Tattooed Nation

Bloomberg reports that about one third of adults in America now have tattoos.  That’s right — fully 30 percent of the people walking among us every day are sporting ink, somewhere, and that number includes about half of the “millennial” generation.

This news will not come as a surprise to anyone who is observant about our modern world.  Go to any local eatery, and you’ll notice that the young person waiting on you will have an elaborately designed sleeve, or a neck stamp.  Watch an NBA game, and you’ll see multiple examples of the cover art on Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man come to life, sprinting up and down the court and throwing down thunderous dunks.  Sit in a subway train, and you’ll observe that when the 40ish businesswoman sitting on the other side of the aisle crosses her legs, she displays a Chinese or Japanese symbol on her ankle.  In America, the ink is clearly flowing, and it’s pretty much everywhere.  The Bloomberg article reports that the increasing popularity of such “body art” has made tattooistry into a thriving industry that generates an estimated $1 billion annually, primarily through cash sales at individual tattoo parlors.

The tattoo phenomenon is one of those cultural changes that has happened so gradually you don’t really notice it — until you reflect on it, and compare modern times to earlier years.  Once, tattoos were rare and basically reserved for aging sailors, ex-convicts, Ivy Leaguers like George Schultz, who famously had the Princeton tiger tattooed on his keister, and outrageous personalities like Dennis Rodman, who displayed a lot of ink when he wasn’t wearing a wedding dress.

Now tattoos are ubiquitous.  That doesn’t mean I’m going to get one, however.  The idea of paying somebody to puncture my skin and ink up the dermal layer underneath gives me the willies.

But I wonder:  What’s next — serious facial and body piercings?  Maybe Dennis Rodman is more of a cultural trendsetter than we ever suspected.  That’s kind of a scary thought.

Dennis And The Dictator — Continued

Dennis Rodman returned from his ill-advised trip to North Korea and promptly checked himself into a rehab facility, saying that his behavior was due, in part, to excessive consumption of alcohol while in the land of Kim Jong-Un.

Normally I wouldn’t comment on someone’s decision to seek treatment; that is their business. In this case, though, when Rodman went into rehab his agent issued this statement: “Dennis Rodman came back from North Korea in pretty rough shape emotionally. The pressure that was put on him to be a combination ‘super human’ political figure and ‘fixer’ got the better of him.”

I’ve got news for Rodman’s agent — no one put any pressure on Dennis Rodman but Rodman himself. No one asked him to go to North Korea and pal around with a dictator. No one — and I mean no one — would ever expect that the dysfunctional Dennis Rodman would be “combination ‘super human’ political figure and ‘fixer.'” Indeed, we’re not even sure he’s capable of being a regular human, much less a super human. All we ask is that, if American citizens go to a foreign country that regularly issues anti-American statements and engages in repressive conduct, they at least keep their mouths shut and not make statements and engage in conduct that feeds the propaganda machine of that regime. Rodman couldn’t even meet that very basic standard.

If Rodman in fact has an alcohol problem, I hope he addresses it, sobers up, and becomes healthy. And then I hope we never hear of Dennis Rodman again.

Dennis And The Dictator

Former NBA player and walking tattoo billboard Dennis Rodman is back in North Korea. This time Rodman is leading a group of former NBA players who will play a basketball game today, apparently to celebrate the birthday of North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong-un.

Rodman says the dictator is a great friend and that he is on a “basketball diplomacy” mission, similar to the trip of the U.S. table tennis team to China that helped to thaw relations between those two countries during the Nixon Administration. (The U.S. says Rodman isn’t representing this country, in case you’re wondering.)

For somebody who professes such aspirations, Rodman is a pretty crappy diplomat. During an interview, he made comments about Kenneth Bae, an American who worked as a tour operator in North Korea, was arrested on charges of attempting to overthrow the government, was sentenced to 15 years in a labor camp, and apparently has suffered significant health problems since then. Rodman was asked whether he would speak to Kim Jong-un about Bae, reacted with anger, and asked the interviewer if he knew why Bae was imprisoned and what he had done in North Korea — comments that Bae’s family and others have interpreted as suggesting that Bae did something wrong and deserves his treatment.

It’s not surprising that Rodman would go back to North Korea. During his NBA days he grew accustomed to celebrity status, after his retirement he went through the mill of professional wrestling and bad reality TV shows, and he continues to crave the spotlight. Now, the only way anyone pays attention to him is when he goes to visit brutal dictators who lead a destitute and starving nation — and he’s apparently willing to pay that price. I wonder, however, why any other self-respecting former NBA players would participate in Rodman’s folly. After all, Kim Jong-un is regarded as so unbalanced that some news media found plausible an apparently satirical claim that he had his uncle torn apart by a pack of 120 dogs. Why would anyone voluntarily travel to a benighted land and put themselves under the complete control of an absolute dictator who clearly does not feel constrained by principles of international law or human decency?

First Dennis Rodman, And Now This

North Korea has got to be the most bizarre country in the world.

Cut off from interaction with the rest of the world for decades, run by the military and a ’50s-era communist dictatorial regime, North Korea and its leaders seem to have a hopelessly distorted view of the world.  It releases laughable claims about its leaders and their prowess, it issues remarkably aggressive declarations about fighting with South Korea, the United States, and other purported enemies — and then its young leader will put on a big show about watching a basketball game with Dennis Rodman.  North Korea is so isolated from reality that it apparently doesn’t realize that Dennis Rodman has long since become a comical figure and punch line for his own peculiar behavior.  Entertaining an oddball, fringe figure like Rodman does nothing except leave outside observers scratching their heads.

It would all be laughable — except that North Korea has an enormous military, missile and (apparently) nuclear capabilities, and a starving population, and within days of Rodman’s visit, North Korea announces that it is withdrawing from its non-aggression agreements with South Korea and that it has the right to issue a pre-emptive nuclear strike.  Although North Korea hasn’t followed through on all of its prior threats, the provocative statements of an unbalanced regime have to be taken seriously.

It sounds weird to say it, but the reality is that any country so delusional that it thinks hosting Dennis Rodman is a way to show it is a friendly, functioning member of the world community is capable of just about anything.