christopher cocca

I’ve blogged a lot about how Shepard Fairey is either the most subversive or the least ironic person on the planet. I’m happy to say he’s at it again.

For $75, you can have a t-shirt with his new Creative Commons design. Rather than write that sentence again, I’ll just encourage you to re-read it.

I support the Creative Commons. I use it. I love it. And I even think it’s worth giving money to. But come on. This should be like a pay-what-you-want Radiohead kind of thing. My contribution (I’ll claim fair use…irony!) is below:

Feel free to put that on a t-shirt. No charge.

Original story here.

“We recently got wind that some of Shepard’s Obama illustrations are being used to protest Obama’s upcoming visit to Notre Dame University. The images are being used beside those of slaves and graphic photographs of aborted fetuses. The Center for Bio-Ethical Reform Mid West is driving these billboards on semi-trucks around South Bend, Indiana and flying them from planes above the sky where the University is located. We fully support reproductive rights and in no way allowed the CBR to use these illustrations. While we completely support the first amendment, we are saddened to see people manipulate Shepard’s illustration of our President in this manner.”

Is ObeyGiant.com really upset by this?   I’m not suggesting that Shepard Fairey and his organization are kidding about being pro-choice, of course, but the fact that the renowned deconstructor of propaganda phenomenology also made the iconic image of the Obama campaign is one level of this I’ve always found compelling.  That his people are upset by the propagandization of that very image (which the AP claims was wrongly wrested from them  in the first place) is another.  This feels full-circle in a strange kind of way.   I get that the juxtaposition of the Obama images with those of slavery and abortions is jarring and I get that that’s point (speaking of phenomenology).   My own personal views about the intersection of fetal rights and progressive politics are elsewhere on this blog, but regardless of your position in that debate, don’t you find this fascinating?

This ties into the larger discussions we’ve been having about the almost-oppressive layers of irony that cover almost everything we say and our questions about the possibility of sincerity.  When we’re finally finished deconstructing and turn our energies to building,  will anyone believe us?  Will anyone trust us enough?  Or will we all be too afraid of not being in on the gag when the other shoe finally drops?  Because hasn’t it always?

Has it?

In the course of preparing this week’s edition of Blog Love (it will be up later today/tonight), I came across a post about an article in Relevant Magazine considering “the ironic generation.”   I can’t give a fair assessment of the piece because I didn’t read the whole thing.  That said, the first part of the second paragraph in the essay by Brett McCracken (and excerpted at LiturgicalCredo) is interesting:

There are reasons for our embrace of irony. We grew up in a world where earnestness failed us. Cold Wars were waged very sincerely, ideologies were bandied about with the best of intentions. Our parents married and divorced in all earnestness, and wide swaths of American homes were devastated by the sort of domestic disharmony that shattered any pretension of white-picket fence perfection.

The excerpt ends  with received language, deconstructing a construct that’s been so deconstructed already that I’m not sure the symbol is worth rehashing.  I didn’t know anyone with picket fences when I grew up in the suburbs in the 80s and 90s, but you get the point.  For me, though, two phrases here hit on something: “Cold Wars were waged very sincerely” and “our parents married and divorced in all earnestness.”

When I was in Div School I wrote a manifesto for my Pastoral Care of Young Adults (that is, 20-and-30-somethings) Class called “Incarnated In Young Adulthood.”   I’m not going to dig it up, but at that point in my devotional life and in my understanding of what made me and my friends the way we were, I looked at the lack of mentoring communities, and, specifically, the lack of some kind of constructive guidance across the generation.  Yes, we had good, caring parents in this cohort, but the overarching pressure I remember is, having deconstructed whatever it was the Boomers thought they were building and rejecting out-of-hand many of things our parents already rejected from the traditions they received, we were at a kind of end.

When the Berlin Wall and Soviet Union fell (I’m collapsing those years), some political philosophers began talking about “the end of history.”  History was defined by ideological struggle (not, as the retreating Marxists claimed, class struggle), and there seemed to be clear victors (the Western ideologies).   In the void, of course, other conflicts bred.  There is no end of history until, you know, it ends.

The end of sincerity strikes me as something different.  The Boomers deconstruct their received traditions, we deconstruct their deconstruction (that is, our received traditions: our parents’ rebellion, political optimism, materialism, the primacy of self) and so on.  And along the way so many mistakes are made by people who mean well or well mean for better outcomes than their systems wrought.  On and on it goes.  At the same time, we imbibe a million points of insincerity in popular media:  there are only so many ways to say I love you that haven’t already been overdone by John Hughes.  Face-to-face communication is recycled movie lines.  Even when we think we mean something, it’s tough to really know.  We are frustrated that there’s nothing new to say.

