtless reflecting the person's mood and frame of mind at the time they got the tattoos, but without regard for what their mood will be in a few years.  If the people are fat, the tattoos tend to draw attention to the vast expanses of flesh they possess, like the over-sized canvasses of the neoclassical painters of the French Napoleonic period, on which the tattoo artist has to work.  If the people are good-looking--muscular men or women possessed of smooth curvaceous and otherwise unblemished skin, the tattoos mar the fine natural landscapes of their bodies, like random stains on a beautiful piece of fabric or gashes of graffiti on architecturally attractive buildings.  Tattoos enhance natural ugliness and besmirch natural beauty.  And there is essentially no area of the body that is immune from tattoos, from head to foot.

     The third reason for tattoos flows from the second one.  Because most people are socially and morally unfocused, and tend to spend a great deal of their time watching violent cartoon-like and comic book-inspired movies and reading garbage on their smart phones, they have become inured to depictions of extreme absurdity and vulgarity.  Thus they are unable to differentiate the comic book realm from the realm of reality, and are unable to recognize the foolishness of what they see.  Besides that, they're high or stoned much of the time.  They have so much sensory input from all sides, that it's almost as if they are in anti-sensory deprivation chambers, filled not with silence and lack of sensation, but instead with too much meaningless white noise and chaos.  Thus almost devoid of anything that could possibly shock them or wake them up, they come to crave the pain of getting the tattoo itself, and care less what the ink says than what the process of getting it does to them in terms of sharply focused sensory input.  Tattoos in this context are the equivalent of beating your head against the wall, because it feels so good when you stop.  This pain consideration often divides the tattooed people from the untattooed people.  Those who do not particularly like pain, and have found enough in life to stimulate them in more focused ways, tend not to get tattoos.  These latter folks are, not coincidentally, on the whole more intelligent and better educated, too.

      Another reason for tattoos, perhaps wrapped in the tendrils of the previous ones, is narcissism.  The social media and recent technologies have instilled in practically everyone who uses them a sense of preoccupation with themselves in a way that was never before possible except among the insane or insufferable.  Facebook says to the world, "Here's what I think, where I am, what I'm eating or enjoying, and what amuses me or pisses me off," whether anyone is interested or not.  Twitter says, "This is what I'm thinking RIGHT NOW, in 280 characters or less," whether anyone is interested or not.  Instagram says, "Here's what I look like RIGHT NOW, as I'm in the act of saying or doing whatever I feel like saying or doing," whether anyone is interested or not.  (This very blog, I'll admit, is an instance of the social media, except that it's much less accessible, which is why I have about eight followers, instead of 11,000, which in turn is why the things I say won't have much of an effect on others.)  All this wasn't possible a generation ago, and so people didn't assume that anyone necessarily gave a rat's ass about their innermost thoughts and opinions, or what they look like while acting foolish at any given moment, which, in point of fact, most people don't.  This was a good thing, because it tended to keep people's egos in check, not to mention allowing people time to think about what they might say and do, and often wisely to decide not to say and do those things.  Ah, the lost art of impulse control.  Tattoos precisely reflect the narcissism and lack of impulse control created and fostered by the social media, only in a much more indelible way.  They say, in a way nothing else can do, LOOK AT ME (and see what a fool I am).

     The next reason for tattoos is akin to body dysmorphia.  That's the condition in which people completely lose sight of the objective realities of their bodies.  They become obsessed with self-perceived flaws, often leading them to diet excessively and unhealthily, or to get plastic surgeries that end up going right past mildly corrective and into freakishly disfiguring.  Yet they do not realize how ugly they look, with their fish lips and taut skin and outlandishly high cheeks.  As it occurs in tattooing, it is what causes people to get more and more tattoos, thinking that if one tattoo looks good (to them or a few other similarly tattooed people) then additional ones will look even better.  Eventually they're covered with tattoos in a way that would make a freak in the employ of P. T. Barnum positively green with envy.  It is akin to the phenomenon in a certain society of stretching the lips and putting plates in them until they stick out half a foot or so, and calling that beauty.  Almost everyone from outside that society can see how absurd that is, and regards it as ugly and disfiguring.  Except, that is, for that small group.  In a few years, millions and millions of people are going to be looking at the tattooed people of today and shaking their heads, wondering what they were (or more likely weren't) thinking.   

