In a comment yesterday from the volunteer specimen of The Stupid Left who frequently provides me with material, I was faulted for not getting the "irony" behind the internet virality of Eduard Khil's one 1970s kitschy performance of a dumb cowboy song to nonsense syllables.
On her Labor Day day-off show, Rachel Maddow reminded us of who Trump is carrying water for through his racist Attorney General and how they really are Nazis, only she didn't go that far. And good on her for taking that opportunity, it should be taken any chance available.
If you listen to the Nazi, Richard Spencer at the link, notice he quotes Hegel's racism in his intellectual emesis, remembering that Hegel was also to Marx kind of what Malthus was for Darwin. So, more evidence of my theory that Marxism is more closely related to Nazism than conventional poli-sci holds. Someday I'm going to find a transcript of that load of crap and do a comparison of quotes, but I haven't found it and, so far, I'm damned if I'm going to go through the exercise of transcribing the words of American Nazis, though I might change my mind. And, believe me, when I heard it I could find exact parallels, many of them between Spencer 2017 and Darwin and Darwin's inner circle. When you biologize hate, both to do science and to then use the science to promote hate, pointing out those parallels is not only possible but a moral imperative.
But back to the "irony" angle in that story. When people were shocked and disturbed to have Americans, speaking American English with American accents, in 2017, yelling "Hail Trump," some trying to make a distinctions between that and the German original, "Heil," PBS News Hour producer P.J. Tobia e-mailed Spencer as to the meaning of the spectacle and he reported that Spencer said "Hail Trump" was shouted with Nazi straight-arm Hitlerian salutes was:
“clearly done in a spirit of irony and exuberance.”
Irony. Have you ever noticed how saying something is done in "irony" is supposed to excuse just about anything, no matter how hateful it is, no matter what it is in support of. If you want to figure out how we've gotten here, it's by people using "irony" and "comedy" and "humor" and a list of other inverted and perverted concepts to enable stuff like the hate-comedy of the 1980s which has not stopped but it has gone on, hate-radio shock jocks and that went seamlessly into cabloid hate-talk (Lou Dobbs and so many others) and on to today with Nazis in the White House (Bannon and Gorka were the tip of that shit pile) the Justice Department and elsewhere throughout the American government. There was, beginning in the 1980s, during the Reagan administration, what I think is an obvious campaign of renormalizing racism, sexism, other forms of hatred. It began in the 1970s among gay men in New York City, in my memory, one of the first people I remember hearing it from was a gay man I knew who worked at NBC - babysitting one of the big executives. It probably should be traced to the "ironic" cynicism even before that, which was not an exclusively urban male gay phenomenon but which I first noticed in the frat boys who ran The National Lampoon.
If irony can't go back to what it really meant, maybe it's time for us to stop using the word because it doesn't mean that anymore, it means what this is about, it has turned into a shield for an American Nazi leader to use to blunt the response to his followers giving Trump a Hitler salute. I'll try to remember to not call what is really ironic, irony, from now on. Simps has my permission to call me on any lapses on that resolution.
Ah yes. Along with Darwin, the biggest contributor to Nazism was clearly stand-up comedy.
ReplyDeleteOh, I merely mentioned that virtually everything that Richard Spencer said in that speech had a parallel in something said by Darwin and, or, his closest inner circle of scientific colleagues who he cited as scientific fact.
DeleteYou're apparently the one who thinks he's a comedian. So, I'm led to believe that you find the Nazi salute "ironic" as he claimed. Did you feel exuberance over it, too?
" I first noticed in the frat boys who ran The National Lampoon."
ReplyDeleteOh, fuck you. I worked with two editors from the Lampoon in the 70s -- one was a refugee from South African apartheid and the other was a New York City jew. The suggestion that they were responsible for the rise of Trump is not just stupid, it's deeply offensive.
Name them.
DeleteDanny Abelson and Ellis Weiner. Ellis writes for the New Yorker now, so obviously he's a Nazi.
DeleteAnd fuck you again.
I don't remember either of them being involved with the National Lampoon, when did they work there? I would guess they probably worked there after I stopped reading the crappy thing, sometime before 1975.
DeleteIs your argument that someone who is Jewish can't a. be a racist, b. can't have had something to do with the Trump regime coming to power? Because I can give you a list of names who are both.
First, there are all manner of unintended consequences, including the abuse of "irony" (the word and the concept), which is what the post is about, as I understand it.
ReplyDeleteSecond, if we're really going to talk about irony, we have to go back at least to Kierkegaard (no, seriously), to start to get a handle on what it is, distinguished from the usual misuse of the term (and especially the error of conflating "irony" with "dramatic irony").
Third: "Isn't it ironic? don't you think?" was an intentional misuse of irony, mocking our incorrect usage of the concept. Oddly enough, most people thought that was the misuse of irony, not the satire of that abuse.
I'm ready to just stop using the word.
I hope it never passes my keyboard again. It's useless for any honest purpose, now. I wonder if Niebuhr might have been the last one to use it constructively.
DeleteFuck you, asshole. What you know from being Jewish is right up there with what you know from funny, i.e., nothing.
ReplyDeleteWell, there's a guy you might have heard of, one of Richard Spencer's proteges named "Stephen Miller" he's been compared to Goebbels quite a bit since January. Not to mention the right-wing Jewish support for Trump, even as he promotes Nazism.
Deletehttp://religionnews.com/2017/08/28/jewish-trump-supporters-resist-calls-from-other-jews-to-renounce-the-president/
If I ever feel the need to consult one of Duncan's regulars about things Jewish, I'll go see if I can find DAS's old blog, I used to be a regular reader. You, I wouldn't trust you to give out accurate information about The Dixie Cups or Ultimate Spinach, you're such a lazy, ignorant liar.
Oh, and, speaking of the National Lampoon, this is how I think of the young Steve Simels, the boy in blue.
Deletehttp://www.marksverylarge.com/images/7302cover_l.jpg
I stopped finding it funny about the same time that Chris Miller started writing for it, though I didn't read every issue up till then. I thought it was mostly puerile and stupid. Frat boy humor.