Isn't it ironic

My childhood: a study in unironic tie-dye.

Remember when irony wasn't a thing? Or if it was a thing, it was a dramatic thing? Saved only for moments of sheer theatricality. So far as I know, it didn't come in the form of skinny jeans and mustaches and vinyl and expensive espresso. Somewhere along the way, irony came to replace nostalgia and sentimentality. It was a way of recalling the past by making fun of it. It's something we all do, almost mechanically.

I recall an old friend from abroad whose layers of sarcasm were piled so thick that I could rarely understand what he was saying. There were jokes, but they were dark, and there were cutting, knowing observations, and there was bitterness, and there was anger, and at the very heart of it all, a kind of sadness so entirely swaddled in emotion that it would spill out at the most unexpected moments, little bursts of honesty that when unfurled, would wipe away all the bullshit. It was those moments that made him my friend. There was a brilliance to the way he cloaked it all in, an irony to his self-deprecation and occasional malevolence, and yet it was an irony I have yet to truly understand.

I wonder, though, if things in him had settled, and if all the caustic one-liners were swept away, if we had been better friends.

I've written before that irony is a thing that emerged in my generation in response to eight years of George W. Bush. I still believe this, and feel within me a deep-seated sense of political unrest whenever I think of those eight long years. Perhaps because that era is over, and because my personal life has achieved some semblance of stability, I don't burn with that glimmer of political dramatics the way I once did.

It's still curious, then, that during that period irony transformed into a cultural aesthetic, one that can be spotted cycling through San Francisco's Mission District on a fixie, sipping a four-dollar espresso, sporting expensive jeans with carefully-torn holes on the knees. But I could be wrong; surely I am. Some of them wear tie-dye.

On politics and pretzels

Sometimes, when reading the newspaper or listening to President Obama's voice boom confidently through the nightly news, I have to stop myself and think, what year is it again? Was the Bush administration really so long ago, or does time pass faster when competency reigns?

It's funny, remembering how much of my adolescence and young adult years were spent either fervently protesting against or shying away from our government and its faulty representatives. One of my dearest high school friends recently contacted me after stumbling across a column I had written in our 2002 school newspaper. I don't remember the column's full title, but I'm quite sure that the words "Good ole GW" and "pretzel" were in there somewhere. Remember when he choked on a pretzel and that made the news? Remember that?

I received my first "hate" mail after the publication of that 500-word essay. We were required to let the student in question, a girl whose name I remember but won't share, print her own rebuttal editorial. I kind of admired her for that, though it stung because her political party was still frustratingly in power, and would be for far longer than we could imagine, even then. But what felt the best was knowing that no matter what she said or did, no one could deny that George Bush had faced down the dangers of a carby treat and had lived to tell the tale. There were bruises - again, this was news.


Photo credit: BBC

We wonder now why irony has become such a popular literary trend. For those of us who came of age during the Bush administration, who protested weekly after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, who wrote snarky editorials and campaigned for Kerry, and yes, maybe even Gore--irony was not a choice. It was our default, and it had to be.

Years later, facing one of the most tragic economic depressions in recent American history, we plod on, though I don't feel the same need for irony. Obama isn't perfect, but he's assertive and diplomatic, and he's never made the headlines for indigestion. Hamburgers at local joints, yes, but he manages somehow to always keep them down.