The Citizen, 2010-12-02, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2010. PAGE 5.
When I was 16 I went to sea for the
summer with a crew of Jamaicans
on an oil tanker that ran between
Halifax and Venezuela. I came back in the
fall to start Grade 12 with $36, a rather
impressive repertoire of Spanish and Jamaican
expletives…And a tattoo.
Nothing flamboyant – a simple anchor with
a banner entwined around it, all discreetly
drilled into my upper right arm. Such
a piddly tattoo wouldn’t have raised
an eyebrow in Halifax, St. John’s or Vancouver
but I lived in rural southern Ontario.
Deepest Landlubberville. There was no
tradition in those parts of going to sea and
certainly no history of inking one’s carcass.
I stood out. My English teacher took one
look at my shiny tattoo and sniffed, “Two
types of people get tattoos: pirates and
jailbirds.”
Music to my ears. I was suddenly
N.G.O.C. – Notorious Guy On Campus.
Times change. To achieve notoriety on
campus nowadays you’d have to be the only
student without a tattoo. Nowadays, girls have
them. Geeks and nerds have them. Hell, the
teachers have them.
No surprise. Humankind has been fascinated
with tattoos for ages. Ancient Egyptians fooled
around with tattoos as did most every culture
from the High Arctic to Polynesia. In 1991
scientists chipped the frozen corpse of a Late
Stone Age hunter out of an Alpine glacier and
guess what they found on his body? Fifty-
seven tattoos – on his back, behind one knee
and around both ankles. The hunter died about
5,300 years ago.
The tattoos weren’t fancy; just squiggles and
dots really. Not like the ones you see today.
Modern tattoos are expansive, intricate
and more colourful than a Toller Cranston
canvas.
Complicated, too. There’s a woman in
Toronto who has Jack Kerouac all over her
back. The closing lines from Kerouac’s novel
On the Road run across her dorsal surface
from left collarbone to lower right ribcage.
And just in case some random reader isn’t
familiar with the work there’s an image of
Kerouac hunched over a typewriter
superimposed over the script.
It’s pretty impressive, but, if I may be so
bold…what’s the point? I get the erotic
potential of a butterfly on the buttock or a
pixie dancing up a thigh – but half a novel on
your back? You’d have to join a nudist camp to
be appreciated.
Even then you’d always be standing still for
slow readers.
There’s some evidence that the tattoo cult
has jumped the shark. The actress Susan
Sarandon has the names of her kids tattooed
down her spine (is she worried she’ll forget?)
When Lindsay Lohan gets bored (which is
often, apparently) she can always look down at
her right wrist and read her mantra: STARS:
ALL WE ASK FOR IS OUR RIGHT TO
TWINKLE.
And then there’s the actress Megan Fox,
who is rapidly transforming herself into a
walking Bookmobile. One of her more recent
tattoos is a disjointed line of text that rambles
across her belly from right hip to left breast. It
reads: “Those who danced were thought to be
quite insane by those who could not hear the
music.”
“It’s a quote from Nietzsche,” Fox explained
to a television interviewer airily.
Except it isn’t. Nietzsche never said it. It’s
an Urban Legend. Like Sarah Palin’s grasp of
geography.
That’s the thing about tattoos. If you’re
going to get one with words in it, you should
make sure your designated mutilator consults
a dictionary.
Unlike the woman who had a ruby red heart
tattooed on her chest and below it, the caption
in large flowing cursive: BEAUTIFUL
TRADGEDY.
Or the guy who paid a lot of dough to have
his personal motto needled into his back in
huge gothic letters.
It reads: “I’M AWSOME.”
Even tattoos without words in them can
prove embarrassing. Never forget the one law
that none of us can break – the law of gravity.
That beautiful young thing with the cute,
perky little hummingbird tattoo peeking out of
her cleavage?
Give her a few Big Macs, a desk job and a
couple of decades, it’ll stretch into a
pterodactyl.
Arthur
Black
Other Views Tattoos can be ‘beautiful tradgedy’
Just days after Remembrance Day, I was
appalled to find out that there is a new
breed of dirtbag in the world, preying on
the families of Canadian soldiers.
I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling that I was
witnessing a new low when news broke last
week that someone was making prank calls to
the spouses of several Canadian soldiers telling
them that their spouse was killed in combat.
Three spouses of soldiers stationed out of a
military base just north of Quebec City have
reported receiving these calls, the first of
which occurred in the middle of the night on
Nov. 13. The calls detailed grave injuries to
their loved ones who are serving in
Afghanistan and asked for physical details
from the spouse in order to identify the body.
Many major media outlets have picked up on
the story, including every newspaper from The
Toronto Star to The Los Angeles Times.
The calls were described by an spokesperson
for CFB Valcartier as sounding professional in
nature and about a minute and a half in length.
Canadian Defense Minister Peter MacKay has
called them “insensitive, amoral and
disgusting”.
MacKay’s statement goes on to explain the
sacrifice made specifically by the families of
military personnel, indicating that no military
family should have to endure this kind of cruel
prank. He also indicates that in the event of a
serious injury or death within the Canadian
military, families are always notified in person.
