The All-New, Improved Age of Irony

 

On September  24 , 2001, TIME essayist Roger Rosenblatt declared that the 9/11 terror attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. had marked “the end of the age of irony.”

For too long, Rosenblatt said, “the good folks in charge of America’s intellectual life have insisted that nothing was to be believed in or taken seriously.” He continued:

With a giggle and a smirk, our chattering classes–our columnists and pop culture makers–declared that detachment and personal whimsy were the necessary tools for an oh-so-cool life.

Such glibness will have to stop, he said, because:

The planes that plowed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were real. The flames, smoke, sirens–-real. The chalky landscape, the silence of the streets–all real. 

Unfortunately, Rosenblatt never quite nails down what he means by irony. Is it a trivial, wise-aleck attitude toward life, or is it a fatal denying of reality? Those are two different things.

In either case, Rosenblatt was wrong. The best ironists may seem glib, but they don’t deny reality. They expose reality by pointing out the disconnect between what is real and what we like to pretend is real. Or what we are told is real by our “leaders” and their stenographers at outlets like TIME.

Moreover, the events of 9/11 failed to end irony. They jump-started a whole new Golden Age of it, government-approved and highly destructive.

 Government Approved Irony Pre 9/11

There was, of course, plenty of government -sponsored irony before 9/11. My own favorite example involves the following events, all happening within a fourteen-month period:

1.     In November 1989, the Berlin Wall falls.  This is said to mark the end of the Cold War. It promises a “Peace Dividend” – defined by Oxford as “a sum of public money which becomes available for other purposes when spending on defense is reduced.”

 

 

2.     One month later, the U.S. sends 26,000 troops into Panama, a neighboring sovereign nation. The Peace Dividend is forgotten. The Panama operation includes such intense firebombing of one barrio, El Chorrio, that locals nickname the event “Little Hiroshima.” In that neighborhood alone, many dozens, perhaps hundreds, of civilian die in fires. Two thousand homes are destroyed and between 10 and 20 thousand people are made homeless.

The invasion itself is a major breech of international law –indeed, the Nuremberg trials have identified “aggression against a sovereign nation” as “the supreme international crime.” Also illegal is the failure to warn civilians of the attack and the “disproportionality” of it.

 But, as one U.S. general explains, “We have all these new gadgets, laser-guided missiles and stealth fighters, and we are just dying to use that stuff.”

And this is all – officially, at least – to capture one single guy, Panama’s president Noriega, who, ironically enough, had long been a U.S. intelligence asset.

 

3.     Just over one year after that – January 1991 – the U.S. decides Iraq needs invading. The reason: Iraq had invaded Kuwait, a sovereign nation. In other words, it was okay for the U.S, to invade a much weaker sovereign nation but it was a crime for Iraq to do so.

 

The Golden Age Emerges

Thus the roots of the New Age of Irony were already well sunk when the planes hit New York and the Pentagon and Shanksville, Pennsylvania that Friday in September of 2001 and the end of irony promptly declared by Roger Rosenblatt.

Since then, the Ironies of US actions have multiplied and must rival that of any empire in human history (such things being difficult to measure).

Here, then, is a small sample (ten) of U.S. government-sponsored ironies that illustrate the age in which we now live -- the “post 9/11 world,” as they say:

1.     It was ironic that, in response to 9/11, Afghanistan and then Iraq were invaded and violently occupied when, according to the official 9/11 story, 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi Arabian citizens and none were Afghan or Iraqi. And that Saudi Arabians were “the primary source of al-Qaeda funding.”

 

2.     It was ironic when, in the name of fighting terrorism, President Obama approved the drone-strike murder of U.S.-born citizen Anwar Al Mawlaki in December of 2011 – -making Malaki  the first-ever American citizen killed by the State without trial or judicial procedure.

 

3.     It was ironic that in 2011 –- in the name of curbing the violence of a civil war in Libya -- the U.S.,  led a bombing campaign there that featured the firing of 110 Tomahawk Cruise Missiles on Day One; lasted over eight months; included 26,500 bombing sorties;   and resulted in a dystopian state whose civil war worsened for several more years, is a center of human trafficking, and allows some 47,000 people to live in conditions that meet the definition of slavery .

