Ennet House: the credit-card duel
Geoffrey Day had looked up from his AmEx (Gold, to Ewell’s Platinum) and shaken his moist pale head at Ewell and asked rhetorically what had ever happened to good old traditional U.S. tattoos like MOM or an anchor
Context
The two educated men in the room conduct their bond and their rivalry entirely in the register of ironic connoisseurship — a childish argument over whose credit cards are more prestigious (Platinum trumps Gold), waged on a detox ward, while a boneheaded kid displays his ink in "boneheaded regretless first-category fashion." Day's rhetorical sigh for "good old traditional U.S. tattoos like MOM or an anchor" is nostalgia performed as put-down: the ironist mourns lost sincerity precisely as a way of proving he's too knowing for it. It's the same faculty as his DIS–EASE critique, now aimed at décor — taxonomy and taste standing in where feeling would be.