There’s a scene in one of the greatest movies ever where Garland Greene, an infamous serial killer who once drove through three states wearing a woman’s head as a hat, attempts to boil down one of life’s trickier literary devices. As Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” plays, Greene (portrayed by Steve Buscemi) remarks to Cameron Poe (who, despite the name, is not a woman….or a mascot for a terrible football team): “Define irony - A bunch of idiots dancing around on a plane to a song made famous by a band that died in a plane crash.”
He may be awesome at killing women and wearing hats, but Greene is not particularly adept at defining irony, in either its classic or modern form. What Greene describes is not verbal irony, dramatic irony, or situational irony (which in the author’s opinion, isn’t really irony at all). No, it’s just one of those Morisettian coincidences that augurs poorly (didn’t think I could slip a second use of “augur” into a blog post this week, did you?) for the future of the term “irony.” Oh well.*
Most people have a decent understanding of verbal irony, but generally call it sarcasm, a technically incorrect equating of a thing with the largest subset of said thing. Still, close enough. Dramatic irony (what Greene was going for here) is more generally confused, and maddeningly so. At its simplest, dramatic irony is “a disparity of expression and awareness: when words and actions possess a significance that the listener or audience understands, but the speaker or character does not.” Soooo simple.
Using this definition, you can argue that Greene isn’t entirely wrong, though you’d largely be wasting your breath. The dancing to the song seems to be his problem, the “action possessing a significance the listener understands, but the character does not.” However, the dancing does not possess any significance…the plane does eventually go down, but not for a few minutes at least, and not due to the dancing. We are not given to think that the idiots are unaware of Skynyrd’s fate, just that they don’t care because IT’S A FUCKING SONG. At best, this is situational irony, a contrast between expected results and actual results, but that’s a large stretch as well.
ANYWAY….this was all a long intro into a rant about politics and the long-anticipated release of my number 1 ranked all-time most ironic event. First, the rant:
Over the past eight years, President Bush has proven himself to be every bit the monkey he looks like. His approval ratings have fallen quicker than Eliot Spitzer’s pants (HAY-OOOOO!!!).** And so, 8 years after mistakenly electing a man who appealed to voters for his down-home personality, his approachability, his seeming disregard for high-falutin language and deep policy discussions, his lack of national experience, and his common manness, all traits we have come to learn are TERRIBLE traits for a president, we are given another chance to right our (and his) wrongs.
And the two top candidates as of today are, respectively: 1.) an approachable guy from a Southern state who doesn’t really “bother”much with or “understand” the economy, whose friendliness with the press helped him beat back a technocratic (and boring) challenger who had a pretty decent record with forward-moving thoughts, and who would love nothing more than to continue a disastrous war in a foreign country because it “feels right” and would seemingly be the “right thing to do;” and 2.) an extremely likeable guy with little to no real political experience running as an “outsider” despite being a multi-millionaire Ivy-educated Senator, whose chumminess with the press and perty mouthwords have allowed him to escape most criticism and beat back a technocratic (and boring) challenger who has a pretty decent record with forward-moving thoughts, who is being supported (vote-wise) almost entirely by richer, more-educated people with confusing/confused motives (and poor blacks, but they don’t exactly count, do they?), and whose devotion to his god and pastor knows almost no bounds.***
WTF, America? Seriously, were we even trying? And here is where irony comes in, or maybe doesn’t. A situation like this MIGHT be ironic if you expected America as a whole to rise up and learn their lesson, reject everything they hated about the last guy as strongly as all their busted polls seem to suggest they feel, only to find they are basically RACING to decide between two guys running with Xeroxed copies of Bush’s CV, and beating back a leftover Clintonite with actual experience in the process. However, I am not sure that anyone can expect anything other than what has happened.
People want to elect people like them. This is what makes them stupid, and, Q.E.D., what makes the people they elect stupid. The people they elect either (a) actually ARE like them, mindless idiots with no sense of history or rationality or (b) the kind of people best suited to selling to morons, so they can rule morons. Awesome.
Anyway, I’m running out of steam, because I only care in as much as everyone is being ridiculous about this. Can anyone explain to me what one of the presidential candidates would do in his first year that (a) would be remarkably different than the other candidates?, and (b) would be something demonstrably positive? History says “Eh, I’m sorry, I…uh…have a boyfriend, but I DO think you are an awesome person and all, but, to answer your question….no…I don’t think so…no.”
And now, the moment you have all been waiting for: Sean’s MOST HYSTERICALLY IRONIC THING EVER award…..
And the winner is….
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT!!!!
(Voiceover) “Mary earned this award by writing a little ditty called “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” a plea for men everywhere to recognize that women are equal to their male counterparts (not naturally inferior as was thought before) but lacked the education necessary to express it. Super-ironically, though, Mary was forced to include her thoughts in novel storybook form for the women because even the educated ones refused to read pamphlets, histories or philosophy due to those forms being “too boring” or “stuffy.” To top it all off with an ironic cherry, the novel (Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman) was published posthumously because Mary died in childbirth, an exquisitely hilarious means of death for the first real feminist. Oh…and her daughter’s writing sucked and paled in comparison to that of her husband.”
* I am aware that the picture has nothing to do with Garland Greene, but I do love shirtless men.
** I am unaware of any scientific study that proves Spitzer’s pants would fall faster than mine would. Galileo might even suggest that, in a frictionless environment, his pants would fall EXACTLY as fast as mine, even though my pants are made of heavy hooker-proof material. Fortunately, friction exists (mostly in my pants, which is why I can afford to make them hooker-proof), so this joke still works.
*** I also have it on good authority that both candidates are fathers to black children.
