Irony Deficiencies

Sometimes you are what you don’t eat.

A series of otherwise unrelated recent events viewed together might indicate that, among their many glaring shortcomings, progressives above all might simply be suffering from irony deficiency.

The caloric theme was evident when Gibson’s Bakery won an astounding $44 million civil judgment at the expense of Oberlin University: a jury had found that an apparent student protest branding the bakery as “racist” for detaining students in the act of shoplifting had been not only been libelous but had been egregiously aided and abetted by high-level administrators at the school.  

Several ironies were inherent in the peddling of the false racism narrative, not least that, as noted in Atlantic’s coverage of the case, “[one] student offered to plead guilty to misdemeanor theft, a plea deal the bakery’s owner, explicitly approved, but judge rejected the deal…one of the student defendants would later remark that he appreciated the support of his classmates even though it probably hurt his case.”

A bigger irony might be in several liberal assessments of the result:  "Holding universities financially liable for student speech will inevitably lead them to police and censor that speech, creating a chilling effect that is antithetical to the First Amendment.”  The lack of self-awareness here from supporters of the school—which has been one institution that has been particularly aggressive in promulgating the progressive agenda—is astounding: most schools like Oberlin are usually very much in favor of “policing and censoring” student speech, and they themselves present the bigger threat to free expression. 

Less astounding but no less appalling are the tendencies of Oberlin’s allies’ to blatantly lie about how administration-driven the protests were, in the face of public court records, such willful dissembling as simply another progressive tool notwithstanding.   It further justifies the schadenfreude that has ensued from certain quarters about Oberlin being the first of hopefully many progressive eminences and institutions being force fed their own ostensible “principles”.

Oberlin’s comeuppance may be a further indicator of how progressivism is itself the ultimate “cultural appropriator”, as detailed by Zach Goldberg in his study of the phenomenon: ““wokeness”—a term that originated in black popular culture—is a broad euphemism for a more narrow phenomenon: the rapidly changing political ideology of white liberals that is remaking American politics.”   In that sense, contemporary progressivism might owe as much if not more to Kipling than Karl Marx:

“The woke elite act like white saviors who must lead the rest of the country, including the racial minorities whose interests they claim to represent, to a vision of justice the less enlightened groups would not choose for themselves….Consider, for instance, that black and Asian Democrats and liberals are significantly more supportive of restrictive immigration policies and less positive toward racial/ethnic diversity than their white counterparts. Black and Hispanic Democrats and liberals are more sympathetic toward Israel than the Palestinians (likely due in part to the fact that they tend to be more religious). They are also more likely to part ways when it comes to contemporary social and gender-identity issues, including views of the #MeToo movement. In all, though they do converge on some issues, the attitudes and policy preferences of the woke white left are unrepresentative of the “marginalized communities” with whom they are supposed to be allies.” 

Moving from politics to popular culture, some have noticed a trend particular to comedy where the industry, in reaction to having a President who ostensibly “at heart, [is] one thing: an insult comic”, has simply abandoned irony and incongruity as comic devices, "creating a kind of insult comedy for the Resistance: less subtle, less civil—and, strangely, more conservative.”  Here, a double irony: an overwhelmingly liberal establishment imitating their bete noire by abandoning the one thing they ostensibly do for a living.

Unless progressive activists and entertainers have been using Alanis Morrissette’s definition of irony all along.

In fact, while the Politico piece presents Jon Stewart as the paradigm of “ironic detachment”, it underestimates how much of the irony was itself an act, and overestimates how “detached” he really was.  Make no mistake: Stewart’s real contribution to political discourse was advocating for policies he liked while making himself appear to be above the fray, while simultaneously subtly promulgating false moral equivalencies; one favorite was to consistently present Christian attempts to exercise religious rights as equally dangerous to the American fabric as Islamist terrorism.  Lest anyone forget what ultimately put him on the map as the go-to source for television news, his 2004 takedown of Tucker Carlson on Crossfire indicated that Stewart was no more above employing adhominy than our current Insult-Comic-In-Chief.  The ironies were likely not lost on Stewart, but they seem to have been lost on everyone who watched him.

The progressive irony deficiency might be simply attributable to the progressive tendency to hold non- or anti-progressives to a different double standard than they hold themselves, particularly when they suddenly find themselves at the business end of the more painful consequences they wish to mete out to their antagonists.  In addition to the Oberlin suit, a spectacle involving a metaphorical force-feeding involved NY Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger feeling compelled to write an Op-Ed…in the Wall Street journal (irony alert?) lamenting—as the NY Sun noted with appropriate if barely concealed glee in an editorial—“how irresponsible it is for President Trump to issue a tweet accusing the Times of committing, in the course of exposing our cyber attacks on Russia’s electrical grid, “virtual treason””.  The Sun then went on to list no less than three high-profile treason accusation headlines issued from the Times at Trump from their stable of Op-Ed eminences (in these particular cases, Krugman, Kristof and Blow).  

One wonders whether it occurred to Sulzberger to attempt an analogous Oberlin “we can’t control our writers/students” defense, or if he realized that the real world consequences of treason are far heavier than $44 million, and that he and his stable could be on the hook long before the President would.  In any case it is apparent that irony is no longer taught in journalism and comedy schools—or, as the Oberlin case demonstrates, any schools, for that matter. 

Once on a date with a woman who was a nutritionist, I mentioned my then chronic addiction to sugar cereals.

She made a face, confirming my guess she considered such fare anathema.

I pressed the point: “But they have vitamins! And minerals! And iron!”

She said: “They’re sprayed on.”

You have to wonder whether any previous progressive pretensions to irony are as “sprayed on” as the iron on Frosted Flakes.  Progressives are a lot more directly responsible for the purported death of irony than conservatives ever could be, as that device was claimed to be exclusive to nonconservatives; if not, the left has been suffering from irony deficiency for a lot longer than anyone previously assumed.