Sacred Nonsense
does it mean anything to you
Proprietor’s Note: This edition of Weed Church is related to this article that I wrote for Defector Media this past week. If you haven’t read it, you can do so first. If you don’t want to read it, that’s okay too, but this blog might make slightly less sense unless you already know a lot about tattoo guys.
One of the weirdest things that seems relatively unique to American culture is the obsession with legacy. I grew up watching professional sports — probably the most frivolous hobby on Earth — and even something as stupid as that was infected with “legacy” narratives. LeBron James has been talking about his legacy since he was 19. In between his legacy, other great players have come and gone and sports writers have written about what their legacies will be relative to LeBron’s legacy.
Has anyone thought about Steve Nash’s legacy lately? What about Tim Duncan’s legacy? I remember him. He was the best player anyone had ever seen until the next one came along. Now he’s just some tall guy in Texas whose wife got everything in the divorce. San Antonio has a new taller guy that seems like he’s going to be a better Spur than Duncan in the long run. Legacy is fickle!
I don’t think a lot of people paid attention to my tattoo story last week because there was other stuff in the news. For those of us who are Hinckley Connoisseurs, the whole thing feels like watching a new generational psycho inherit the legacy of American vigilante politics. While this was happening, I got an Apple News alert about how pundits were starting to “assess Joe Biden’s legacy.” I understand that opinions are divided about the president’s performance since 2020, but it seems reasonable for everyone to agree it wasn’t “legacy” material — and if you need proof, the other stuff in the news is a good starting place.
I think of the concept of legacy as being descended from the whole Great Man theory of history. It’s a little chicken and egg that way. On the one hand, the legacies of great men are often exaggerated or meant to cover for the less than great things those men did alongside the major achievements. On the other hand, a lot of major events that shaped the direction of humanity were indeed the byproduct of great vision — maybe not one person, maybe not gendered — of specific minds.
(The paradox of my own work studying the Rastafari movement is that so much of it relies on the legacy of an emperor whose temporal existence had its share of flaws. But that emperor was also a proxy for a lot of other things, including a handful of actions by other nations entirely.)
Legacy, by its nature, is about the aggregated accomplishments of a generation as represented by one person (or a small group of people). Inherently there are going to be some issues there because an aggregated approximation of greatness never seems to leave room for the not-so-great. Using the sports analogy to keep things light, it’s like how LeBron’s legacy is going to focus on his otherworldly statistical accomplishments that set the pace for a generation of players rather than the really bad Space Jam remake about how much LeBron loves references to previous intellectual property.
Tattoo appeals to me as a tradition because it has a bit of a tongue-in-cheek approach to legacy, as it does to everything else. Ed Hardy is the guy. But Ed Hardy was the first guy to tell listeners that he’s not the guy, because he got a lot of ideas from other guys (and gals!). His friend Nick Bubash was arguably more accomplished in the fine art space, but neither of them cared much about whose legacy was “better.” That was for us — the rubes — to discuss and debate. Those two were just making tattoos and competitively ribbing each other, confident enough to ignore the assessments of outsiders.
Legacy seems a bit like a paradox, as it doesn’t feel like a “top-down” phenomenon. Legacies are maintained by the people after the subjects of the myths move on (hence the “folk hero”), thus it seems impossible to avoid its allure. However, in the modern world particularly, mass media has created an industry around brand building such that famous Americans always dip into the uncanny valley. Powerful people curate their own legends in real time with expensive teams of consultants paid to keep a finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist. Athletes lean into personas created by their corporate shoe campaign.
Legacies have always been imaginary — whether its the delusions of the powerful or the collective imagination of people — but now that the myths are mass produced they seem to fall apart more easily. Will any of them survive the slow march of progress?