And yet more irony still….....
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Thank you for trawling through a cyber-universe overflowing
with stupid opinions and for eventually settling on this particularly stupid
one.....
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Before I go on, I wanted to just share a brief thought I had
on “ironic” writing; or rather, why it can be so difficult to read sometimes.
If you’ve ever flicked through an “Indie” or street press publication, on the
lower scale, I mean, then you may be familiar with the kind of satire that
often pads out the articles within. Satire, irony- it sounds noble, but
sometimes it’s just mean, acerbic, and condescending, even though at first it seems smart
and alluring.....
....
Let me paint a picture. In my imagination, if irony were a
person, she would be that smart, sassy girl in the university tutorial with the
striking combination of intellect, peroxide blonde bangs, and thrift shop daggy-but-sexy cardigan which make her sexy and appealing.
Compounding this appeal is the fact that she’s supremely cynical. She is very
unimpressed by the other students. She speaks with the manner of somebody who
is smoking a cigarette, that is to say that she seems preoccupied by something
that you are not doing; at worst openly disinterested by the things within her
surrounds, and at best, aloofly bemused by them. This includes you. Which makes
you only more determined to impress her, to be the one thing about which she
has a positive word to say. A brief moment of eye contact, or even better, a
nod of agreement to your comment on the tutorial reading, feels like
electricity. Ultimately though, if you ever manage to talk to this girl, or
maybe somehow have lunch at her table in the cafeteria, you’ll probably find
that her cynicism wears thin after a while, and she’s not the most interesting
person you’ve ever met after all. What seemed at first to be sophisticated and
intelligent begins to feel stifling and futile. And then you feel bad because
in your mind, you may have pictured her naked in tutorial, which only validates
her defensiveness and cynicism of you in the first place. Which makes you
think, maybe people use irony, satire, and cynicism as a means of defence? And
maybe the more pressure an individual is put under, the more pronounced those
defences become? Sarcasm, which is the bitterest application of irony, is the
opposite of sincerity; which in tempered quantity is essential to our personal
relationships. At some point you have to look at your lover/friend/family
member straight up and say; “I love you”, rather than shift around uncomfortably, sit on your hands, roll your
eyes and scoff “yeah, like, I totally love you or whatever”. It’s tiring to walk around wearing a suit of
armour and at some point you will need to take it off. (Anyway, as a side note,
girls like that always already have boyfriends who are older, more dangerous-looking,
and more sophisticated than you. And if you thought she was a cynic, boy, wait until you meet him. So don’t feel bad, she doesn’t hang out with people
like you in the first place.)....
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Anyway, before
I fell into that digression about dating university girls, what I meant is that
I don’t want to be patronised by the person whose work I’m reading. Satire for
the sake of cruelty is useless (also known as being a bitch); and ultimately it
alienates me as a reader, because I don’t want to feel like I might be the kind
of person you would rip on for kicks if I met you in the street (then again,
other people love reading Perez Hilton, so what would I know?!). But, I hear you say, nobody should be safe
from satire; after all, satire is meant to
be the great leveller, the voice of truth that shines a light on everybody,
that makes all transparent, without allegiance or bias. Sure, but the person
writing satire might just be an idiot, or be insecure, or have a massive chip
on the shoulder, or driven by a personal ulterior motive; in which case the
only thing they’re shining a light on is their own partisan opinions, which
aren’t relevant to anybody else. It stops being about a search for “truth” at
that point, and starts becoming an exercise in “clever wordplay”. (Yes I know,
this column is mostly that, except generally it’s less ‘clever,’ and more ‘tedious’… See how I can cover my own tracks by taking the
piss out of myself before you do? It’s my form of immunity, although it will
probably imprison me, as there is only so long I can apologise for my opinions
before you get sick of reading it and I get sick of writing it. No sense in
pretending I’m not playing that game. Hmmm, ironic.)....
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After all, if true satire has no allegiance, then it has no
allegiance to the author either. What I mean to say by this is nobody wants to
read an ironic article and feel like the author is just some smug know-it-all
casting the first stones. It’s generally not in the author’s best interest to
do that either, because then, what credibility does the author actually
have? ....
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I, of course, have no credibility as a writer in any case,
which works out rather well, because I can immediately distance myself from my
unqualified and cockamamie theories the moment they escape my mouth. I maintain
no responsibility for the things I say; which is the most twisted
bastardisation of freedom of speech, the singular prerogative that the internet
has afforded my generation. And now that nobody needs to maintain any
responsibility for the things they say, now that internet-anonymity has clad us
in the most impenetrable armour of all, perhaps there is no more need for
irony? No more need for saying one thing but implying another? You can say
whatever the hell you want, and best of all, you don’t have to qualify it,
craft it, stand by it, think about it, or take responsibility for it. Which, in
the end, makes communication completely meaningless, and therefore, without a
reason to exist at all. All you need to do is look at a Youtube video response post, or a chat room, or an online
opinion wall, to fully appreciate the liberty individuals have to be
emphatically and violently racist, sexist, homophobic and generally dreadful,
without any fear of accountability. And they are doing so without any sense of
irony, just the twisted “freedom”
of irresponsibility. At which point, suddenly, irony does start to look more
civilized, and more useful in combating the brutality and barbarism of the status quo. ....
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For instance, maybe Harry Connick Jnr was too sincere in his
discomfort at the Black-Face routine on channel 9? His intentions where honest,
but maybe if, while on the judging panel, he’d given it a score of“10” and called it the “smartest, most
respectful and historically aware skit he’d ever head the pleasure of seeing” his point would have been clear, but he would have
escaped the hate mail (delivered, of course, over the internet by individuals
hiding safely behind the anonymity that Harry Connick Jnr is not himself
afforded.) Although, doubtless, were that the case then many would miss the
irony in his statements anyway, so he would probably bare the brunt of
disapproval from both sides.....
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In conclusion, I cannot be held responsible for anything I
have written here that you agree and/or disagree with; if you agree with me then
we can be assured in our own correctness, and if you have a problem with
something I have written, then you have simply misread it, or missed the irony, for in fact, no
matter what your particular opinion is, I actually agree with you, and I
disagree with all the other people who disagree with you. I have no interest in
arguing, because as I have just mentioned, there is no sense in arguing over
what we already agree on! In the spirit of ironical ambiguity, I mean the thing
I mean and the opposite of it too. ....
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You see this way, I can wrangle it so that my lack of
anonymity (you can see who I am) doesn’t render me responsible. I might as well be dragonslayer69 or sexygirl84. All I have to
say is that I don’t believe anything I write. Which may or may not be true, and
you can never know. But apparently that is the only way to broach difficult
subjects and avoid committing to saying anything concrete, and, ergo; I might
avoid hate mail. ....
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Until next time.....
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P.S. - Love… its still the only thing there’s just too
little of.....