   The last reason for the great proliferation of tattoos, and surely the most important one, is a sort of corollary to all the rest of them, or more accurately the overarching reason for them, and that is stupidity.  The abundance of pure unadulterated idiocy among humans is staggering, and nowhere is it more evident or inexcusable than in tattoos.  People look back to the Middle Ages and say that folks were really ignorant.  And in terms of technological knowledge we certainly have come a long way since then.  But at the core of our beings we are still as ingenuous and superstitious and just plain toe-stubbingly doltish as we were when we dragged our knuckles on the ground.  There are many more of us on the planet, and we're healthier on the whole and better able to get around.  But we're just as benighted as ever.  And nowhere is our inherent stupidity more in evidence than in the phenomenon of tattooing.  Where once (and sometimes now as well) tattoos were the symbols of a comparatively narrow shared experience, like being in war, or prison, or a gang, today they are evidence of nothing much at all, except the silliness of wanting to be like others, without regard to the consequences.

     What's to be done?  Well, nobody asked me for my opinion, but I think that this thing, as I've suggested, will just have to play itself out, going the way of the powdered wig, the wing collar, and the tie-dyed t-shirt.  All things must come to an end, eventually.  In the meantime, it seems to me that with what we know about the human body, not to mention chemistry, someone could come up with a tattooing process, or an ink, that naturally fades and goes away completely after, say, five to seven years.  How goddamned difficult could that be?   We already know that some tattoo ink colors naturally fade more quickly than others.  If all tattoos had a comparatively short life, tattoo artists could stay in business, and people could, after coming to their senses, go back to having the skin they were born with.  Hell, under those circumstances, I might even get a tattoo.  Maybe one that says, "Stupid for a day." 

Weathered

Cathedral City, California

January 11, 2020

     It has been almost 40 years since the Weather Channel began on cable TV.   That means that more than a generation, and close to half the people alive today, don’t remember when the weather only occupied five minutes or less of the local evening news, and that was it.  Then, as now, the goofiest and otherwise least upwardly mobile of the news crew members would stand in front of a map of the United States or their state and gesture at high pressure centers and temperature readings, and push the weather in from the west.  Regular watchers would find out what the forecast was where they lived for the next day or perhaps the next few days, and prepare accordingly.  And then the sports guy would come on and talk about more important things.

     Today, the basic format for local weather reports remains about the same as always.  The big difference is that now we have, in addition, an entire channel devoted to nothing but the weather, in all its glorious and varied forms, not just in and around where we live but throughout the whole damned world.  This in turn has produced a generation of home weather aficionados, many of whom have gone a step or two further and become utterly obsessed with the weather, and often quite phobic about it.

     Let me say near the outset of this post that I do believe we're in the midst of climate change and global warming, much of which owes itself to human intervention due to the release into the atmosphere of lots and lots of good old carbon dioxide.  Having said that, I must also state with confidence that not every single fluctuation in the weather is due to global warming.  There are trends and cycles.  And global warming and cooling have happened in the past, without the assistance of billions of energy-hungry consumers.  But still, we are seeing some rather rapid melting at the poles, with a concomitant rise in sea levels and changes in weather streams and patterns, causing who knows what, weatherwise.  But not everything.

     As Mark Twain is supposed to have said, everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.  Of course, when he said that, the implied joke was that nobody could do anything about it.  Today we're pretty sure that not only have we done something about the weather, but that we ought to undo it, or slow it down a bit.  But Twain is still basically right, I think, in that it's probably too late to do much to change the trends of the next century or so.  Alea iacta est, the die is cast, in the words of Julius Caesar, another fun guy to quote.  So I say we shouldn't do a whole lot of hand-wringing; rather, we should just try, within the limits of our poor powers, to slow down the profligate use of CO2-producing stuff.  We’ll figure it out, slowly, and nothing apocalyptic is likely to happen, but in the meantime it wouldn’t hurt to build higher dikes.

