Oh oh, now you're getting into the ever touchy issue of sincerity versus irony versus sarcasm. Having a somewhat warped sense of humor along with a long, unfortunate history with the "Sanity" guys, I have a hard time taking any of it too seriously. Maybe the guys are all really sincere in their good wishes, although I've seen the Neocon song barrage a few times before. It helped with this morning's fire, anyway.
But this is the feelies, so I guess it's appropriate to cite the current "in the news" guy on the subject, Jedediah Purdy. The ever ironic NYT is a funny place to go for a review, but the daily review is fairly kind:
Date: September 9, 1999, Late Edition - Final
Byline: By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT
Lead:
FOR COMMON THINGS
Irony, Trust and Commitment in America Today
By Jedediah Purdy
226 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $20.
''An ironic man, with his sly stillness, and ambuscading ways,'' wrote Thomas Carlyle in ''Sartor Resartus,'' ''may be viewed as a pest to society.''
No, worse, argues Jedediah Purdy in his impressive if somewhat pious first book, ''For Common Things: Irony, Trust and Commitment in America Today.'' The ironic man, whom Mr. Purdy personifies as the sitcom character Jerry Seinfeld, ''irony incarnate,'' is an outright menace.
With his ''style of speech and behavior that avoids all appearance of naivete -- of naive devotion, belief, or hope,'' the individual armored in the irony so prevalent among young people today has withdrawn from the political arena just when it needs him most. With good reason perhaps, Mr. Purdy concedes, politics these days being, in his words, ''undignified, disreputable, vaguely ridiculous and thoroughly outmoded,'' especially compared with an earlier time in the century, when, as the German novelist Thomas Mann wrote, ''The question of man's destiny presents itself in political terms.''
But politics today is both less and more than a Promethean exercise intended to ''bring about basic changes in the human predicament,'' Mr. Purdy argues. Politics can also serve the maintenance of what he punningly calls ''common things,'' referring all at once to what is public, what we all share and what is ordinary. ...
Still, you almost always sense what he's getting at, and you have to admire him for taking on the disease of irony, which some see as afflicting an entire generation. If many will not heed him, at least he has articulated a cure.
As his epigraph by Czeslaw Milosz puts it, ''What is unpronounced tends to nonexistence.'' Now that ''For Common Things'' pronounces the case against a static irony, it gives one pause about reacting ironically.
I left out the middle part, which was a bit more critical, you can look it up at www.nytimes.com if you like. There was also a big article on Purdy in the NYT Magazine, where his family seemed to find his earnestness a bit tiresome in the end, but irony is a hard thing to avoid at the NYT.
Personally, I fear anyone looking for salvation from irony in politics in these caustic times is , um, a little naive, but it's a nice thought. If the front runners on both sides stumble, we might actually end up with a somewhat less cynically packaged election than recent history points to, which would be nice, if improbable.
Christmas Cheers, Dan. |
