Irony is often the cowardice of intellectuals.
Imagine the Big Boss is a horrible tyrant and the best way to stay employed (or alive!) is continuous flattery. The clever man might say: “You, Big Boss, are the biggest bossiest Big Boss that ever bossed. We are all larger for being managed by you. Thank you.” Said just the right way the Big Boss will bite and the “cool friends” will know you did not really mean what you had said and if, perchance, they miss the wink nudge, then you can have a laugh with them over drinks about the Big Boss using the paycheck he is paying you.
You are a Vichy intellectual, hiding your cowardice to quit or tell the truth, behind a mask of irony. I knew such folk in graduate school, including professors, who would think the diktats of the administration were ludicrous, but only say so in friendly circles. In public, they would respond with arch-philosophical jargon: we knew they were mocking the administration, but (we hope assumed) the administration did not know.
We had our values and our comfy waivers too.
It is hard to see how deceiving the Big Boss while pulling his check is ever noble, unless you are saving millions of lives to do so. When the French gave up in World War II and fell under Nazi control, many took to “irony” to live their lives. They would spout the party line, but add a wink and a nudge. If dealing with soup lines, maybe, but when Jewish lives were on the line, surely this amounted to cowardice.
Irony in the cause of keeping a paycheck is no virtue and a cowardice in the face of evil is a vice. To mock the Germans when you are not getting a benefit is one thing, but for actors, playwrights, radio personalities, professors, and others who depended on German favor to stay in business to traffic in “irony” was too self-serving. One mocked, but one ate well in hungry Paris.
Even in describing the German occupiers, the Vichy intellectual played this “double game:”
The term which defeat first ushered in was ces messieurs: these gentlemen or, more likely, those gentlemen. Formal to the point of caution, it had the discreet advantage of suggesting, according to the circumstances and the speaker, either servility or irony. In the slang which in turn succeeded ces messieurs formality shaded into familiarity, carrying all the nuances of acceptance or resistance that went with it. Often the Germans became simply les autres. This deliberately bland usage gave subversive meaning to Sartre’s famous aphorism in Huis clos (1944), ‘l’enfer, c’est les Autres’, which otherwise innocuously translates as ‘Hell is other people’.*
The intellectual could stay at his cafe while Jewish people were loaded on cattle cars and have a sense of danger, cleverness, and virtue: cowardice with commendation from the conscience. They could keep from enflaming the bosses, while getting their favors and treats. All the while, their smart friends, their elite friends, would know that you did not think the bull necked Prussian was an equal. Oh no! You were just playing with them, fools, and eating their caviar and swilling their champagne.
“Why,” you could convince yourself, “I am the true French resistance.”
In the US none of us, thank God, face the choices of the Vichy French, yet this also means that none of us face privation and death for standing for our values: not yet, not here. We need say nothing to the Big Boss, but if speak we must, the irony that is not understood is another way to lie while feeling good about it. The ability to resign, to speak up, even to make a pointed joke is only lost when we are unwilling to tell the truth.
This is so obviously sniveling fear, or greed, that we use irony to seer our conscience: virtue by eye roll.
God save us all from Vichy irony. God help us to be wise, prudent, but eventually to tell the spirit of the Age, the butchers of the unborn, those who oppress the poor, the tyrants, the “tin-plated dictators with delusions of Godhood” what we really think.
Irony, true irony, is known to be irony by the powerful: the dangerous deflation of the inflated with puncturing wit.
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*Ousby, Ian. The Occupation: the Ordeal of France, page 174.
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