Stop This Horrible Scourge Before It Destroys Us All! AMERICA'S WAR ON IRONY
By James Poniewozik

(FORTUNE Magazine) – "I can't, uh, really define irony," says Winona Ryder in the 1994 movie Reality Bites, "but I know it when I see it!" Thus this spokeswoman for her generation launched the decade's tradition of misunderstanding the I-word that runs through Alanis Morissette's anthem "Ironic" to Jedediah Purdy, the newly anointed 24-year-old Carry Nation of America's rising temperance movement against a literary device.

For some time we've seen stirrings of anti-snideness sentiment from such disparate quarters as David Foster Wallace, Beck, and even Entertainment Weekly, but Purdy, in his sour tract For Common Things, has taken them one step further, establishing once and for all the connection between Jerry Seinfeld--whom he identifies as the ultimate symbol of this scourge--and the strip-mining of West Virginia. Irony as it is actually defined is a device by which a statement expresses something other than its literal meaning (contra Morissette, it is not like "a black fly in your chardonnay"). But Purdy's "irony" is a mishmash of cynicism, nastiness, selfishness, self-awareness, individualism, apathy: a catchall for every meretricious modern attitude that goes against the communitarian world-view of the Appalachian back-to-the-land hamlet where he was (you guessed it) home-schooled. (Purdy later went to Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard, whose highfalutin snideness shocked him to his earnest core.)

There is a mocking and a serious answer to Purdy. He may prefer the mocking--in his book and interviews he offers preemptive scoldings of those who "belittle" others and suspect others' motives. But the serious answer is the more damaging: Purdy fails to make the case even against his own ersatz definition of irony, to show why a lack of Jedediacal zeal means a lack of scruple. He simply, arrogantly believes there is no way of expressing ideals other than his own starchy one. In fact, irony--or sarcasm or self-awareness or whatever Purdy's getting at--is at best a form of protest. Forget Shakespeare and Swift: Even irony as practiced by David Letterman (a favorite target of Purdy's predecessors, like the more articulate Wallace) doesn't mean nihilism. Letterman's, at best, is a genuine response to the fakery and crassness of the entertainment biz. That he expresses it this way, rather than, say, by withdrawing to till a hillside in the Blue Ridge Mountains, is not necessarily a loss for the rest of us who remain to engage with the evil world.

Purdy's anti-irony screed--most of which is actually devoted to homilies on strip mining, bioengineering, and rural public schools--is really an old-fashioned agrarian manifesto, full of suspicion for the decadent, oversophisticated metropolitans, who, in this version, have led everyone to adopt a world-weary, seen-it-all pose, dismissing and thus condoning global ills with a knowing smirk. Purdy's heartfelt entreaties cloak a narrow-minded, condescending intellectual bullying that reaches the unoriginal conclusion that the world's failure to adopt the author's own program must be a sign of pervasive cultural sickness. A thoughtful, decent person not brainwashed by Jerry Seinfeld could not but share Purdy's beliefs about forest conservation and genetic science. And if you don't, well, how sad for you.

Which brings us to the mocking answer: For Common Things is, finally, an inadvertent, horrifying caution against not irony but...home schooling. It's the scandalized work of a young man evidently raised far too long among "like-minded neighbors" without the salutary experience of being laughed at (that is, having his moral certitude challenged), then released to a cruel world shouldering a rucksack full of rectitude and the name Jedediah. To mock thus is to prove Purdy's well-inoculated point. But the truth, as Jedediah Purdy would do well to learn someday, actually is sometimes said in jest.

--James Poniewozik

JAMES PONIEWOZIK is a staff writer and TV critic at Time magazine.