So some people turn to nihilism (but only in secret:  a good nihilist is anonymous by definition), many more turn to irony, but really, these are turns of the same screw.   The same with bravado.  It’s not entire coincidence that when I’m considering these things in the mid-90s, I’m also reading Beckett and Conrad in English class and listening to Oasis and Beck.  It’s all very postmodern, isn’t it, all very code-hero-safari-existential?  This is why I get cranky when people mean “nihilist” as an insult.  Aren’t all of these things, nihilism, irony, swagger, just different ways of saying we’re only kidding because kidding is all we can do?  Because shit books and romantic comedies beat us to the punches?  Isn’t it all just taking the piss out of pretension with pastiche and effigy?  Taking the piss out of pretension-by-default with pretension-on-purpose?  With winks and nudges?

And so that’s fun for a while.  But then your subversive detached-speak becomes the lingua franca.  Sounding ironic is like unto hipness and easier than ever.  It’s supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.  And so McDonald’s makes new commercials making fun of hipsters and we wink and nudge.

I’m currently reading The Furious Longing of God by Brennan Manning and will be reviewing it here soon.  So far, I’m troubled by its sincerity.  Embarrassed isn’t exactly the word, but I find myself wishing he’d show some restraint.  Put up his guard.  Not tell me so much.  I’m ill-equipped for his confessional bleeds and his conviction that if I take the words of Song of Solomon 7:10, “I am my beloved’s and his desire is for me”, personally, very personally, “the drumbeats of doom in your heart will be replaced with a song in your heart, which could lead to a twinkle in your eye” (pp. 22).  I know he means it, but it sounds so received.  I know I can’t speak like this without feeling insincere myself.

Even so, we did lectio divina a few weeks ago as the main point of our Sunday gathering and I loved it.  I loved the space and the room to breathe it gave us.  And I suppose I loved that I could share this impression or not.  But I can’t escape Manning’s piety or openness and my least favorite measure of spiritual courage, vulnerability.  It’s not that I’m against it, per se, it’s just that I’m against what most people mean when they say they appreciate experiencing the vulnerability of others in worship or in small groups or wherever.  I think there’s a certain piety in keeping some things close, don’t you?  And a certain wisdom?

I don’t know that our generation (let’s say 20-40 year-olds, though McCraken has it starting with people who are currently 15) is incapable of sincerity, but I struggle with finding ways to sound sincere in person and in my writing because of all that’s come already.  Because of all the cliches we all know so well.  Because we know in ways different than our parents that being earnest isn’t enough, that being sure of our convictions doesn’t make them right, that having money doesn’t make us happy, that doing drugs actually kills people.  That being detached and ironic isn’t patent rudeness but also isn’t always funny.  That being clever is lazy.

Maybe I expect spiritual fulfillment to be harder than grace.  Maybe that’s because human relationships, our only model, are so goddamn vexing.  And maybe that’s why I think, in the end, grace is all we can hope for.  That we the vexing and vexed can’t really help how far away we want or need to keep him.  This is a problem for Christians whose God comes kicking and screaming to earth in placenta.  I get that.

When I was at Yale, David Bartlett told our expository preaching class that it was all well and good that we walked around campus with our devotion to irony firmly intact, that we were ironic about the things we were supposed to be there doing, but to remember that there are people whose lives literally depend on the words we bring them.  That when we’re honest, we admit that ours do, too, and if we’d ever let our guard down for even a moment we’d be crushed and destroyed by that need.  He was imploding our irony by saying what it was: defense, a coping system.  Something we used as a buffer, something smoothing the edges of our heady but also primal pursuits and longings.

Our trade in irony betrays our need for something bigger than the human systems, emotions, and words we’ve deemed played out.  For some it’s nihilism and for others irony begets itself.  For some it’s swagger or humility.  The code-hero-safari-existential.  All of these things, maybe.  Does our sense that something’s wrong mean that there’s right to be fought for or found?  My gut says yes. And my gut says there’s a God and God is patient.

Remember when Shephard Fairey’s biggest headache was Vince McMahon?  This week he’s being sued (?) by the AP and getting arrested by the Boston Police Department.  

Ryan Stout posted a new Kierkegaard quote on facebook:

“Since my earliest childhood a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it stays I am ironic; if it is pulled out I shall die.”

Love that.

Can you remember the very first television ad you saw embracing the “we’re hip because we’re ironically detached and you are, too” model? I’m guessing the trend started around 2000 in little bits and pieces (because it was heavy in the culture for at least half a decade before that), unless you count the old Mentos commercials, but those weren’t done that way on purpose. At least not at first.

Marketing models follow culture (very rarely do they create it), and as the mainstream outgrows its appreciation of all things clever (and self-conscious, self-referential literature gets prepped for its place on “I Heart the 2000s”), the ads will swing back toward realism (loosely defined). Old Navy dropped the Morgan Fairchild schtick some time ago. Are mainstream agents and publishing houses still looking for it? Probably, which probably means you shouldn’t be.

The “From The Comments” pick from Friday at 100 Word Stories was good, not because it was clever or funny, but because this is how people talk and it’s fruitless. I love the deconstruction of repetitive small-talk and consensus in this piece. It makes me wish Beckett wrote scores of 100 word stories.

Today’s prompt at 100 Word Stories is “write something with a hidden message in it.”

Vote for/rate my attempt here.