Well, that's perhaps somewhat better than George Will's misinterpretation of Springsteen, but otherwise pretty trite.
Then there's this.
Here is one dictionary definition of irony: "Incongruity between actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result." That kind of irony might note that America, for all its effort to shine a beacon of freedom throughout the world, is seen as an imperial oppressor by large swaths of the Islamic world. That kind of irony would wonder if in this new battle on behalf of freedom, we may rush to strip away civil liberties. That kind of irony would wonder whether this new kind of war, waged to make us safe from terrorist attacks, might plunge the world into a far more dangerous conflagration.
To note these ironies is to engage yourself in the grave purpose at hand and take some responsibility for helping to think it through -- and that's the opposite of ironic detachment.
Call it, then, Ironic Engagement. One 20-something who championed this is Randolph Bourne, a member of Generation Lost who died of influenza in 1918 at the close of the First World War. Bourne had opposed that war and predicted a spiral of more bloodshed to grow out of it. A brilliant social critic credited by some with fathering America's counterculture, Bourne considered his sharpest tool irony. "The ironic life is a life keenly alert, keenly sensitive, reacting promptly with feelings of liking or dislike to each bit of experience, letting none of it pass without interpretation and assimilation, a life full and satisfying -- indeed a rival of the religious life."
"The ironist is ironical," declared Bourne, "not because he does not care, but because he cares too much."
The First World War, the so-called Great War, wiped away blithe optimism and made ironists of us all, argues historian Paul Fussell. His own ironic awakening came as an infantryman wading through gore during the Second World War, the so-called Good War. Just as there wasn't much great about the first, there wasn't anything wholesomely good about the second, Fussell argues in his memoir "Doing Battle." "I've been an enemy for years of the concept of the 'Good War' and of all the sentimentalizing that's done by people who didn't fight it or who profited from it one way or another," he told an interviewer for the Atlantic magazine. "It was absolutely necessary. Hitlerism had to be wiped out and so did the Japanese empire, no question about it. But all wars are horrible, and flimsy, superficial war talk is always extremely dangerous."
If Bourne and Fussell make my case for a new dispassionate and skeptical Ironic Engagement, so too does Jedediah Purdy. He was quoted in the New York Times yesterday saying a little bit of irony might do the country a world of good at the moment: "In peaceful and prosperous times," irony is a way of "keeping the passions in hibernation when there is not much for them to live on, but another kind of irony can also work to keep dangerous excesses of passion and self-righteousness and extreme conviction at bay."
Some people, including the droll Michael Kinsley, find it ironic that Purdy would now embrace irony. Actually, however, Purdy said about the same thing in "For Common Things," where he did side with “an intelligent and resourceful irony” against "the human reserves of pompous self-seriousness, and the leaden earnestness that always threatens to run molten."
Yes, it's going to run pretty molten over the next weeks and months to come, and so we had all better don our protective suits of irony. archive.salon.com
It's still running pretty molten among the "war is peace" crowd, near as I can tell. |
