If there existed a support group called Tattoophobes Anonymous, I’d have to join it. “I’m Alex, and I am a tattoophobe. While I respect tattooed people as human beings, I’m constitutionally incapable of looking at them.”
That creates a problem when I have to talk to tattooed sale assistants, which almost all of them are. They think I suffer from strabismus and look at me with compassion. Later they must tell their co-workers, “There was that old cross-eyed geezer again. Poor sod. He can’t even look you straight in the eye.”
The lower down the social scale you go, the greater the Tattoo Quotient (TQ) becomes. For example, if you arrange different sports in descending social order, you’ll probably find no tattooed polo-playing toffs. Middle-class tennis will probably have a TQ of about 10 per cent, up to 20 among the pros. And almost all professional football players are tattooed, footie being a working class sport.
My little phobia shouldn’t be misconstrued as contempt for the lower social orders. It’s nothing of the sort. Here’s an ironclad rule to which there are no known exceptions: people who despise the working classes are themselves despicable.
By and large, they come from the Islington-dwelling, Guardian-reading, Prosecco-quaffing, LibDem-voting classes who claim to speak French, but fail to pronounce the ‘s’ sound in coup de grâce and fleur-de-lis.
In plainer words, they are pretentious, snobbish twats, not to mention atheists whose milk of human kindness has gone rancid. No believer can possibly despise the lower classes, and neither can a genuinely educated person.
After all, education isn’t just accumulating information but what happens as a result, “what remains after you forget all you knew”, as Einstein put it. And what should remain is wisdom, kindness, style – and love. After all, the Christian spirit permeates Western culture so comprehensively that even educated non-Christians absorb that ethos.
This means that anyone professing contempt for the lower classes is never really educated. Even if he knows how to pronounce coup de grâce and fleur-de-lis properly, he is an ignoramus.
Having said that, while despising proles is indefensible, despising their tastes isn’t only permissible but indeed essential. Even that would be wrong if prole tastes weren’t imposed on the whole society. But they are, so it isn’t.
About 200 years ago some Frenchman coined the phrase nostalgie de la boue, literally ‘nostalgia for mud,’ meaning the attraction of low-life culture and experience. When that condition results from individual longing, it’s bad enough. But when it’s imposed on an indoctrinated society for ideological and commercial reasons, it’s calamitous.
The ideology involved is an echo of Marxism, with its hatred of anyone who doesn’t belong to the proletariat. Alas, even when people reject Marxist economics and Marxist savagery, they still can be sweet-talked into accepting that only the lower classes have virtue.
Many people who grew up in perfectly bourgeois families and went to decent schools feel latent shame and hence the need to fit in with those of a more fortunate, proletarian, nativity. Thus speaking estuarian English becomes ‘cool’, which has to be one of the most revolting words in the language.
The same goes for tattoos: the fashion started because intellectually challenged individuals wanted to attract attention, something they felt they could only do by emulating New Guinean natives. Now that so many people sport tattoos, they are no longer attention-grabbing. They are much worse: cool.
As for ‘music’, which unqualified term even conservative broadsheets apply to prole cacophony, with toff affectation demanding the modifier ‘classical’, the story is more involved. Unlike pop, real music demands a lifelong effort from the listener. One derives gratification, but it isn’t instant.
With a few minor exceptions, even people born with musical aptitude aren’t born with musical taste, meaning the ability not just to like music but to appreciate it. This has to be cultivated over many years, and it takes motivation to embark on such an arduous journey.
When I was little, most parents in our circle, even those who, like mine, had themselves never attended a concert in their lives, knew that music was important – because culture was. Not being able to appreciate (as distinct from merely to like) a Bach fugue or Beethoven sonata was seen as cultural illiteracy, not something they wanted for their offspring.
By and large, that motivation no longer exists, quite the opposite. As Allan Bloom wrote perceptively in The Closing of the American Mind, peer pressure and the whole cultural atmosphere push young people towards prole gyrations. In fact, he wrote, most of his students identified themselves by the pop group they not so much liked as idolised.
The soil thus primed, commercialism moves in. Since most people these days define music as electronic din, record companies drop recordings of real music.
And even conservative broadsheets sense they’ll sell more copies by covering the cultural heights scaled by groups with names like The Urinals, Devil’s Spawn or Evil Incarnate. (These names are imaginary. But, if by some chance the first one isn’t, and you happen to find yourself at their concert, make sure not to sit in the first two rows.)
Tattoos fall in the same category: they are badges of ideologised and commercialised proledom, savagery in traditional Western terms. Just as Prof. Bloom’s students identified themselves by their pop groups, so do today’s lot cover themselves head to toe with ink to make a cultural statement.
The statement is: we are proles and proud of it – even if we pull down a six-figure salary and have to cover our tattoos with suit and tie when going to work. Proledom isn’t about money or lack thereof. It’s about belonging to the ruling party, that of pagan, deracinated, dumbed-down modernity.
These melancholy thoughts have been inspired by most of our papers highlighting the news of the day: David Beckham’s 50th birthday.
Everyone expected this ex-ball-kicker to be knighted on this momentous anniversary, but so far that accolade has escaped him. Not for long, I’m sure – another few years of Labour government, and Beckham will get at least a life peerage, if perhaps not the crown.
Now David is a nice enough man – or would be if he hadn’t covered every square inch of his body with disgusting tattoos. When he used to put in those right-footed crosses for Man Utd and England, I didn’t mind watching him in long TV shots. Now he tends to appear in close-ups, charming his British and American audiences with his tongue-tied platitudes.
They don’t mind the platitudes and they don’t mind the body ‘art’. This means I mind them.
Social class probably has something to do with it.
But I observe a continuum of self-mutilation, ranging from hideously dyed or partly shaved hair at the lower end, though tattoos and piercings and the kind of cosmetic surgery that makes its victims look like the bastard offspring of Donald Duck and Betty Boop, up to the top end, where one has one’s genital organs mutilated in order to pretend that one belongs to the opposite sex.
All these forms of self-mutilation, from the easily reversible to the permanently disastrous, seem to me to be symptoms of unconscious self-loathing. The concept of sin is dead, but the concept of punishment for sin is alive and well. The more men and women cease to believe in God and disobey his laws, the more they inflict upon themselves indignities that God would be too tasteful to imagine.