Irony Sufficiency

I am a big fan of irony, as a literary device. I enjoy its use by writers and I employ it liberally myself virtually every, time I put pen to paper. Saying what you mean, and meaning what you say, are overrated virtues, and directness and sincerity the strict province of untutored naïfs whose inability to couch their intent safely beneath multiple layers of cryptic misdirection screams their lack of sophistication and wit. Even composing something as straightforward as a shopping list, I will salt the slate of necessities with items I have no intention of buying, creating the impression that this could be the list of someone else entirely, someone needing anchovy paste, tampons, and diet wine. I find it personally amusing and besides, there may come a time when I need to disavow authorship of the list. You never know.

Irony can be as broad or as subtle as you want to make it, though the more nuanced it is, the less likely you are to be appreciated for your wit. The bane of the ironist is to be taken seriously and/or at face value, which to him makes him no different from a sign painter or drafter of technical manuals. Although, there is some satisfaction to be derived from describing someone to be, say, "very smart", when you are actually saying they are "very dumb," only they are too dumb to realize they are not being complimented but mocked. Sometimes being the only person to grasp your ironical brilliance is its own onanistic reward.

Viewing the world through an ironic lens and applying that vision to one's writing and speech is an honorable and worthwhile pursuit, but I'm not sure about recent trends toward “ironic” habiliments, accouterments, and appurtenances. 

For instance, there is evidently a thing called an “ironic mustache” which is indistinguishable from a real mustache except it's adorning the lip of some hipster deriding the concept of this macho signifier beloved of cops, firefighters, gay men, Mexican drug lords, and 70s porn stars by splashing one directly on his decidedly UN-macho trendy-ass mug, creating a sort of Dadaesque contextual anomaly and amusing his friends for several minutes, after which he just becomes a guy with a mustache. Talk about your shaggy-dog stories. The punchline hardly justifies the weeks-long setup, and unless Mr. Mustache completely sequesters himself during its developmental stages, it is diluted to a nearly total degree. The full impact of the “stache will only be felt by strangers who, not knowing how cool he actually is, will just presume he is a haunter of public restrooms. He probably gives himself a good laugh whenever he looks in the mirror, though.

Then there is the curious case of the trucker hat, a clear and absurd example of irony gone haywire.

The trucker hat, if you don't know, is like an uncool, low-class version of the ball cap so ubiquitous among American men since whenever. With its plastic mesh back, blocky foam crown, and flat bill, it was made to ride higher on the head than the low-profile curved-bill style of Dudeworld. The fronts advertise auto parts or feed stores and other redneck-intensive places, and they are given away as  promotional items. Pretty much the uncoolest accessory imaginable, being cheap, tacky, and associated with truckers, who may be necessary as hell but are definitely not cool.

Enter some wry tastemaker around the turn of the century who happened to notice both the trucker hat and the fact that he was the farthest thing from a Skoal-dippin' gearjammer imaginable, and you had the beginnings of a viral trend. He interpreted the contrast between his own terminal hipness and the cheesiness of the hat as together, a cleverly ironic statement, and apparently the world agreed because trucker hats forthwith became the accessory of choice for trendfollowers the world over. Truckers from I-95 to I-5 collectively continued driving.

Naturally, hats from Bubba's Bait and Tackle were immediately supplanted by fifty-dollar reimaginings of the form from Von Dutch and other trendy outfitters. This was the beginning of the end as the fad quickly burned itself out, and it wasn't long before the trucker hat was passé and anyone still sporting one hopelessly gauche. End of story, right?

Not so fast. The postmortem was barely complete when some young Hollywood hotshot showed up at an event just as big as life, trucker hat cocked at an insouciant angle and strutting like a rooster. The people whose unfortunate duty it is to monitor and report on these kinds of things, rather than castigate the punk for his blatant faux pas, chose to interpret the gaffe as a bold, “post-ironic” swipe at the fashion world. Post-ironic? Okay, first it's lame, then ironic, then hip, then lame again, and now it has somehow rediscovered its ironic tone, I guess through the double negative of two distinct degrees of lameness, one its original condition and the other a post-hip playedness.

I get it, I guess. That's a tad more layered complexity than I really need in a head covering, but fine. As long as the cognoscenti are all agreed on what chapter of the subtext to refer to in qualifying the intent of the trucker-hatted, the whole business fits pretty well into the whole 21st-century zeitgeist. We can all now resume normal operations and stop worrying about what Ashton Kutcher has on his head.

But wait, there's more, and it is important for me to clearly state that I am not making this up. Two years ago, a writer for a fashion magazine labeled trucker hats “post-post-ironic.” Rather than attempt to make sense out of that twaddle, which I have about as much chance of doing as puzzling out Fermat's Last Theorem, I'll just wish the deconstructionists good luck with a situation that has clearly exceeded the bounds of reasonable discourse.

Some time ago I thought I'd make a personal ironic fashion statement of my own by incorporating images of Hello Kitty into my persona, figuring the juxtaposition of hard-ass convict and cheerful cartoon innocence made for a pretty good joke. I'm not sure what other people thought about it, but as time went on it became clear to me that the joke, if ever it was one, had run its course and it was time to face the unassailable truth: I had simply fallen under the spell of Hello Kitty.

Having done so, I needed to reassess my original intent and decide if it was in fact an ironic contradiction I intended portraying or if that was just cover for my understandable admiration of that irresistibly iconic kitty. I find her presence soothing, comforting, and in no way reflective of any lack of masculinity or sanity. I doubt that Hello Kitty, as décor or ornament, is any weirder than, say,  camouflage, whose ubiquitous urban presence has the exact opposite effect from camo's intended purpose. Now that's ironic.