“One good thing could come from this horror: It could spell the end of the age of irony.” —Roger Rosenblatt in Time after September 11 |
true violence is ahistorical. It cleaves our days together, it flows only through communities, but it does leave an unslightly stain upon the carpet. Houses shield thousands of battered and bruised families from public view. Prisons are built with drains on the floor to drink the blood.
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The power of the present lies in quotation marks, which remove any statement from the realm of reality and veracity. “here” we can make outlandish revolutionary battlegrounds, virtual islands of irony within a sea of human misery. No: empires of irony that will rise and fall beneath the blind eye of the textbooks. “here” is where my generation will make their stand, laughing at the last man to take himself seriously (who probably dreamed of holding a political office). The quotation marks allow us to submit to centralized consciousness without losing our dignity. But do they allow us to speak without sounding stupid? |
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| These people want me to rely on extreme social violence to segment my reality. But the academics have replaced "After Death" with "The Common Era." I, for one, am glad that irony is dead. | |