Hays - When Did White Trash Become the New Normal?: a Southern Lady Asks the Impertinent Question

Copyright 2013 by Charlotte Hays

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First ebook 2013

eISBN 978-1-62157-183-4

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For my great-nieces Jenna, Julia, and Sarahhint, hint

It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigour. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution.

THOMAS JEFFERSON

I wish I had an extra finger. Then I could grab more cheese balls.

HONEY BOO BOO

(on learning that her niece was born with three thumbs)

A BBC program recently quoted a tattoo artist, as they are now styled, to the effect that tattooing used to be the preserve of people who were too lazy to work and too scared to steal.

Now, alas, it is the preserve of ones friends and relatives. I got my first taste of this at a lovely garden party in Richmond, Virginia. I was stopped in my tracks by a recently quite attractive young cousin who now sported a bandana at a rakish angle and a garish jungle on each arm. I didnt know whether to think Jean Lafitte the pirate or maximum security. What would Mama have thought if shed lived to see White Trash cousinsin hallowed Richmond, no less? Meanwhile, a brilliant young woman of my acquaintance, a scholar at a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C., showed up at a fancy benefit dinner in a little black cocktail dress that revealed shoulders and upper arms extensively covered with tattoos. While trying to avert my eyes, I nevertheless observed a motif of threatening birds that were only marginally less sinister than the creatures in the Hitchcock movie about our feathered friends. Further sign of the impending Apocalypse: she is a tattooed Chi Omega, Chi O being the sorority once exclusive to the most ladylike among us. She wears a bespoke tattoo, which she designed in consultation with an artist. In my mind, it bespoke volumes. What it mainly said is that White Trash manners have become the new normal.

You no longer have to be White Trash to do White Trash things. Samantha Cameron, for example, wife of the blue-blooded British Prime Minister David Cameron, has a tattoo, too. Its only a small dolphin on her ankle, but can we agree that this is a look Clementine Churchill and Maggie Thatcher would have avoided? A small dolphin is nothing compared to the elegantly named tramp stamps (tattoos on the lower back) or skank stamps (tattoos on the rib cage) that are the rage among educated young women in the United States. Even the President of the United States now has to worry that his daughters may succumb to the rage for tattoos. He and the First Lady are trying to prevent thatby threatening that theyll get tattoos, too, if Sasha and Malia do.

Tragically, younger people in general no longer regard the tattoo with disgust. The Pew Research Center for People and the Press reports that 36 percent of Gen NextersAmericans in the eighteen-to-twenty-five age grouphave one. Or, as Pew puts it, Gen Nexters are not afraid to express themselves through their appearance and tattoos are the most popular form of self-expression. Perhaps they should be more afraid. Perhaps we all should be more afraid.