Novelist David Foster Wallace once observed: “Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving. There’s some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who’s come to love his cage.” From newscaster comedians to blockbuster movies to social media, we are drenched in irony and sarcasm and cynicism that pretends to complain about the way things are. But secretly many don’t want to change anything about it. They get too much profit and popularity from the dysfunctional and destructive system we live in. Irony has become the song of the caged bird who is secretly scared to death of leaving its cage. Irony is merely ersatz resistance: It makes us feel like we are rejecting the system and rebelling against injustice, when in fact constant irony imprisons our imaginations to “what is possible” and adjusts our behavior to the “the way things are”. Using irony, we complain as we obey. But we still obey nonetheless. And when irony and cynicism become orthodoxy, then sincerity and hope become subversion of what is “realistic”. So let’s really become realists and demand the impossible with sincerity and hope.
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