I concur that this is an abdication of authority. The correct answer should be simple: 60 days in D-Seg for the 1st prison tatoo, transfer to an institution of highter security for the next.

Peter: this must be your foggiest (sic) post ever.

(ps. I agree)

Brit:

My kids would certainly agree with you. When I come across those "cool" parents they are always whining to me about, I have to resist hoping their little darlings will some day be completely smitten by a beloved covered head to toe with the latest designs who likes to liven up the family dinner with Eminem impersonations.

Anyway, won't it soon become the fashion that the official $5 tattoos are for wusses, while real men continue to get the homemade ones using rusty hapatitus needles?

Excellent commentary, Mr. B

the unspoken thought is that the spread of tatoos represents a descent into barbarity by the middle class. this is not so. with increasing prosperity many from the lower classes moved up economically, but they are still lower class in their behaviors and thinking. the true middle class is still practicing the same virtues it always has. if you think of these outward markings as warning signs made visible, then they are really a good thing. of course rome does fall eventually, but today is not that day.

I once saw a billboard in San Francisco that said: "What will fill the hole when the piercings are gone?".

"Date a girl with tattoos. She's already shown a willingness to live with her mistakes for the rest of her life."

Here in Seattle, I have been saying for years, to the utter consternation of acquaintances, that tattoos and piercings are a desperate effort by the Numb Generation to feel *something*. This generation, bombarded for years by overstimulation media and increasingly extreme behaviors, has developed the equivalent of a tolerance to sensation. In the absence of meaning, it therefore takes something drastic to feel something. It is no coincidence that tattoos and piercings are quite painful (both during procedure and in the wake of (note that tugging on piercings during sex, and piercing of nipples and genetala, etc. is quite central to the concept.) Peter is correct. No one wants to admit what tattoos and piercings really represent. They are a cry for help. Or misguided attempt to feel meaning and life. At its very simplest, it is self-mutilation. The theme of the late 90's in Seattle might have been, "Make Everything that is Beautiful as Ugly as Possible, Starting with Young Women." As pornography has always had to "up the ante" in a futile attempt to achieve an unreachable satisfaction, so "fashion" searches for more and more drastic ways to find meaning -- meaning that was previously provided by traditional structures, with depravity held at bay by family closeness. In 12 more years, there'll be a new generation of young mean and women who will look at these devastated middle-aged bodies and faces with a combination of pity and horror (and a determination to look the opposite, i.e., wholesome and healthy.) If BrothersJudd readers could see the humanoids that check my groceries here at the local co-op, you'd be horrified. Your food is being handled by arms and hands that look like the extras in the Mad Max movies. You've got earlobes with quarter-sized holes in them, dangling down to shoulders, razor knife-tips coming out of chin, tattooed faces -- I joke with my wife that next we're going to see someone with a dinner plate stuffed into theor lower lip. What pains us is to see the nihilism spread to Taiwan. The best and the worst of American culture are apparently quite appealing indeed. Sigh.