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Friday 28 June 2019

Petrodollar Warfare: Understanding the US Obsession with Iran

First invasion of Iraq 1991

When the USA was planning its first invasion of Iraq, a young Kuwaiti nurse testified before Congress  describing Iraqi soldiers pulling infants out of their incubators and tossing them on the floor.  The "nurse" turned out to be a princess of the Kuwaiti royal family, and her testimony pure fiction. However, her story created the needed public support for the invasion.

Second invasion of Iraq 2003

As the USA was preparing its second invasion of Iraq, Colin Powell was tasked with presenting "irrefutable" evidence that Saddam Hussein was producing weapons of mass destruction.  Powell's presentation together with the totally fatuous belief, held by some Americans, that Hussein was responsible for 9/11 were sufficient to once again garner support for a war against Iraq.  As is well known at this point, the proclaimed purpose of the war was baseless--no WMDs or facilities were found.

USA preparing for war in Iran

As the USA once again prepares to go to war in the Middle East, this time against Iran, perhaps it's time to ask why.  What is the "real" reason the USA is about to invade Iran?  The answer is for the same reason the USA invaded Iraq:  petrodollars.  There are hundreds of sites on the internet which will give you a more detailed, sophisticated description and expert explanation of petrodollars than I will give you here.  As usual, I am shocked by my own ignorance.  However . . .

Petrodollars are basically another name for American dollars, but to understand the significance of this simple fact we need a primer on how money works.  Imagine you are looking at a house and the price is one million USD.  We always think in terms of what the house or the product or the service is worth in terms of money, but we rarely ask "What is $1,000,000 worth?"

Prior to the 1970s it was easy to say what one American dollar was worth, because the USA promised to maintain a stockpile of gold and every American dollar was backed up by that gold.  However in the early 70s the USA was no longer able to maintain a sufficient amount of gold to back up the amount of money they were spending on the Vietnam War.  Richard Nixon announced that the US dollar was no longer on the gold standard.

How the "gold standard" became the "petrodollar"

Keep in mind that money, the US dollar, for example, is physically just paper or pixels--pretty worthless.   The challenge for the USA was:  How do you make your money worth something when you don't have the gold or resources or anything else to back up the trillions and trillions of dollars you want to create and spend?   The answer is that the USA made a deal with the Royal Family of Saudi Arabia--the largest oil producing country in the world.  "We will buy your oil and provide you with military protection against any and all your enemies.  In return, you agree to only sell your oil for American dollars."  Eventually, all the OPEC countries signed on to the same deal.  Over time, virtually all oil transactions world-wide would come to be conducted using American dollars.

Why is an American dollar worth something even in China or Japan or Sweden or Australia?  Because you are going to need American dollars if you want to buy oil, and every industrialized country in the world needs oil (so far).  Oil remains the most valuable resource on the planet. From an American perspective this means you can print paper money and produce pixel dollars, endlessly running up deficits and debts, but you don't have to worry about your money losing its value because virtually every country in the world has a vested interest in maintaining the value of the US dollar because they have some and they need them to buy oil.

As William Clark puts it in Petrodollar Warfare, "No longer backed by gold, the dollar became backed by black gold."  The irony is, of course, that the American dollar isn't backed by American oil; it's backed by oil from other countries.  What happens if some countries and some oil producers decide that they want to start buying and selling oil in a currency other than American dollars?



Military defense of oil, the USD and the petrodollar seems inevitable

The USA is the largest debtor nation in the world.  The USA spends more on its defense and runs larger deficits than any other country in the world.  The economy of the USA (including the strength of its military) depends on oil, the US dollar, and the connection between these two.  If you are still wondering why the USA invaded Iraq in 2003, as Williams points out: "On September 24, 2000, Saddam Hussein emerged from a meeting of his government and proclaimed that Iraq would soon transition its oil export transactions to the euro currency."

Iran has also announced its intention to sell oil for Euros and other currencies--as has Venezuela.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWtIu7mbnbM&feature=youtu.be




Thursday 27 June 2019

Is Education the Answer to Economic Inequality? Not in the USA.

Education can't solve economic inequality

When my guru forwarded Nick Hanauer's article in The Atlantic, "Better Schools Won't Fix America," I devoured it enthusiastically.  Hanauer, a wealthy American philanthropist, with considerable credentials as a patron of education in the USA, was disavowing the dogma that education can erase the income gap--a dogma he calls "educationalism."  Hanauer's criticism of his  cohorts in the 1% is scalding.  "Educationalism," Hanauer writes, "appeals to the wealthy and powerful because it tells us what we want to hear: that we can help restore shared prosperity without sharing our wealth or power."



