#9

Irony has become one of those thoroughly annoying words, but let's return to 1991 when the concept in its contemporary, tonal incarnation was fairly fresh. Douglas Coupland's novel Generation X and Richard Linklater's movie Slacker distilled a mostly white, college-educated, upper-middle-class North American sensibility. It was partly a politicized worldview shared by the children of baby boomers who were disgusted with capitalism (the Iran-Contra scandal, El Salvador, Reaganism, Wall Street) but who also saw that the alternatives—communism and socialism—had flopped. The I-word came to represent an attitude of passive engagement at a recession-era moment, typified by the motto of Linklater's movie: "Withdrawing in disgust is not the same thing as apathy." An ironic stance toward America and its culture provided a space for novelty and pleasure, and, potentially, a sense of purpose.

Wilmerding Shrugged: The political ambitions of Benjamin Kunkel's Indecision.