Irony is dead! Long live irony!

As jingoists call for a New Sincerity, we need irony -- the serious kind -- more than ever.

By David Beers

Sept. 25, 2001 | Well, isn't this ironic? Just when we need an ironic sensibility to remain cleareyed in dangerous times, we're told irony is obsolete. And this from some people who've made it their business to peddle a cheapened grade of irony over the past couple of decades until we've almost forgotten the true meaning of the word.

I'm thinking we need a profoundly ironic outlook to avoid being swept up in the new jingoism, to see that the best intentions might lead us further astray, to protect ourselves from the manipulative propaganda that envelops us in wartime. I'm feeling, suddenly, very much out of step with the latest "trend."

"There's going to be a seismic change. I think it's the end of the age of irony," pronounced Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair and former editor of Spy, his sound bite last week rippling out into dozens of head-nodding Op-Eds. "Things that were considered fringe and frivolous are going to disappear."

"Maybe we've just witnessed the end of unbridled irony. Maybe a coddled generation that bathed itself in sarcasm will get serious," self-flagellated 25-year-old Camille Dodero in the Boston Phoenix and on Alternet.org. "Maybe we'll stop acting so jaded and start addressing the problem."

In Time magazine, essayist Roger Rosenblatt lashed out against "the vain stupidity" of "ironists" who try so hard to see through everything, they see nothing. One thing we don't need in this "new and chastened time," Rosenblatt is certain, is a bunch of ironists.

Well, wait a second. What is irony and why are people saying such mean things about it? Clearly irony is a vague enough concept to have been freighted with a wide collection of negative connotations. The word seems to represent, in the current public discourse, the nihilistic shrug of an irritatingly shallow smartass. (Thus: Wipe that smirk off your face, young ironist, while terrorists are attacking us!) Somehow, irony has come to be a handy shorthand for moral relativism and self-absorption, for consuming all that is puerile while considering oneself too hip to be implicated in the supply and demand economics of schlock. With numb and glib.

If any of this does bespeak a kind of ironic stance, it is one of severe ironic detachment. That's the low-grade irony Jedediah Purdy made his whipping boy a couple of years ago in his book "For Common Things." The irony he bashed was "a quiet refusal to believe in the depth of relationships, the sincerity of motivation or the truth of speech -- especially earnest speech." Letterman, Seinfeld, an entire culture bracketed by air quotes had taught Americans that "nothing is real, true or ours. Irony makes us wary and abashed in our belief."

My first reaction was, and is: Were we ever so callously lost as a society? Not by Purdy's definition. Put under a microscope, Americans turn out to be mawkish to the marrow. For every Bart Simpson there is an Oprah, for every Dennis Miller a Deepak Chopra. As 27-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 1980s, 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.

Next page: I'm happy to join in the chorus of goodbyes to the über-smartass