The Editor,

Re. “Tattooed rebels without a clue” (Face to Face, The Tri-City News, Oct. 30).

Without even seeing his picture beside his column, I can tell from Terry O’Neill’s response that he is someone of advanced age who still thinks that tattoos are “for sailors and whores” and comic books a medium for children and simpletons.

If Mr. O’Neill had intended to form an opinion of any weight or persuasion, he could have done better research into each respective medium as an art form rather than viewing it as a subversive act intended as a threat to his own sense of morality. This sort of heavy-handed fear-mongering is the sort of thing that discrimination is made of and has no real place in an intellectual debate.

To speak for comics, which O’Neill calls “simplified, sensational and, ultimately, juvenile,” he is obviously unaware of the Pulitzer Prize-winning work Maus by Art Spiegelman, in which he depicts his father’s recollections of surviving the Holocaust; or the works of journalist Joe Sacco, who records his experiences in comic form and whose book Palestine won the American Book Award.

As for tattooing and body modification, there are many valid reasons for why one chooses to pursue such avenues, and to make sweeping generalizations about their personal motivations is a ridiculous and archaic position to assume — and narrow-minded and prejudiced, to say the least. Rather than attack things he doesn’t understand to build his position against police paying for gang tattoo removal, O’Neill would do better to illustrate a better use for funds or possible alternatives, instead of just revealing how uninformed and politically unprepared he truly is.

C. McKay, Port Coquitlam