 

It was further ironic that the corporate U.S. media, while employing taglines like “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” trumpeted the bogus cause of the Libyan “intervention” but highly underreported its destructiveness. Writing for a much less powerful outlet, journalist Joe Lauria said it well:

 

How then could The New York Times and The Washington Post, the most influential American newspapers, either refuse to adequately cover or not cover at all a story of such magnitude, a story that should have been front page news for days? It was a story that undermined the U.S. government’s entire rationale for an unjustified attack that devastated a sovereign nation.

 

4.     It is ironic that the U.S. – under both Biden and Trump – has gifted Israel some 21.7 billion dollars’ worth of weapons to conduct their genocide in Gaza and their ethnic cleansing in the West Bank when the Leahy Laws prohibit “the U.S. Government from using funds for assistance to units of foreign security forces where there is credible information implicating that unit in the commission of gross violations of human rights (GVHR).”

 

5.     It’s ironic that while Israel receives the huge amount of aid in military weaponry from the U.S. mentioned above, its own arms exports to other countries recent broke record sales four years in a row.

 

 

6.     It’s ironic that in a supposed constitutional republic, the Supreme Court would decare the president “presumptively immune from criminal prosecution for any official act they undertake.”

 

7.     It’s ironic that a Gestapo-like agency called I.C.E. – that did not exist when Rosenblatt declared the End of Irony – now feels entitled to batter down doors and violently enter homes  without probable cause or a warrant when the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution clearly prohibits this.

 

 

8.     It’s ironic that in a recent six month period, there would be “at least 2,300 cases in which … immigration officials illegally detained people without bond or due process. This despite the Fourteenth Amendment stating that “nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

 

9.     It’s ironic that in a country where “free and fair elections” are considered fundamental to sustaining democracy, the Supreme Court, in 1910, “reversed century-old campaign finance restrictions and enabled corporations and other outside groups to spend unlimited money on elections.”

 

10.   Add your own irony here.  Having trouble finding one? Try Googling of the following:  Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, economic sanctions, ICE murders in Minnesota, Pentagon budget, ICE budget, social security, or income inequality, to name a few.

 

In summary, Irony has not ended, as Roger Roseblatt wishfully wrote in 2001. Like the common cold and Grateful Dead cover bands, it will always be with us. As the sports announcers like to say, you can’t stop it; you can only hope to contain it.

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MLK, Poverty, and War

 

Another Martin Luther King Day has gone by with no mention in any of our corporate outlets -- including NPR and PBS – of the speech in which King pointed out that his own country was the world’s greatest purveyor of violence. Specifically, he observed this:  

I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government.

That speech was titled “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” It was delivered in April of 1967 at the Riverside Church in New York City. Many believe it to be the speech that got King killed almost exactly a year later.

The response in the New York Times was typical and telling. The Times is, after all, an enormous business corporation and thus a key part of the U.S. based empire. The Times advised King, in so many words, to stay in his own lane, or to use an old racist expression, to know his place. The two problems King tried to link – poverty and war – were “distinct and separate,” the Times pronounced. And further:

the political strategy of uniting the peace movement and the civil rights movement could very well be disastrous for both causes.

Fast-forward nearly sixty years, and little has changed.

In the past year alone, U.S.-made bombs have exploded over Venezuela, Syrai, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Nigeria, Palestine, and Somalia. We are the major arms supplier to three of the most brutal suppressors of human rights in the world: Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel.

Meanwhile, in the words of researchers at the Urban Institute, “Wealth inequality is higher in the United States than in almost any other developed country and has risen for much of the past 60 years.”

And corporate media continue to shamelessly ignore the obvious connection between war and poverty.

It’s a common mistake among empires past to ignore the welfare of their own citizens in order to maintain power in faraway places. Or, as Christopher Hedges recently observed: “All empires, when they are dying, worship the idol of war.”  

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