I recently read a tedious, long-winded, nonsensical opinion piece in the New York Times entitled “How To Live Without Irony.” It’s the kind of self-absorbed, self-righteous, vacuous essay that makes me sigh deeply and weep for humanity’s intellectual decline. I got the distinct impression that the author, (An associate professor at Princeton, no less. This is not some part-time teacher at Butler Community College. She teaches at Princeton! Where smart people go!), cobbled her essay together paragraph by disjointed paragraph in between hefty doses of Ambien, Lexapro, and Cabernet Sauvignon. If it hadn’t been published by the New York Times and written by an associate professor at Princeton! <gaped mouth O!M!G!> I would have assumed it was written by an anxious, over-achieving 16-year-old who was cramming at midnight to complete an essay at the last-minute for her AP English class that she is desperate to get an ‘A’ in so she can maintain her class-leading 4.87 GPA, who the following day starts cutting herself when her (non-Ivy League-educated) public school teacher gives her a C minus on it.

That being said, her piece of shit opinion piece sure did give me something to think about.

Now, I don’t expect you to read her essay. But if watching bad reality television or listening to painfully bad Usher songs aren’t filling you with enough of that delicious kind of agonized self-loathing that make you want to repeatedly stab yourself in the neck for the horrible life choices you continue to make even though you’re a grown-ass adult and you should know better by now, by all means, knock yourself out. I linked it above. Happy stabbing. I’ll still be here when you get back from the ER.

Or, in an effort to save time, (and valuable plasma at the Blood Bank), I could just give you the gist of her arguments here:

1)All we do is live ironically now.

2)Hipsters are the worst at this. The absolute worst. Some of them even have moustaches and play trombone! I mean, for shame!

3)Living ironically is bad. Ironic living makes it hard to make real connections with other people, serious subjects, or your own feelings. It also makes you incapable of looking people in the eye or buying heartfelt gifts for your friends.

4)The author came-of-age in that glorified decade known as the 90s, where no one was ironic. People were grungy and apathetic back then, which was WAY better than being ironic like today’s hipsters.

5)Why?

6)It just was. It might have something to do with the superiority of flannel over tiny shorts, but she does not really flesh this out. Perhaps because it is such an obvious truth that no explanation is necessary.

7)You can try to reduce the amount of irony in your life by trying to behave more like a four-year-old. Or a person with severe mental disabilities. Or a plant.

(Now you probably want to read her entire essay to find the part where she encourages you to live non-ironically, just like a ficus. (Yes, she does. I assume that particular paragraph was written after not one but two bottles of Cab Sauv.) Happy stabbing. I’ll still be here when you get back from the ER.)

At no point did she tell those damn kids to stay off her lawn, but we do not know for certain at this point if that was merely edited out for size.

So, clearly, this essay made me grit my teeth and want to punch the next person I see reading The Atlantic Monthly. I never quite understand why intellectuals are so reviled by most normal people, then I read pretentious crap like this, a wee little lightbulb goes off in my head, I hear a precise, metallic <ding!>, I raise my forefinger in the air and think, “Ah ha!”

But, since I’m actually spending my valuable time responding to it instead of watching Dancing With the Stars, who’s the real idiot? <ding!>

Now, I would like to couch my response to her with a few disclosures: I was born in 1969, (which means that I’m 43, for people that do not want to bother with the maths.) I am not a 20-something standing up in solidarity for my skinny jeans wearing, Frappucino-drinking brothers and sisters. And I am not John McCain, suffering from the shock of yet another lost election cycle, ranting nonsensically about how unqualified this woman is to be Secretary of State. I am, ironically enough, of the same generation as the author, although I am clearly much more rational and clear-thinking. (I’m guessing that’s because I am not on her same diet of antidepressants, booze and sleeping pills.) I also do not have a sociology degree or anything else that would remotely allow me to call myself an expert on this subject. I certainly don’t teach at Princeton. (I don’t even teach at Butler Community College.) All I have is a wee bit of common sense and a slightly larger worldview that this hopelessly addled author.

So, let me break it down for you:

America is a diverse country. We have never been a laconic, static nation. Our borders are filled with bustling, energetic groups of every ethnic and religious background imaginable. Our “culture” is an amalgamation of hundreds of different subcultures. It is fascinating, breathtaking, impossibly large in scope, ridiculously challenging to get a handle on, and always shifting.

What you can NEVER do, (not without sounding like a complete moron), is ascribe an entire ethos, (in this case, irony), to “the hipster.”

The hipster is no more a blight upon this nation than the flapper was, or the beatnik, or the hippie, or the slacker. The hipster certainly flavors our culture, but in no way does he control or dominate it. And so if you’re trying to make the point that our lives are filled with too much irony and we need to learn to be more sincere, it makes no sense to point an accusing finger at a man in a vest and skinny jeans wearing horn rimmed glasses shouting, “There’s the culprit!”

Which do you wish to excoriate, hipsters or irony? Because they are two totally different things. Since you entitled your essay “How To Live Without Irony,” I am going to assume that irony is your main buggaboo.

