{"id":12352,"date":"2009-10-04T19:31:13","date_gmt":"2009-10-04T19:31:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2009\/10\/04\/the-bodys-graffiti\/"},"modified":"2009-10-04T19:31:13","modified_gmt":"2009-10-04T19:31:13","slug":"the-bodys-graffiti","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2009\/10\/04\/the-bodys-graffiti\/","title":{"rendered":"The Body&#8217;s Graffiti"},"content":{"rendered":"<p align=\"justify\" class=\"firstinpost\"><font face=\"Georgia\">Tattoos are the graffiti of the human body. And just as the graffiti &#39;artist&#39; defaces property public and private, the tattoo &#39;artist&#39; defaces the human body, torturing the skin with needles and injecting it with ugly dyes. When I see yet another tattooed, pierced, tackle-box head, I wonder what this phenomenon means. Some <\/font><a href=\"http:\/\/www.city-journal.org\/html\/15_4_diarist.html\"><font color=\"#810081\" face=\"Georgia\">thoughts<\/font><\/a><font face=\"Georgia\"> of Theodore Dalrymple are worth pondering:<\/font><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"TEXT-ALIGN: justify\"><font face=\"Georgia\">First, it [tattooing] was aesthetically worse than worthless. Tattoos were always kitsch, implying not only the absence of taste but the presence of dishonest emotion.<\/font><\/p>\n<p style=\"TEXT-ALIGN: justify\"><font face=\"Georgia\">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.<\/font><\/p>\n<p style=\"TEXT-ALIGN: justify\"><font face=\"Georgia\">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.<\/font><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tattoos are the graffiti of the human body. And just as the graffiti &#39;artist&#39; defaces property public and private, the tattoo &#39;artist&#39; defaces the human body, torturing the skin with needles and injecting it with ugly dyes. When I see yet another tattooed, pierced, tackle-box head, I wonder what this phenomenon means. Some thoughts of &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2009\/10\/04\/the-bodys-graffiti\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;The Body&#8217;s Graffiti&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69,644],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aphorisms-and-observations","category-brother-jackass"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12352","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12352"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12352\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}