Living in an Ironical Time

A few years ago, after what we now refer to as 9/11, someone declared that irony was no longer possible. It reminded me of the academic who proclaimed in the early 1990s that history was at an end. Of course, no one with any sense of history would ever make either pronouncement. We've seen better times and worse, and no doubt we will again. But these days irony seems a natural response not so much to the world, but to the way the world is portrayed in our media, new and old.

I was searching for a way to comment on this very unoriginal observation, when I came across the following passage in Joseph Mitchell's Up in the Old Hotel, the book that has kept me company most of the summer. This is from a chapter called "Dragger Captain" in The Bottom of the Harbor, a collection Mitchell first published in 1960. He's writing about an old Connecticut sea captain and fisherman named Ellery Thompson. Here's the passage that spoke to me:

Ellery is companionable but reserved. He often sits out a weathery day in the dock shack with other draggermen, listening with enjoyment to the trade gossip and the story-telling but saying little himself. When he does get into a talking mood, much of what he says is ironical. He is deeply skeptical. He once said that the older he gets the more he is inclined to believe that humanity is helpless. "I read the junk in the papers," he said, "and sometimes, like I'm eating in some eating joint and I can't help myself, I listen to the junk on the radio, and the way it looks to me, it's blind leading blind out of the frying pan into the fire, world without end. It's like me and Doc Clendening. There used to be a department in the New London Day called 'Diet and Health.' It was run by Dr. Logan Clendening, and he was always bright and cheerful. 'Keep smiling!' he'd say. 'Worry will kill you. A good hearty laugh,' he'd say, 'is the best medicine. If you've got high blood pressure, laugh! If you've got low blood pressure, laugh! The more you laugh, the longer you'll live.' When I was down in the dumps, I always enjoyed 'Diet and Health.' It was the first thing I'd turn to. It cheered me up. And then one day I picked up the paper and it said that 'Diet and Health' wouldn't appear no more because Dr. Clendening had cut his throat."

"Blind leading blind out of the frying pan into the fire." Or as someone I know always says, "The world's going to hell in a handbasket." Or as someone else puts it, "We're surrounded by idiots; the inmates have taken over the asylum." But as I said, these are ironical times.