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When all you have is irony, everything looks like the opposite of a nail
Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 3:10 am on 1/29/2003
If you’re not familiar with the Eldred v. Ashcroft case that was recently decided in the Supreme Court, I want you to read this comic twice. The first time, just read it. Then, go familiarize yourself with the Eldred case by reading this. It’s important that you not do this out of order. Then read the comic again.
Now, if you are familiar with the Eldred case, try to read this comic as if you weren’t. In fact, try to read it as if (to correct for what I believe the common political lean of my readership, such as it is, to be) you are from Red America. In a suburb somewhere. As though you aren’t generally given to a frisson of loathing when you hear the word “corporation.”
Do you see how the author of this comic is utterly failing rhetorically? I mean, middle America doesn’t find his strip funny anyway, but still. It’s impossible to see his point if you aren’t already deeply familiar with the case he’s talking about. For the rest of us, he’s making a point, but he’s not making a difference.
An even better case of this tactical failure on the part of the American left is Thomas Frank, editor of the hip-I-guess political zine The Baffler, and author of The Conquest of Cool and One Market Under God. I love Frank’s analysis of the boom and contemporary capitalist thinking in OMUG, but a lot of people who don’t already agree with him would love it too. Unfortunately, even if they do pick up a copy of this book, they won’t get through the introduction, because Frank’s use of irony is so thick that there are entire paragraphs that you can’t even parse unless you already agree with them.
Not everyone wants to write for the uninitiated, and that’s fine. But where would we be if more of us were trying?
(I promise not to write about politics too often.)