The return of irony

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The return of irony

For a long time now I’ve been convinced that irony is dead. And satire is not much better off. Thanks to the religious right and its influence on education, we have become a nation of literalists. God created the world in six days, and everything that came after that is susceptible to no interpretation at all. We all know now that good is right and evil is left; that the world is Zoroastrian after all, and that some of us are moral and some of us are nihilistic pagan pigs, and that’s the way it will always be.

That’s also why we keep pulling the levers or touching our Diebold screens for Republicans. They’re good, they’re moral and they’re all Christians. Or most of them are Christians. It turns out that George Allen is Jewish, but he’d rather not confront that canoodle, since it may cost him votes in that most Christian of states – Virginia.

Now it seems, however, that one of Florida’s finest, the Republican representative from Palm Beach, has changed the script. Rep. Mark Foley, it appears, has taken it upon himself to “mentor” page boys for the House of Representatives. What his mentoring apparently consisted of was writing e-mails and instant messages to teenage male pages about their sexual proclivities, their state of undress, their erotic impulses in response to his interest in masturbation and other such things that pages are required to fess up to in order to serve in the House under, if you’ll pardon the expression, Representative Foley.

What’s interesting is that the Archbishop of the House, Dennis Hastert, knew about Mr. Foley’s mentoring for weeks, if not months and did nothing about it. Now, all of a sudden, when Foley’s machinations become public, and the e-mail containing his plucky probes of some young man are posted on the ABC News website, Hastert and his Republican moralists are outraged.

Or hung on their own petard, if we must summon up clichés. But then, our entire government is one colossal corrupt cliché, so why not? Anyway, Hastert, once he got wind of the brouhaha Foley’s sexual silliness was raising throughout the country started bloviating about what an evil thing this was and that, had Foley not resigned, he would have tossed him out of the House immediately.

In other words, what was wrong about all this was not that Foley was mewing over pages, but rather that someone opened up the can and let the worms out.

And this is when irony was reborn big time. Ever since the Republicans and their theocratic thugs on the right have come into power, they’ve been targeting gays and homosexuality as the next best thing to Osama bin Laden and his terrorists. Constitutional amendments barring gays from marriage have circled the Senate like hawks for years. Scientific research dealing with any study mentioning gays and lesbians has been banned, and Republicans in state legislatures have been urged to do everything but insist on tattooing gays with pink triangles. Any sexual activity is evil, but gay sexual activity or gay relationships are simply the work of the devil.

Yet, whether it be in Washington state or Washington DC, the vast majority of politicians caught fraternizing with boys sub rosa, or sub computer, are Republicans.

More ironic is the fact that in the convoluted complex of ethics that is the world of Republicanism, being caught writing e-mails to boys and covering it up appears to be a worse crime than getting warnings from George Tenet of the CIA before 9/11 and sitting on them to the point of our own destruction. That’s what Condi Rice did, but are they going to summarily dismiss her? Not on your life.

When you come right down to it, what Foley did would be meaningless in a society that wasn’t scared to death of sex and sexual activity. From the e-mail posted on the ABC News website, it would appear that Foley was having a consensual chat about things sexual with someone who was totally willing for such chats to occur.

But so overriding is our shame and guilt when it comes to discussing matters of sex, genitalia or anything else having to do with the pleasures of the human body that it trumps things that are far more evil, but which are given a pass because we’re willing to let our political leaders ride roughshod over us as a result of the irrational fear they’ve inculcated in us in the name of 9/11.

In one of the plays of the Greek comic playwright Aristophanes, a father is angry with his friend because he hasn’t praised and diddled with his son’s genitalia. In America in 2006 we consider people who would do such diddling sludge and send them off to alcoholic rehab centers.

But we seem to have no problem with allowing our political system and our system of government to become so corrupt as to be unrecognizable. Our legislators work for and are paid by corporations and special interest groups. Our president, vice president and cabinet members are addicted to spying, lies, deceit and cover-ups, and our judicial branch is now packed with right wing ideologues.

And if that’s not ironic, I don’t know what is.

October 4, 2006