Without Any Sense of Irony

Without any sense of irony, Trump announced from Mar-a-Lago that federal workers could not work remotely.

In E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction (1990), the great and tragic David Foster Wallace wrote that irony is “not a rhetorical mode that wears well. . . . This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. . . . Irony is singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisy it debunks.” Wallace makes reference to Third World coups overthrowing corrupt hypocritical regimes without establishing a superior governing alternative. “All U.S. irony is based on an implicit ‘I don’t really mean what I am saying.’ So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say?”

Without any sense of irony, Trump blocks refugees into the United States but maintains that other countries should take in the people of Gaza. There is a lot of sparsely settled land fifty miles west of Mar-a-Lago that could easily settle a million Gazans. And if Trump thinks the Gazans would not like the Florida humidity, there is a lot of arid land in west Texas, Arizona, and Nevada where they could be settled. Of course, some of this is Native American land, but when has that ever stopped us?

Hair We Go!

We attorneys love to draw distinctions between situations. A precedent does not apply, we argue, because that situation is different from that of my client.  The spouse, although not having gone to law school, seems to have picked up the lawyerly trait. For example, when she looks at my disheveled, gray, wispy hair, and I say that the hairdo was good enough for Einstein, she draws a distinction.

Is this another reason to distrust the Bible? Proverbs 20:29 says, “The glory of young men is their strength, but the beauty of old men is their gray hair.”

The spouse did not want to go out last night, but her hair looked too good to stay home.

Super Bowl Retribution

I root against both Kansas City and the Eagles, so I may not watch the football game. Even so, I wonder if this will apply to the Super Bowl: “Philadelphia, where no good deed goes unpunished.” Steve Lopez, The Philadelphia Inquirer, January 15, 1995. Quoted in Craig Johnson, Kindness Goes Unpunished.

Trans—gression

During the election season in Pennsylvania with contested presidential, Senate, and House races, I saw ad after ad of candidates seeking votes by promising to stand up to the trans people, focusing particularly on trans girls in girls’ sports. I wondered at the time how many transgender athletes are in girl sports and asked Siri. She gave me links to news articles that said that in 2023 there were maybe 100 in college sports and five in K-12. Five.

In the picture I saw of Trump signing an executive order seeking to end transgender girls playing sports showed him, pen in hand, surrounded by a crowd of pre-teen girls. I noted to myself that those girls in the signing photo are much more likely to encounter an abusive coach than compete with or against a transgender female. Oh, wait. They were standing next to a sexual abuser.