I see articles like this and I can't determine whether the author is being humorously ironic or shamelessly bigoted.
Theodore Dalrymple The Australian March 17, 2014
THE end is nigh! French civilisation is on the verge of collapse! No one who attended the recent Mondial du Tatouage (the World Tattoo Fair) in Paris could be in any doubt about it.
It was held, appropriately enough, in the old abattoir at the end of the Avenue Jean Jaurès, named after the highly civilised French socialist politician who was assassinated 100 years ago this year. The elegant Victorian wrought-iron construction of the old abattoir is now surrounded by a wasteland of concrete monstrosities, French modern architecture now being some of the worst in the world.
It would be bad enough anywhere, but is especially painful in a country with a millennial history of architectural achievement. Perhaps the rejection of beauty as a goal by French architects — their work seeming rather to exclaim “F..k off, humanity!” — accounts in part for the adoption as a style by so many of the young French of deliberate ugliness and self-mutilation. In a world of brutal ugliness over which you have no control you might as well admit defeat and join in.
Thousands queued to enter the fair at €30 ($46) a ticket. Many of them had already permanently disfigured themselves and, since their tattoos would have quite likely cost hundreds or thousands of euros, poverty was not the explanation for their degradation.
Inside the abattoir, there were about 250 stands from across the Western world offering tattoos, many of them with more than one “artist”. It was only to be expected that ugly loud tuneless rock music of the kind that makes thought impossible and speech difficult was poured into the atmosphere like poison gas. Customers lay down on couches to have dragons, skulls, vampires, insects, rats or Elvis Presley permanently inscribed on their legs, backs, arms, chests.
One man held a baby in his arms as a tattooist inscribed a snake on his back. You are never too young to be indoctrinated with nihilism. A little boy of four wore a T-shirt with the slogan “I love my Tattoo [sic] parents’’ and was photographed by admiring photographers, most themselves heavily tattooed.
Two nearly naked middle-aged men of flabby physique, tattooed so heavily that only a few years ago they would have been considered degenerate freaks, patted small children on the head as their delighted parents proudly took photographs of them: something to remember and look back proudly on, then.
By coincidence, the first stand by which I stopped was Australian: Khan Tattoos of the Gold Coast in Queensland. Khan, of South Korean origin, was himself heavily tattooed and had had the words ‘‘My name is Khan and I do tattoos’’ inscribed on the back of his head and neck. This is typical of the wilful idiocy of tattooed slogans: another, on the front of a young woman’s upper thigh and knee, read ‘‘We are like roses that have never bothered to bloom when we should have bloomed and it is as if the sun has become disgusted with waiting.’’ By comparison with this, the slogans painted on the sides of Nigerian buses — ‘‘No condition is permanent’’, ‘‘Let them say’’ — are miracles of philosophical depth and compression: and removable into the bargain.
The aesthetic of tattooing, if that is not too generous a word for it, is predominantly that of criminals in prison who take to drawing, which is not entirely a coincidence because the fashion for tattoos spread from prison. Some of the names of the tattooists’ enterprises were revealing: Evil from the Needle, Clod the Ripper, Perfect Chaos, Black Heart, La Boucherie Moderne (Modern Butcher), and La Cour des Miracles.
The latter was an area of Paris in which tramps, beggars, cripples and criminals gathered; the miracles were the recovery by beggars on their return to the Cour from the falsely-assumed illnesses and injuries that they adopted when begging. The identification of the tattooed with tramps, beggars, cripples and criminals is not a desire to help them or reduce their suffering, but purely romantic; a desire to be in opposition to society without paying the price for it.
In the last analysis, the Mondial du Tatouage was sad and even tragic. A competition was held for the most ‘‘beautiful’’ tattoo of the day (one of the judges, a heavily tattooed man of about 50, had a label saying “F. . k off” sewn on his leather jerkin), and a succession of young victims of their own execrable taste paraded themselves, without dignity or self-respect, in the hope of a moment’s fame and a photograph in one of the many magazines devoted to tattoos and tattooing. All this in sight of a large poster saying ‘‘Unleash your potential’’. (English is the international language of stupidity as well as of science.)
Foolishness and bad taste have always existed, of course, but rarely have they spread so rapidly. Ten years ago there were 400 professional tattooists in France; now there are 4000. In England, where so much of the worst of modern culture originated, more than a third of young adults are tattooed. Civilisations collapse from within.
