Prose Before Hos

This is the inaugural post in a new category, Prose Before Hos, which is the prose version of the Poem of the Week. Poetry on Thursday, prose on Saturday. Think of it as the literary equivalent of a mullet ("business in the front, party in the back").

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As my late English-professor dad would have told you at great length, "irony" does not signify something annoying or irritating, or even a strange coincidence. In its purest sense, irony is a rhetorical mode in which you say one thing and mean the opposite ("Dude, what a lovely spring day we're having!" as you walk across town in a driving sleet-storm), although it also refers to a cosmic phenomenon in which human acts produce effects contrary to those intended. (One could say that the results of the Iraq war have been ironic, for example, but only if you believe the war was actually intended to produce a peaceful, democratic Iraq.)

But I'm also not here to rail against the slippery, postmodern sense of the word "irony," the one infamously referenced by Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter when he declared that irony was dead after 9/11. Carter, I suppose, was trying to say that insincerity and dispassion and a permanent attitude of poking fun had to go on hold temporarily in the wake of that disaster, and Jeez, I hope he was looking in the mirror when he said it. (In fairness, he later acknowledged that it was a dumb-ass thing to say, although perhaps not in those words.)

Nay, I am here to honor that indefinable form of irony in all its treachery and instability, its tendency to reverse the polarities of meaning or to render them indecipherable. This is the form of irony that will make all of us, as we grow older, unable to tell whether the younger people around us are behaving sincerely or not. We will find no comfortable recourse, no safe haven. This kind of irony is both a form of self-knowledge and a form of self-mockery, it is a defense against the world of late capitalism and an embrace of it. I say it is a proud and noble thing, and I say bring it.

from Beyond the Multiplex, 3-22-07, by the esteemed Andrew O'Hehir, writer for Salon.

Go read it. Now.

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Comments

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"This is the inaugural post in a new category, Prose Before Hos, which is the prose version of the Poem of the Week. Poetry on Thursday, prose on Saturday. Think of it as the literary equivalent of a mullet ("business in the front, party in the back")."

There actually isn't a single part of that paragraph that is anything short of brilliant.

Prose Before Hoes (Hos? I neither know nor particularly care). Excellent.

Before you begin to think that I've fallen ill, wait until my next comment to decide for sure.