Irony, fear and the sentimentality of terrorism
It seems odd in this era of “pervasive cultural irony” (David Foster Wallace) that Americans are so prone to sentimentality. We have been schooled to be cool with the shocking, the disgusting, the daring, the outrageous–to strike postures of ironic detachment and to mask our true feelings by displaying their opposite: indifference, say, for disappointment or amusement for anger. Having recently attended a reading featuring the poetry and fiction of undergraduates, I submit as anecdotal evidence a roomful of students and professors who winced not a whit as bland and clinical reportage about post-adolescent sexual experimentation was lauded as literary art. In such a setting the desire to know what the students actually longed to say is met by what Wallace says is irony’s always unspoken answer: “How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.”
And then something happens like a terrorist bombing at the Boston marathon, and our “hip fatigue” (Wallace again) snaps out of itself, turns on the TV, and gets with the program. Our cynical knowingness meets our deep insecurity–our fear that we are not safe, that the world is a precarious place and not simply the site onto which we map our rebel cool.
And yet even this fear is out of proportion, a mismatch for what we can’t turn away from on our screens. Our exaggerated sense of the risk of terrorism leads us to villify whole ethnic groups. It instills an unquestioning reverence for the nonsense that comes out of so-called experts on terror in the corporate media. Americans are, as Wallace notes, united more by common images than by common beliefs, and thus the iconography of terrorism–video and still shots of the maimed and dead, of airplanes slamming into towers, all played on an endless loop on TV–makes of us fearful practitioners of American civil religion, the central tenet of which seems to be that we are an exceptional people whose suffering is always exceptional and whose public lamenting of our exceptional suffering must go on and on and on. (And on some more).
