For what it’s worth, in response to a (cut-and-pasted) comment to my interest in Howard Dean, here are my Green Party credentials, for what it’s worth. (The occasion was Nader-ween.)
My green credentials
07.03.03 | Permalink | Comments Off on My green credentials
Oh my, irony!
07.01.03 | Permalink | Comments Off on Oh my, irony!
This weekend the wife made Bisquick pancakes, as she’s won to do on weekend afternoons. Upon returning from the kitchen I said, “Everything’s better with Blue Bonnet on it.”
Now what — if anything — is ironic in my statement above? Perhaps I’m being sincere, and attempts to assign irony only smack of cynicism. (I am a sucker for dairy.) Or perhaps I’m being sarcastic, actually saying that everything’s worse with Blue Bonnet on it. (I can be a bit of a shit.) Maybe there was just a Blue Bonnet commercial on TV, and I am mimicking it to be cute. Or perhaps my mimickry is intended to mock the fake sincerity of the characters in TV commercials — Blue Bonnet being a convenient lever.
The Guardian Unlimited has a lovely piece by Zoe Williams on what irony is and what irony isn’t. Halfway through she provides this handly — if thick — little summary of the article:
Most pressingly, though, there are a number of misconceptions about irony that are peculiar to recent times. The first is that September 11 spelled the end of irony. The second is that the end of irony would be the one good thing to come out of September 11. The third is that irony characterises our age to a greater degree than it has done any other. The fourth is that Americans can’t do irony, and we can. The fifth is that the Germans can’t do irony, either (and we still can). The sixth is that irony and cynicism are interchangeable. The seventh is that it’s a mistake to attempt irony in emails and text messages, even while irony characterises our age, and so do emails. And the eighth is that “post-ironic” is an acceptable term — it is very modish to use this, as if to suggest one of three things: i) that irony has ended; ii) that postmodernism and irony are interchangeable, and can be conflated into one handy word; or iii) that we are more ironic than we used to be, and therefore need to add a prefix suggesting even greater ironic distance than irony on its own can supply. None of these things is true.
Got that? Yeah, I had to read the whole article too.
Click to continue reading “Oh my, irony!”
Dear underpants gnomes,
06.30.03 | Permalink | 3 Comments
To the underpants gnomes who took my Randolph Bourne reader,
Please give it back.
Sincerely,
chutney
So is it important to think?
06.27.03 | Permalink | Comments Off on So is it important to think?
Arete provides a helpful Foucault quote on the relationship between social critique and social transformation. And so I offer this Foucault quote, drawn from his lecture notes, with perhaps a nod to Aristotle:
Thought is the form of action.
On the way back from Mt. Sinai
06.27.03 | Permalink | 5 Comments
The Happy Tutor asks, “In the name of what does one speak against the golden calf?”
From the burning bush, Moses’s god sent him to lead a liberation armed with a name: Yhwh. One translation of Yhwh is “I am who I am,” which translated yet again turns out to mean, “Shut up. My name is none of your damn business.”
Anyone doing something “in the name of…” is being either ironic, naive, or deceitful. The first two can cut close to idolatry; the last gets there and then some. No wonder Yhwh didn’t want his name to be taken in vain.
The ancient Cynic known as Jesus, in a sobering follow-up, said that the sin against the Holy Spirit is the only unforgivable sin. It would seem, then, that breaking the tablets and overturning the tables (whip in hand, of course) is the only proper response to golden calves. And perhaps hoping that those who have ears will hear.
And we should not be shocked when the trickster Yhwh forbids us to enter the promised land just as it’s come into sight.
Our Fuehrer, Who Art in Heaven: Part 2
(Meet Your New Big Brother – Jesus Christ)
06.26.03 | Permalink | 6 Comments
Killing the Buddha editor Jeffrey Sharlet ends the second section of his Harper’s article recounting his immersion experience in the Family with this whopper:
The brothers of Ivanwald are the Family’s next generation, its high priests in training. I had been recommended for membership by a banker acquaintance, a recent Ivanwald alumnus, who had mistake my interest in Jesus for belief. Sometimes the brothers would ask me why I was there. They knew that I was “half Jewish,” that I was a writer, and that I was from New York City, which most of them considered to be only slightly less wicked than Baghdad or Amsterdam. I told my brothers that I was there to meet Jesus, and I was: the new ruling Jesus, whose ways are secret.
Strong words, and they smell of hyperbole. (And perhaps Sharlet does exaggerate his case.) But imagine with me for a moment a new totalitarian regime, in some fictional nation in a fictional time; our own dystopian novel. A key feature of totalitarianism is the mass surrender of the private wills of its individual subjects. That is, they cease to experience themselves as individuals at all, except through their decision to leave all other decisions to the Party, the Reich, etc. The “Great Leader”–or Big Brother, if you like–symbolizes and enacts the Great Will of the Party/State/Reich on behalf of the masses.
Click to continue reading “Our Fuehrer, Who Art in Heaven: Part 2
(Meet Your New Big Brother – Jesus Christ)”
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