Off the front burner...
Michael Kelly takes the occasion of Memorial Day to deliver another "time to get serious" message and to reflect on the Sontag-istas once again, and on the futility of trying to respond to today's situations with yesterday's tired old tricks:
did you notice how absolutely irrelevant and inconsequential it all felt? One's lasting reaction was not outrage at all, but a mild embarrassment mixed with a strong sense of temporal dislocation, of the sort occasioned by catching a glimpse of Jerry Lewis on television. It is a sense of: You're still here? You're still talking? Why? The most obvious fact about the people who bravely-- oh, so bravely, so bravely-- dared to tell truth to power in the New York Review of Books and London Review of Books, and the Cosmic Review of Blah-blah, was how old they were.Old, old, old. Also, tired, tired, tired... this is our Old Guard now.
Or as Kelly puts it: "you can take seriously, or pretend to take seriously, the likes of Chomsky--or the likes of Gephardt--when you can afford to. But that sort of thing is a frivolity, of a grim sort, for a frivolous time."
Despite the gratuitous slap at Gephardt (who is hardly in the same category) he's right. I feel a bit guilty admitting it, but I believe I'm not alone: I kind of miss frivolity's brief reign. Never has it been so easy to be right about what was on the front burner in the culture war, as well as in the real war: all you had to do is pull a quotation from the latest column by the resuscitated dinosaur of the day, arm it with an ironic caption, and stand back to watch it self-destruct before the eyes of the reader. Of course, we've still got the Guardian. But generally, you have to work a little harder now. Anyway, it's amazing how quickly the nostalgia-go-round goes by.
(via Bill Quick)
Posted by Dr. Frank at May 29, 2002 11:14 AM | TrackBack