While many media outlets are describing the
act as being the “lowest of the low”, it seems
like Canadians had already said the same thing
earlier this fall when a 23-year-old Burlington
woman, Ashley Kirilow, faked cancer to
collect thousands of dollars. After she had a
benign tumour removed from her breast, she
grew that initial nugget of fear into an
elaborate lie and a charity that is said to have
defrauded people of over $20,000. While she
admitted to faking cancer, Kirilow says she
only collected $5,000.
Earlier this month, Kirilow had company in
her despicable club, as Jessica Ann Leeder, a
21-year-old Timmins woman, defrauded her
employer out of over $5,000 by faking
stomach and lung cancer. Meanwhile a 39-
year-old Ontarian, Christopher Gordon, has
been charged with fraud for collecting $3,000
to fight terminal brain cancer that he never had.
As a man who has spent the past month
collecting money for Prostate Cancer Canada,
stories like this surpass anger and frustration
and just make me sad.
It disappoints me that another person would
be so dismissive of their fellow man that they
would put them through the emotions of losing
a loved one, or prey on the charitable spirit of
Canadians in order to fill their own wallets.
And while both are their own brand of
unthinkable, finding out donations you made
went to a bogus cause simply cannot compare
to hearing that the person you have chosen to
spend your life with is no longer living, all for
the (presumed) enjoyment of a heartless
individual on the other end of the phone.
Upon hearing the news someone we love has
died, there is a horrible sinking feeling. And
while we try to pull ourselves up, we never
quite get back to where we had been before, as
that person will be forever missing from our
physical life going forward.
To unnecessarily put someone through that is
one of the worst things I can imagine.
You’d like to think if these people had ever
lost someone they loved that maybe they
would think twice about redefining cold-
hearted as they’ve done.
Dirtbags on parade
No love is lost between the Liberals and
Progressive Conservatives, the
Hatfields and McCoys of Ontario
politics, and there are indications the October
2011 election could turn particularly nasty.
Premier Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals have
never forgotten a slur from the 1990s, when he
first led his party in an election and Tory
premier Mike Harris ran advertisements
picturing him looking grim and
uncomfortable, as in a police mug shot, and
claiming he was “not up to the job,” and they
played a part in his defeat.
The Conservatives who have held power
almost as a divine right for most of the last
seven decades are desperate to regain it and
dispossess these upstarts and polls show they
have a chance they cannot afford to miss.
The bitterness between the parties has
emerged mainly in reports from their back
rooms. The Liberals have been mulling over
the idea of putting Conservative leader Tim
Hudak’s wife, Deb Hutton, in their ads.
Leaders’ wives usually campaign with their
husbands, mostly by simply accompanying
them, which demonstrates they have families
and draws little comment.
But Hutton was a senior unelected adviser to
Harris when he was premier, probably the
most influential woman aide any premier has
had.
She played a key role in decisions for which
Harris still is criticized, including reducing
social services. Hudak and Harris have said
they admire each other’s policies and the
Liberals say they will focus on this in the
election, as they are entitled to, although
voters should expect the two parties’ more
recent policies to be the main themes.
Hutton was at talks in the1990s in which
which Harris told police he was anxious to end
quickly an occupation of Ipperwash Provincial
Park by aboriginals and a judicial enquiry
ruled this helped create an atmosphere in
which police moved in and a protester was
shot dead, although curiously she forgot the
gist of what was said.
The Conservatives also appointed Hutton to
a lucrative public post, all of which makes her
much more than a political wife.
The Liberals, in a recent news release,
included Hutton in a list of “Tories at the
Trough” and said they are entitled to point to
her because Hudak has used her and their
three-year-old daughter in commercials to
attract votes.
The Tories once attacked McGuinty because
he had one of his profusion of brothers
working in his office, at a low salary which
showed he was not in it for the money.
McGuinty explained he wanted him there
because he was a hard worker and reliable, but
the Tories forced him out.
Hudak has said attacking an opponent’s
spouse is “way over the line” and he would
never allow his campaign to do it.
It is not a conclusive argument to say a
political aide should be immune from criticism
because she has married a party leader. But
many backroomers were given even higher-
paying rewards by Conservative governments,
and a case can be made the Liberals would be
better advised to focus their attacks on them.
The Liberals appear to have dropped the
idea of targetting Hutton, but the
Conservatives are also incensed because a
relatively new Liberal research and innovation
minister, Glen Murray, said in an internet
message he did not feel would become public
Hudak supports discrimination against gays,
of which there is no evidence and which he
withdrew.
The Liberals were not amused when
Conservatives picketed their recent convention
with signs “watch your wallets – Liberals in
town.”
Someone also registered a fake account with
meaningless messages on Twitter in the name
of Miller Hudak, Hudak’s three-year-old
daughter, which McGuinty and his party
quickly decried and said had nothing to do
with them, and Hudak immediately accepted.
But there are so many itchy fingers on the
trigger in these two parties and so many ways
of expressing criticism it will be surprising if
someone does not shoot below the belt.
Eric
Dowd
From
Queen’s Park
Shawn
Loughlin
Shawn’s Sense
Election could turn nasty
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– Laurence J. Peter
Final Thought