     Now back to the Weather Channel, which would exist even if global warming weren't a thing.  Somebody down in Atlanta, probably Ted Turner, got this idea that certainly tapped into the general populace's preoccupation with weather, identified so long ago by our favorite national pundit.  The thinking probably went, why should people wait until the evening news to find out about the weather?  And what with people's families spread out all over the country, wouldn't it be nice for them if they could know what kind of weather their children or parents are having, so they can have something else to talk about and worry about?  And therein lies the kernel of the continuous irritant that is the existence of the Weather Channel, which has by now figured out ways to fill in its airtime with shows about tornado chasing, and all that silly stuff.

      At present I reside in the desert in southern California.  Many people don't know quite where Cathedral City is, and California is a very big state.  But what they do know, thanks to the 24-hour weather reports engendered by, or inspired by the existence of, the Weather Channel, is that certain big weather-related things happen in California--earthquakes of course, and also wild fires, mud slides, excessive rain, not enough rain, flash floods, and so on.  I can tell readily which of my nearest and dearest are watching the Weather Channel (meaning that they don't have a lot else to do), and also which of them are becoming with advancing age more generally worried and fretful about a world over which they have no control (as if they ever did).  I can tell this by their inquiries via text about whether I am in the path of some fire or other meteorological event.  I appreciate it, but hell, if I was in any danger I'd let you know, unless I was buried under a mountain of lava or something.  More often than not these well-meaning worriers are off by at least a hundred miles from where I'm living, because, as I said, California is a big state, about which it is really hard to generalize, though people try to do so all the time.

     Preoccupation with the weather, I think, stands in for a lot of other fears we have, such as fear of geopolitical calamities, and of sudden unforeseen injuries, illnesses and deaths.  In other words, fears of things we can't do a thing about.   And if we're doing okay where we live, we wonder and worry about the people on the other side of the country.  Practically speaking, as we move ever more toward urbanization and away from the era of the individual farmer, most of us don't really need to worry about the weather.  Yeah, it'll be hotter or colder than we like, and snow and rain will come at inopportune times, but the majority of us have decent housing, no crops to worry about, plenty of good roads and safe vehicles to navigate them, and anyway, we lead lives that increasingly keep us indoors, rather than out in the open.  If anything, weather should be becoming less important to us rather than more so.  But that isn't the case.  If it's going to be slippery we wonder whether school should be closed and whether we should venture outside.  If it's going to be hot we worry about whether we should take extra water.  None of these considerations were not there half a century ago, and yes, people died of heat stroke and slipped on the ice and broke their necks, but generally these were treated as isolated unfortunate events, not as part of an almost conspiratorial assault on us by the weather gods.  The prevailing feeling then seems to have been that shit happens, so be careful.

     The media feeds this weather obsession relentlessly, as you might expect.  Hurricanes and earthquakes aside, the weather and the news used to be separate concepts for the most part, but no more.  Today, as often as not, the weather is the news.  There are several reasons for this in addition to the ones I've already noted here.  One is the need to fill up more and more air time.  In reality there never was, nor is there now, more than about fifteen to thirty minutes of news worth knowing about on any given day.  Huntley and Brinkley, and Walter Cronkite, used to do a half hour a night, and that was more than enough.  But with cable TV we have multiple all-news channels (not to mention that all-weather channel) that run 24 hours a day.  Almost at the same time as the Weather Channel came CNN.  But there are only so many ways you can slice fifteen to thirty minutes of daily news to make it spread out over a full day.  Jesus was said to have taken five loaves of bread and two fish and broken them into enough pieces to feed thousands of people.  I think the TV people aspire to do the same with the meager quotidian information at their disposal.  But they're not miracle-workers, and their efforts end up looking silly and repetitious.  One very sure filler on any news day is a look at the uglier side of the weather.  A heat wave overtakes the east, and every person who dies during the heat wave from any cause that is even remotely connected to the heat becomes a casualty of that heat wave.  A regular heat wave becomes The Killer Heat Wave, The Heat Wave That Has Claimed 17 Lives So Far, The Heat Wave That Ate Cleveland.  Thus are our appetites for apocalyptic entertainment and true-life schadenfreude appeased simultaneously.

