After the terrorist attack at her concert in Manchester, pop singer Ariana Grande and her fellow performers have had themselves tattooed with an image of a bee, a symbol of the city. Dalrymple doesn’t see the sense of such a tribute:
In a short time… 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.