Chic Ironic Bitterness

1. Good Morning, America

chapter one Good Morning, America p Insofar as irony becomes conscious of the fact that existence has no reality, thereby expressing the same thesis as the pious disposition, it might seem that irony were a species of religious devotion. —Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony (1841) In the age of irony even the most serious things were not to be taken seriously. —Roger Rosenblatt, Time, September 20, 2001 You have a responsibility to the public discourse, and you fail miserably. —Jon Stewart on Cross‹re to Tucker Carlson, cohost (2004) Nine days after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Time magazine columnist Roger Rosenblatt declared “The Age of Irony Comes to An End”: One good thing could come from this horror: it could spell the end of the age of irony. For some 30 years—roughly as long as the Twin Towers were upright—the good folks in charge of America’s intellectual life have insisted that nothing was to be believed in or taken seriously. Nothing was real. With a giggle and a smirk, our chattering classes—our columnists and pop cul15 ture makers—declared that detachment and personal whimsy were the necessary tools for an oh-so-cool life. . . . The ironists, seeing through everything, made it dif‹cult for anyone to see anything. The consequence of thinking that nothing is real— apart from prancing around in an air of vain stupidity—is that one will not know the difference between a joke and a menace.1 Rosenblatt continued by unleashing a hefty amount of anger against “the vain stupidity of ironists” who try to see through everything. There will be no room in this new and chastened time for “columnists” and “pop-culture makers,” people who think that they’re “oh-so-cool.”* Times now are serious, so the chatterers won’t be around much longer. “In the age of irony,” Rosenblatt offers, “even the most serious things were not to be taken seriously. . . .[even] death was not to be seen as real. If one doubted its reality before last week, that is unlikely to happen again.”2 Rosenblatt’s opinion of irony, it turns out, was shared by many. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times the esteemed civil rights historian Taylor Branch thought that the attacks on America had brought the nation to “a turning point against a generation of cynicism .” Gerry Howard, editorial director of Broadway Books in New York, told Entertainment Weekly, “I think somebody should do a marker that says irony died on 9-11-01.” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Phil Kloer reported that September 11 spelled the demise of a popular culture “drenched in irony and cynicism” that was “a playground for postmodern hipsters,” wherein the “appropriate response to anything is the jaded, all-purpose ‘whatever.’” James Pinkerton of Newsday went a triumphant step further and decreed a victory for “sincerity, patriotism , and earnestness” and, countering the Seinfeldian premise, Chic Ironic Bitterness 16 *Though I am sure Rosenblatt was aware, “oh-so-cool” is a nice turn of ironic phrasing. Though they think it is cool, it is not cool, by which he means, I am assuming, desirable. This fatwa on irony, with its inherent contradiction, is but a new rendition of Plato’s eloquently written call for the ejection of the poets from the Republic. announced that “there’s more to life than nothing, that some things really matter.” Perhaps most famously and oft cited was Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair and former editor of the defunct satirical Spy magazine, who predicted immediately after September 11 that “there’s going to be a seismic change. I think it’s the end of the age of irony.” His pronouncements went rippling out into newspaper opinion-pages and websites across the nation. “Things that were considered fringe and frivolous,” Carter claimed, “are going to disappear.” This reaction against frivolity is entirely understandable. Blogs and web pages of places like Reason, Salon, and Slate buzzed with commentary for and against Carter’s and Rosenblatt’s statements. Finally, a free-for-all topic. Everyone had something to say about attacks on irony, in part because, for those who use it regularly, it seemed so personal. More broadly, however, the logic of the cautionary tales seemed to hint at something bigger : a Marx-like alchemy at work: all that is ironic melts into air. The literal dissolution of the Twin...