     I certainly don't gainsay the need to, say, warn people in Florida or Louisiana of an approaching hurricane.  That should be a matter of course.  But to devote 24 or 48 or 72 hours of continuous coverage to flying debris and palm trees bent under the wind is just too much--rather like looking at a dead body from every conceivable angle, then watching the autopsy and subsequent cremation of the remains.

     But as I stated at the beginning, we have a generation or two of people who have never known any other media-produced reality than that of nonstop concern about the weather.  Fifty years ago, and even a hundred and fifty years ago, the weather was just as good and bad as it is now, with people far less well equipped to handle it.  We see temperature and precipitation records being broken all the time, but they usually contain telling statistical points, such as "this is the hottest it's been in Chicago on this day since 1923" (before air conditioning), or "the worst blizzard in New York since 1888" (before snow plows and central heating).  In other words, much more really bad shit is behind us than we imagine to be lurking just around the corner.  In the 1930s a drought in the middle of the country, combined with poor crop management techniques, caused a disaster we call the Dust Bowl--as devastating as anything we've seen since.  And somehow, against all odds, people knew all they needed to know about it, even without the Weather Channel.  Imagine that.

It's A Miracle

January 8, 2020

Cathedral City, California

     The other day I was changing in the locker room at the gym, when a hunched-over older man came to the bench where I stood and began to do the same.  As he went toward a locker to hang up his clothes he said, pretty much apropos of nothing, “Every day is a miracle.”  By that I assume he meant that he felt fortunate to be alive, and that he was glad to be able to work out at the gym.
 

     Well good for him, I thought, but why is that a miracle?  When I was growing up and going to Sunday school, we were given to believe that miracles supernatural things.  In fact, when I looked up the word "miracle" in the dictionary just now, it defined it that way, to wit:  a surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore considered to be the work of a divine agency.  Getting thrown into a fiery furnace and not being burned, for example, is a miracle; feeding thousands of people with five loaves of bread and a couple of fish is a miracle; a virgin getting pregnant (however dubiously welcome that experience might be in real life) is miraculous.  Maybe my idea of miracles is heavily influenced by bible stories, but still, I thought, unless this old guy I encountered dies every night and is brought back to life in the morning, or arrives at the gym by means of a magic carpet, I just don’t see how every day is a miracle, to him or anyone else.

     Of course we all know that today the word “miracle” has gone down the road of absurd hyperbole (hand in hand with adjectives like “awesome”), such that it is used almost universally to mean exceptionally good, or against the odds, or sometimes just out of the ordinary.  “It’s a miracle we made it here on time, what with traffic,” we’ll say, or “It was a miracle she survived that accident,” when what we really mean is such cases is, “We sure as hell didn’t expect that!”  This all bespeaks more a sincere but mistaken subjective evaluation of a likely outcome than any objective supernatural event.  Apparently, by the way, the definition of “miracle” is completely missing a negative component.  Miracles are always good things.  When things go unexpectedly wrong we don’t call that a miracle; we’re more likely to call it a "tragedy"--another unfortunate misuse of a perfectly good word.  In bygone days (and even today in many religions) both the good and the bad were ascribed to the Almighty and to the adherence of the faithful, or lack thereof, to the necessary prescribed forms of worship.  Thus when the sun came up in the east each morning, or when it rained after a drought, it was considered a miracle brought about by ardent prayers for divine intercession, and when a hurricane or an earthquake came it was because we somehow failed to kiss God’s ass with enough alacrity.  I suppose that giving the deity credit for everything, good and bad, is in some ways more consistent and honest than considering only the cool stuff to be miraculous.  But to think that human intervention helps miracles to happen is just plain ridiculous.    