So. Let’s look at irony for a minute. There certainly is a lot of it in our culture. Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report has clearly perfected the art. We have more late night talk shows than ever skewering national and world news on a daily basis. Comedy podcasts like the Bugle tackle meaty subjects with humor as well. And, of course, South Park and the Simpsons and other animated shows still manage to poke at revered icons and taboo subjects. Irony is not necessarily a bad thing. In many cases, it can be quite hilarious.

Irony is not the same thing as cynicism or apathy. It is also not necessarily an indicator of anti-social behavior. Just because a very masculine man wears a Care Bears t-shirt, it doesn’t mean that he doesn’t know how to listen to his girlfriend or carry on a conversation about serious subjects.

In fact, let’s just take a look at what this country has endured, at least in my lifetime:

1)Vietnam–a war we were lied into, were drafted into by the hundreds of thousands, that we didn’t want to fight.

2)Watergate–a clear-cut example of the President of the United States employing dirty, immoral, dishonorable tactics in order to win re-election over a political opponent

3)Nuclear Arms Race–people in the 70s and 80s lived with the extremely real possibility that we would all be blowed up real good any goddamn day now.

4)AIDS

5)Stock market collapses

6)Cyanide in Tylenol. Remember how we almost shit our pants over that one?

7)Toxic shock syndrome. Your tampons were going to kill you. Seriously.

8)The attacks on the World Trade Center. More frightening than your tampons.

9)Ten or eleven years of perpetual war. Or maybe it’s twelve years. Is anyone still counting?

10)The cola wars I can’t take it anymore.

Through the past ten years, our protests against the system have been weak and ineffectual, our wages have shrunk, our college debt has risen, we’ve been told that we’re greedy for expecting social security to remain solvent, that we’re fools for believing that global climate change is man-made, that Janet Jackson is the Devil for flashing her nipple at our children during the Super Bowl, that we’re criminals for trying to download a Young MC song off of Napster, that we’re going against God’s will, prophecy and ALL THAT IS WRITTEN for believing that gay people are should be treated like people, that we’re morons for thinking that electric cars and solar power are going to make this globe a better place, that we’re socialist terrorists if we think Barack Obama is an effective leader, that we’re going to Hell for not believing in Hell, that we’re bringing on the destruction of the country for expecting our immigrant brothers and sisters to be treated with dignity and respect, and that we’re unpatriotic if we don’t blindly support a military that seems to derive an inordinate amount of power and pleasure from blowing people up.

And yet you have the audacity to lament the prevalence of irony in our society?

I submit that the only thing that has kept this pulsating mass of a society from losing its collective mind in my lifetime is its beautifully honed sense of irony. You want to know who WASN’T ironic? Timothy McVeigh. That Heaven’s Gate cult leader. The dude who flew his plane into the IRS building down in Texas. A lack of irony will kill you.

Irony does not allow people to shy away, hiding in public, as you so ignorantly claim. Irony allows people to face serious, complicated, painful issues head-on, by laughing at them. Being able to laugh at those that wish to harm you is the ultimate way to have power of them. Having power over the things you fear gives you strength. It gives you the ability to think. It gives you the ability to formulate a response. It gives you the ability to feel more in control when faced with forces that are much more powerful than yourself. America has a long and proud history of mocking the Establishment that controls us. It doesn’t matter whether we do that on a political stage or on a marketing stage or on a cultural stage. It is all, to a certain extent, a form of rebellion. And in a corporate society dominated by oligarchical thinking, sometimes it is those little forms of rebellion that keep a people collectively sane.

Now, clearly, there are effective limits to irony. You certainly wouldn’t want to be sitting at your friend’s hospital bed as he’s battling cancer, saying, “Yeah, I know how you feel. I had the worst headache yesterday.” There is a clear difference between irony and being a dick. And there might be a lot of 20-something dicks in the world. You may have a point there. But, you know what? There have ALWAYS been 20-something dicks. Alexander Hamilton was a huge 20-something dick. So was General Custer. And others! That has less to do with the prevalence of irony in our culture than it has to do with the fact that 20-somethings think they’re invincible and amazing and that they’re going to change the world. But, they’re also awkward and arrogant and incredibly self-absorbed and stupid. It’s okay. They’ll grow out of it. Or die young. Unless they’re Donald Trump. Or Charlie Sheen. (Also two very non-ironical guys.)

Lastly, while I hope I’ve shown that irony as an ethos is not necessarily an indication of society’s decline, I would, however, like to point out that not everything about our country is steeped in irony. We are still an amazing country of charitable givers. We still are incredibly benevolent when it comes to rescuing dogs and cats from animal shelters. Many young people–those hipsters that you scoff at–are passionately involved in global climate change initiatives, gay rights, and other political projects. There are also many young people passionately involved in their churches, advocating for all the things I hate, like abstinence and anti-abortion efforts. (Again–not ironical people!) But they’re doing it! Yay for them!

We Americans are just kinda tired of being shit on politically, economically and militarily.

Don’t blame us for turning ironical. Be grateful. It takes a lot of intelligence to grasp the nuances of irony. Don’t feign disgust at people who appear to be living ironically. Feign surprise and pity for those who aren’t.