Irony? What's that? This is so educational!

I’m part of the tail end of the generation labeled Gen X, which was really the first generation in recent memory to adopt irony as a stance. In my early twenties I would routinely be told by people that I was the most sarcastic person they’d ever met. Even now my humor sometimes lapses into well-timed, sardonic one-liners designed to deflate egos and elicit uncomfortable laughter from listeners.

Um, Kamina, this is a cool moment and all, but you're naked. And you're wearing a midget mole pig over your crotch.

Irony was our way of coping with our largely impotent fury at the state of things around us. Postmodernism and radical relativism was all the rage, a way of rebelling against the ‘right way’ imposed on us by the over-eager Baby Boomer generation, an intellectual way of being conscientious objectors. Why conform when conformity was just as empty and pointless as nonconformity?

Pop culture was infected by irony. Shows like Daria and Buffy the Vampire Slayer made it cool to be distinct and separate from the quarterback-and-cheerleader popular crowd. Grunge made it cool to wear ill-fitting flannel shirts and sport shaggy hairdos stuck in the awkward phase between short-cropped preppy and glam-rock locks. Gen X kids were suspicious, often rightly so, of anything that presented itself as the right way in the upbeat, earnest, ‘let’s go gang!’ attitude so fashionable in the 80s, saw it as naïve, self-absorbed, even greedy and materialistic. There was a reason we were called the Slacker Generation by our elders: We didn’t buy the polished, glossy consumerist dream sold by mass media, saw it as shallow and superficial (two of the worst insults Gen X could hurl at anything) and we fought against it with our most devastating weapon: Irony.

Unfortunately, when the dust settled and we were done demolishing the Yuppie Dream, we discovered we had nothing to replace it.

So why are there pictures of Kamina, Kintaro, and Captain Jack Sparrow on this post?

These characters, who clearly stand apart from the herd (so far apart that they’re considered idiots, weirdos, and even deviants), didn’t get the Irony memo. They’re obviously nonconformists, but they do it without the hip irony most nonconformists adopt as an ego defense. Kamina is such a glorious idiot that the social pressure to ‘succeed’, that is, become an influential and upstanding member of his little cave-dwelling community doesn’t bother him in the slightest. Kintaro gave up a secure career as a law graduate from Tokyo University because of his addiction to learning, despite being continually underestimated as a consequence. And Jack is too busy being cool to be worried about looking foolish.

It's hard to keep an ironic distance when you're running away from savage cannibals.

So what am I saying?

Yes, the monoculture is stupid, superficial, and shallow, forcing its participants to march lock-step, shoulder to shoulder, or risk being mocked for being ‘different’, for not watching the right shows and movies, for reading the wrong books, for engaging in forms of entertainment it cannot understand or simply refuses to understand. And yes, it is extremely entertaining to stand on the sidelines and mock the ‘robots’ and rest in the knowledge that you and your friends are so much deeper, so much more intellectual and profound, so much more tragically hip.

But it doesn’t change anything.

Irony as an affectation is just as robotic a response as blind conformity. And it’s a response borne out of fear, the fear of being mocked yourself. You’re a non-conformist? You’re apart from the herd? Act like it. Stand out. Be mocked and ridiculed for it by people who are too cool or too afraid to do what you do. Otherwise all you’re doing is seeking safety in a different herd, one that reads Derrida, watches machinima, and listens to obscure J-rock bands.

Lead from the front. Or get back in line.

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