     One of my favorite meaningless betes noires in this vein is the expression, sometimes slung about by religion hucksters on television, “Expect a miracle; make miracles happen.”  Which is silly, since miracles are by their very nature unexpected events, and most certainly not anything any mortal being can accomplish.  Another one I hear from time to time is “I am a miracle.”  To that let me simply reply, “No.  You are not.”

     The easiest thing to do when confronted with such illogical behavior is to label it stupid and leave it at that.  Most of us know there is more than enough stupidity to go around, and stopping the analysis at "stupid" saves us the trouble of having to figure out why we repeatedly do the dumb things we do.  But a more responsible approach might be to speculate about why people are so prone to calling things miracles when they are manifestly not miracles.  The most obvious answer is that we are prone to seeking linguistic shortcuts, often misusing words until, after many instances of such misuse, they succeed in changing the meaning of a word.  But another possible answer is that we persist in calling things miraculous because there are, in fact, no miracles in real life, and--poor us--we wish that there were.  That also explains why we are so preoccupied with the idea of aliens having visited earth.  Miracles only happen in the realm of myth and legend, and religions stay in business by commemorating those legendary miracles and making folks think that more miracles may be just around the corner.

     The slightly more intelligent religions, like Judaism, take a more nuanced view of the miraculous.  Modern Jews celebrate the traditional scriptural miracles of the past, like the passing over of the Angel of Death and the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem, as part of their cultural heritage.  But their core belief is that however chosen by God they might be, they are condemned to an existence that is always a hair’s breadth away from horror and annihilation, chiefly because God is easily pissed off by disloyalty or just by being ignored or taken for granted, and owes them exactly nothing.  They're chosen all right, but they have been chosen by a peevish, jealous, and often indifferent God.  Follow the rules, live righteously, and be just and merciful to your fellow man and you might just be okay.  Or not.  You never know.  The million-pound shit hammer might come crashing down on even the righteous.  Look at the story of Job.  The guy did nothing wrong; he just got in the middle of a celestial pissing contest between God and Satan.  Job was your average  prosperous and righteous dude, always doing what was expected of him.  God was so sure that Job wouldn't renounce him that he gave Satan permission to kill his family, his livestock, his crops, and damn near destroy his body.  He had sores covering him from the top of his head to the soles of his feet.  After all this only Job and his wife remained, but sure enough, Job didn't renounce God, so he got a new family (fuck the kids who died when the roof fell in on them, I guess--collateral damage), and he prospered again.  And this is how the God of the Jews treats the good guys, the loyal guys, the troopers.  Holy shit.  One is tempted to think, after reading this story, that it doesn't much matter whether you're one of God's chosen people or not, or even if there is a God.  And many have thought just this.   

     Christians also celebrate the mythical miracles that brought their religion into existence—the virgin birth and the resurrection of Jesus, to name a couple of the big ones.  The difference between them and Jews in this regard is that the Christians, like little children, believe not only that those miracles actually happened, but that more miracles are just around the corner.  Maybe the more pessimistic Jewish view is what an extra few thousand years of maturity brings to a religion.  I don’t know.  But with respect to the Christians, it explains why everyone is so determined to see miracles hiding behind every burning bush.  What would life be like, the thinking goes, without at least a few little miracles here and there, and perhaps a big one now and then?  It would be predictable and repetitive.  And predictable and repetitive are things an immature person, or immature religion, just can't stand.  So people all over the world wait for miracles, and when they don't get them, they fudge the definition of miraculous to include the more pedestrian events of everyday life, like active old age, close calls, and recoveries from grave illnesses.

     I do believe that it would take a miracle to convince the average person that there are no miracles.  And who am I to cause such a thing to happen?