From Salon Because I doubt shallow cynicism ever really did dominate the national mood, I'm happy to join in the chorus of goodbyes to the über-smartass, the kind of "ironist" so detached that heart and head were all but amputated.
Which, hopefully, now opens the way to a golden age of irony. The real stuff. The kind of irony that drove Socrates' queries, the irony that lies at the heart of much great literature and great religion, the irony that pays attention to contradictions and embraces paradoxes, rather than wishing them away in an orgy of purpose and certainty. Whoever named Bush's still murky plan of retaliation "Infinite Justice" was dangerously devoid of irony, not to mention a sense of Islamic theology.

Here is one dictionary definition of irony: "Incongruity between actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result." That kind of irony might note that America, for all its effort to shine a beacon of freedom throughout the world, is seen as an imperial oppressor by large swaths of the Islamic world. That kind of irony would wonder if in this new battle on behalf of freedom, we may rush to strip away civil liberties. That kind of irony would wonder whether this new kind of war, waged to make us safe from terrorist attacks, might plunge the world into a far more dangerous conflagration.

To note these ironies is to engage yourself in the grave purpose at hand and take some responsibility for helping to think it through -- and that's the opposite of ironic detachment.

Call it, then, Ironic Engagement. One 20-something who championed this is Randolph Bourne, a member of Generation Lost who died of influenza in 1918 at the close of the First World War. Bourne had opposed that war and predicted a spiral of more bloodshed to grow out of it. A brilliant social critic credited by some with fathering America's counterculture, Bourne considered his sharpest tool irony. "The ironic life is a life keenly alert, keenly sensitive, reacting promptly with feelings of liking or dislike to each bit of experience, letting none of it pass without interpretation and assimilation, a life full and satisfying -- indeed a rival of the religious life."

"The ironist is ironical," declared Bourne, "not because he does not care, but because he cares too much."