7.16.2006
Abortions Are Awesome!
Salon and everyone else is having a good laugh at the pro-life blogger who mistook the 7-year-old Onion.com spoof "I'm Totally Psyched About This Abortion!" at face value on his blog last week. His recent update to his July 6 post (WARNING: gruesome picture) features an aborted fetus and the caption "Can you face the truth? This is what you all are laughing at." But I don't think that's what anybody's laughing at. We're laughing at the fact that a self-righteous right winger didn't get a complex joke about self-righteous right wingers (and continues to miss the point, which only makes him look sillier and crazier). In the Onion article, the writer says things like, "I don't care what they say: It's worth it for all the fun and laughs I'm going to have at the clinic." That must mean that abortions are awesome!
Irony is defined as "An expression or utterance marked by a deliberate contrast between apparent and intended meaning." During some recent research on irony I also came across a further qualifier: usually irony rests on the assumption of a person, however unlikely, that would hold the apparent meaning as true. In an ironic utterance, that person is the object of mockery, and in this case he actually showed up to be lambasted in person. The whole thing raises an interesting possibility to me. What if non-right wing fanatics all started posing as right wing fanatics? Heck, what if they started posing as the soulless, flaky pinkos that fundamentalists perceive them to be? What if parody, rather than defensive posturing, became the language of the socially minded? I would vote for an ironist, and I think that socially minded parties have done themselves a great disservice by acceeding that language has a fixed meaning. People like Jack Layton (and John Kerry) have inadvertently turned the left into a wannabe right. Why not put them on our grounds for a change? I'm totally cereal.
By the way, I'll be hosting my first ever "Eat the Irish" luncheon this weekend, and you're all invited.
