Summary: Friends and I gave a ride to a hitchhiking teen last week. The conversation was difficult because we couldn't hear her. Between our aging ears, the rumble of the car and her nearly inaudible mumbles, her ideas just weren't getting through. She had to say everything twice or more. I remember mumbling inaudibly at her age. It was how I coped with my fundamental uncertainty. I anticipated myself saying something stupid I'd want to retract. Once your foot is in your mouth though, there’s no getting it out gracefully so I’d speak half-heartedly and half-vocally. People would ask me to repeat myself. The mumbled, inaudible first pass was like a rehearsal, a half-inflated trial balloon floated low and wavery in the strong gusts of adult conversation. Tentativeness is a teen’s right of passage and mumbling is but one of a few strategies for coping with it. Another is to overcome it with brazen, dogmatic, self-certainty as in the teen who compensates for tentativeness by declaring as absolute fact that his parents are loser-idiots. Still another strategy is irony: Put what you say in quotation marks as though it were said by someone else. That way, if what you say turns out to be stupid you can disclaim it. Really, you were just making fun of people who say things like that. Sometime in the last decade irony peaked, was criticized as corrupting a generation of youth, and then fell into disrepute as a trendy, hip, too-easy formula for hovering cynically above and outside reality. Irony was seen as a sub-species of sarcasm, saying the exact opposite of what you really mean, for example saying “My, isn’t this nice!” when you mean it’s awful. With irony, defined this way, you play-act as though you’re some other dork who would say “My, isn’t this nice!” when it’s obvious that, to hip people like you, it’s not nice at all. Irony was seen as a sign of the next generation’s exceptional lack of self-discipline. Why can’t they speak forthrightly the way we do? As such, the criticism was our generation’s contribution to a traditional campaign of frustration with the young, a campaign that goes back at least as far as Plato (429-327 B.C.E.) who is quoted as saying, "The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.” This is a hard campaign for baby boomers like me to pull off convincingly. In all of history, my generation will go down as the pinnacle of slouchiness. In the service of irresistible convenience we burned roughly half the fossil fuel accumulated over eons. Comparatively, ours was a time of extraordinary freedom and opportunity. Many of us floated trial vocational balloons, decided against them and managed to launch successful second and even third careers, a sign of the extraordinary opportunities we had. We worry for our ambitiously artsy children because we know their opportunities are slimmer than ours. We fear they won’t get a second chance the way we did. Yes, they’ve joined us at the party, enjoying the unprecedented party favors of our fossil fuel and resource rich post-war economy. But we know. We’ll be leaving the party just as the fuel and economy are spent. They’ll be left to clean up after us. They know too, and are confused by their more limited ambiguous options. From this perspective irony or any coping strategy teens might adopt is a natural and appropriate response. Think of how much uncertainty my hitchhiker has to cope with. It’s a hard time to know what to do. Not for some, of course. These days we’re seeing the surge of that other coping strategy, the brazen, absolute, dogmatic self-certainty in fundamentalists of all stripes from Tea Party activists to Hard-line Muslims. The fundamentalists claim to have been provoked to it by
