We live in a culture set off by quotation marks. Irony is our defining trope, enveloping my own generation and circumscribing those generations after my own so definitively that I fear many of us are unable to distinguish the truth. Last night I caught about an hour or so of a PBS documentary on the American folk singer Pete Seeger. Although this was not my first exposure to Seeger, I found myself listening skeptically to all he had to say: his earnest, direct speech seemed too good to be true. Surely another agenda must be at work, I thought. But as the documentary focused on his involvement in the civil rights movement, it occurred to me that he was one of the last of an earlier generation that embarrasses us for its peculiarly forthright nature. Would a widespread civil rights movement be possible today, I wondered? Would Americans of different political motives and inclinations be wiling to come together for a common cause in 2008? It is hard to imagine.
The Obama campaign seems to represent for many Americans a return to positively pronounced political values. Whereas irony negates definite meaning, his campaign (ostensibly, at least) defines itself by a direct expression of intention, unfettered by the bitter partisanship of the last decade and a half. The notion that we might link ourselves in a common chain of shared aspirations, simply put, rings true for many of us. The Clinton campaign, by contrast, seems less affirmative, in part because it appears to be connected to the past. This is the problem of irony: no matter what is uttered in the moment, the past always awakens to overwhelm the meanings expressed in the present tense. Thus novelty seems true, and the familiar false.
