Isn’t It Ironic?

Posted on May 9, 2007 by Timothy Burke

Is it just me, or is this description of an upcoming local talk by Victor Davis Hanson incredibly convoluted? The penultimate paragraph (the one beginning, “In short”) especially baffles me. Or maybe Hanson is just doing a cleverly postmodern bit of metadiscourse, and trying to make his own speech demonstrative of the “ironic” and “contradictory” character of the war?

This entry was posted in Politics. Bookmark the permalink.

4 Responses to Isn’t It Ironic?

  1. jfruh says:
    May 9, 2007 at 11:36 am

    Yeah, if I wanted an in-depth academic analysis of the discoure around a contemporary war, the first person I’d go to is a classicist. His commentary on 300 was totally insane, but at least his profession was relevant to it.

  2. emschwar says:
    May 9, 2007 at 1:14 pm

    Yikes. I can only hope some overambitious intern who’s practicing to be William F. Buckley, Jr. (and still needs the practice) wrote that. That horrible comma splice in the penultimate paragraph just hurts my brane. VDH himself is normally a better writer than that.

  3. hestal says:
    May 9, 2007 at 6:22 pm

    I know it is not the paragraph you mentioned, but I, unlike the politicians, pundits, and the public sure as hell have not been readjusting my position on the war.

    So why do guys like him make such sweeping statements as this: “politician, pundit and public instantaneously readjusting their positions to the perceived negative course of the war.”

    It makes no sense at all and is a waste of time.

  4. Joey Headset says:
    May 9, 2007 at 10:09 pm

    The war in Iraq is ironic — but in the Morissettian sense more than the literary sense.

    You see, the war question doesn’t invoke irony in the traditional sense. All those people who’ve died, it’s wasn’t so they could bring some truism of life into Stark Relief. The folks who’ve gotten chunks of themselves blown off: not employing some clever literary device. Like Alanis’s seminal chick-rock anthem, “Ironic”, this war is ironic only in the sense that it is pointless, miserable and (again, like the song) authored by people too stupid to know what the word irony actually means.

    In short, “IT’S LIKE RAAAEEEEAAAIN… ON YOUR WEDDDING DAAYYYY!!!!”

Comments are closed.