Irony and Druids
I read a lovely piece in the Guardian this week – http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/30/enough-irony-art-eurovision?INTCMP=SRCH talking about the horrors of modern irony. As a culture, we embrace the idea of things that are ‘so bad they’re good’. Starting from hideous incompetence, painful mediocrity and other such shortcomings, we can make a TV program by mocking the afflicted and having a laugh at their expense. What it gets us is a hollow sort of thing, joyless, destructive, and facilitating the use of worthless rubbish as ‘entertainment’. The writer concluded by saying that the most subversive thing a person can do in this climate, is really care about something.
To my mind, the old fashioned, Druidic image of satire and irony is a good one. It should be there to bring down the pompous, not to bolster them up. Irony should be used on politicians, journalists, anyone whose trade involves too much power and not enough value. Irony and the laughter it draws are the weapons of the powerless against tyrants and fools. This is important work. But when the reality is that we are spoon-fed rubbish and told to feel smugly superior in face on it, that’s not proper irony. It’s just allowing people to sell us facile nonsense. And of course the person who does not get the joke, the person who goes ‘that is a crock of shit’ can be knocked down for not being cool enough. The Emperor has no clothes on.
I am not cool. I am not even slightly interested in being cool, or having people think me cool. I want funny things to laugh at, and soulful things to be moved by. I want to care, not only about my real(ish) life, but also about the unreal things that are offered to me for my amusement. I’ve been accused of being a snob plenty of times mind – for not liking computer games, or predictable genre fiction, for not being tolerant enough of other people’s innocent pleasures. Part of the problem is, I don’t see the innocence. Hours spent killing imaginary people in computer games does not seem innocent to me. It seems like a way of desensitising a person to violence. I am never going to be persuaded that violence is fun. Nor do I think that the five minute celebrity cult of reality TV is innocent. The less said about manufactured pop-disasters massacring old songs in the pop charts, the better. This whole approach to entertainment stifles creativity. You can’t feed off the old stuff forever, but X-factor and its conies make it harder for real artists and creators to get a look in. How do you compete with someone who gets that much screen time?
So you won’t catch me celebrating much as being ‘so bad, it’s good’. It’s such an easy way of justifying rubbish. It’s lazy. I’m much more interested in the idea of things that are inherently good. So many people don’t seem to believe in that ideal any more. I’d like something so good, it’s great. Something so good in makes me laugh until I worry about wetting myself, or cry until snot comes out of my nose. I want something so good that the awe of it literally knocks the breath out of my body.
When I saw the painting ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ for the first time, in Bristol, I was reduced to tears. I don’t want to be cool, I want to be overwhelmed with emotion, inspired to new heights of passion and sensitivity. I care, and I care about a lot of things. Crap irritates me. Dull, predictable, low quality things irritate me. Give me something unpolished and heartfelt any day. I’ll listen to a middle aged man singing the folk song he loves any day in preference to some bling laden girl prancing on the TV mangling some variation on a theme of ‘ooh, ahh, baby, yeah’. It doesn’t have to be shiny, to be good. It needs to be cared about. Enough of the unsatisfying surfaces, I want something real.
That’s why you’ll find me hanging about with pagans and steampunks, with artists, bards, musicians, people who dare to care about what they do. The good stuff is out there, it just takes a bit of finding.
