Ariana Grande, of whom I had not heard until Salman Abedi killed 22 people at her “concert” in Manchester, has had herself tattooed with a picture of a bee, a symbol of Manchester’s industrious industrial past, as a “permanent tribute” to the city. Apparently, the other performers in her vulgar act have done likewise. Could courage, compassion, sympathy, self-sacrifice, indeed virtue itself, go further?
This could be the start of something big: a movement called Tattoos Against Terrorism or TAT for short. If anything could convince the Islamic suicide bombers of the superiority of the Western way of life, with its fundamental freedoms, surely this could. Alternatively, it will terrify them into giving up.
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However, one has to be slightly skeptical of the permanence of this beautiful permanent tribute. The bee, after all, was also the symbol of Napoleon, among other historical figures to have adopted it, and rather more famously than Manchester. When, in The Tempest, Ariel sings:
Where the bee sucks, there suck I:
In a cowslip’s bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry.
On the bat’s back I do fly
After summer merrily.
Merrily, merrily shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.
I challenge anyone to think of Manchester. This would take cognitive dissonance to a new and higher plane.
In a short time, therefore, the tattooed bee will no more conjure up Manchester than a tattooed palm tree would conjure up Antarctica. It will be just another instance, though a minor one, of the inexplicable epidemic of self-abuse that has overtaken the Western world in the past two or three decades. And when Ariana and her sidekicks tire of their compassion, sympathy, etc., they can always have the tattoo removed, for the techniques of removal have improved in tandem with those of putting them on: an example, no doubt, of what the economist Joseph Schumpeter called capitalism’s creative destruction, though tattooing itself is more like an instance of its destructive creation.
