Put under a microscope, Americans turn out to be mawkish to the marrow. As year-old Purdy was growing up in West Virginia, New York may have appeared the City of Broad Cynics, but when Joan Didion who lives there dissected the Big Apple's tabloid culture of the late s, she found it sentimental to the core.
Yes, Seinfeld came to live there, too, but who watched the show to identify with the cast? No, they were us minus the ability to feel and learn, their faulty personal navigations systems throwing them hilariously onto the rocks, unable to steer clear of the reefs even in a sea so placid that "nothing happens.
My thesis here, that over the past decade ironic farce has been largely consumed as a side dish to sentimental earnestness, is borne out in pretty much every plot in the fiction of Douglas Coupland, from "Generation X" supposed demon seed of uncaring irony on.
In "Microserfs," the sarcastic patter of the young entrepreneur is interrupted by Dad at the door. Dad has been laid off by IBM, is reverting to childlike helplessness, is curled up on the couch with the football helmet of his other son, long dead, etc. Wicked nihilism this is not. For further proof, see what Coupland wrote last week for a Canadian newspaper before we knew irony was dead.
Yes, stranded on his book tour in Madison, Wisc. But the windup is idealism of Purdy-pleasing proportions: "Many ecologists say that the best thing that could happen to Western society would be for everyone to stay where they were for 20 years -- no travel allowed. This way people would be forced to commit to local communities and issues and be forced to establish roots. So fine. Which, hopefully, now opens the way to a golden age of irony. The real stuff. The kind of irony that drove Socrates' queries, the irony that lies at the heart of much great literature and great religion, the irony that pays attention to contradictions and embraces paradoxes, rather than wishing them away in an orgy of purpose and certainty.
Whoever named Bush's still murky plan of retaliation "Infinite Justice" was dangerously devoid of irony, not to mention a sense of Islamic theology. 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 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 something who championed this is Randolph Bourne, a member of Generation Lost who died of influenza in 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. The novel tells the story of Private Lynn, a virginal, year-old, working-class boy from Texas who has enrolled in the US Army to skip prison. She is also the coordinator of the site for online reviews Lletra de Dona.
Works Cited:. Abel, Marco. PMLA : DeLillo, Don. Di Blasi, Debra. Donadio, Rachel. Duvall, John. Studies in the Novel : Fountain, Ben. Edinburgh: Canongate, Gray, Richard. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, Gournelos, Ted and Viveca S.
Greene eds. Irony is very much alive and well. It's an era in which comedian Stephen Colbert's ironic roast of President Bush at a White House correspondents dinner is now legend. And, according to a study by Harvard University's Institute of Politics, more toyear-olds watch "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" than read the print edition of a major newspaper. Simpson was about to publish a book about what he would have done had he killed his wife and her [friend], that should be an ironic joke, but it's completely real and horrifying.
The lines of reality are so blurred, irony is the only way to formulate some type of understanding, says Maron, who will be on Comedy Central's "Comedy Central Presents" Jan. Sometimes it takes irony to cut through a lot of the bull.
Plus, it can sometimes drive messages home more efficiently than the truth. They find it boring or too draining for them to engage with," Maron says. Today's irony can run the gamut from a simple wisecrack, knee-jerk and silly, to something much darker, says John Tomasic, managing editor of the online pop culture commentary Pop and Politics.
But in the process, it can bring people together, as long as you know you're not immune. While irony cuts across age groups, ethnicities and gender, it is best understood by the younger generation, who have known irony their entire lives, Tomasic says. They have grown up with irony. It's their best friend and worst enemy.
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