Global education versus American education

The article does not devalue education, but debunks a generalized notion that education alone can solve economic inequality.  His argument, in a nutshell, is that "great public schools are the product of a thriving middle class, not the other way around."  However, in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which is arguably the Bible for crusaders against income inequality,  Thomas Piketty, argues that "the poor catch up with the rich to the extent that they achieve the same level of technological know-how, skill and education, [ . . .]."


The world's poor and the American lower middle class

How can we rectify this shared preoccupation with wealth inequality leading to such different conclusions?  The simple answer is that Hanauer is talking about the USA  (once known as the land of opportunity) and Piketty's perspective is global.  As Steve Pinker observes, in Enlightenment Now, "the world's poor have gotten richer in part at the expense of the American lower middle class."



"The American lower middle class" (whom Pinker identifies as the Trump constituency) were exactly the people who were ill prepared to take advantage of globalization.  In contrast, highly educated individuals from emerging economies, whose expertise, skills and products easily crossed national boundaries or flourished in cyberspace, enriched not only themselves but their home countries as well.

Education and the classroom

The American vision of education (which tends to be shared by most Canadians) is that it begins and ends in the classroom.  The classroom, if you stop and think about it, is a very poor learning environment.  A lot has to happen outside the classroom if the education which is initiated there is going take hold and have any effect.

Money isn't usually the purpose of an education

Economic advantage is rarely the unique objective of education, but most people, quite rightly, expect  economic stability, if not affluence, to be a beneficial side effect of an education.  That expectation is frequently disappointed.  The problem is that cost effectiveness and capital gains (in every sense of these terms) have come to dominate the thinking of both educational institutions and some individual educators.  When everyone is asking "What's in it for me?" the average student is left out in the cold.

The simple solution

Hanuaer's got it right that putting more wealth into the hands of Americans in the bottom half of the socio-economic ladder is the obvious, Occam's-razor solution to wealth inequality.  He's also right that education in the USA would improve if more American families were empowered with the affluence, influence and the confidence to make themselves part of the educational process, rather than turning over the young of America to schools and universities in the vain hope that education will just happen, and the future will, magically, be richer and brighter than the past.

Monday 10 June 2019

On Reading "The National Inquiry Report on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls"

The National Inquiry Report on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls and Two-Spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, and asexual people

Reactions to Reclaiming Power and Place, the title of the National Inquiry Report, have ranged from angry sarcasm to pious platitudes.  I thought there would be lots of room in the middle ground for a reasoned, dispassionate if sympathetic reading.  I had heard numerous declarations that all Canadians should read and educate themselves from this report.  I, therefore, gave myself the task of reading the 1200-page report, the 300-page Quebec supplement, and the 50-page executive summary.





When I was done, my immediate reaction tended toward angry sarcasm.  I had to remind myself of the experience of working on a large research project (though nothing in the order of magnitude of the National Inquiry) where the end result was a hodgepodge which failed to satisfy anyone's vision of what the project was meant to accomplish.

How are the victims served by this report?

It is a bit of a fib (an "exaggeration" if you will) to say I "read" the entire report.  I looked at every page until I understood its general content, stopping to read further when an entry struck me as directly relevant to the fates of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.  With the exception of the testimony of grieving relatives, I was in awe of how infrequently I could see a direct connection between the content of the report and what happened to victimized Indigenous women.  The burning question for me was "How does this report benefit the cohort of Indigenous women who have been and will be victimized?"

Who will read this report?

Despite Prime Minister Trudeau's claim that "this report will not sit on a shelf, gathering dust," my impression was that the report was designed to be ignored.*  Who, other than someone like me (a retired nerd with a PhD who blogs as a hobby), is ever going to read this 1550-page report. On page 199 of Volume 1b, the inquiry calls "on all Canadians to:  [ . . . ] Develop knowledge and read the Final Report."  How seriously can we take the "call to justice" to "read the Final Report" when that "call" appears after we have read 920 pages of the Report we are being called to read?

The purpose of the National Inquiry?

The only part of the Report which attempts to provide comprehensive data on what happened to the victimized women and how the criminal justice system dealt with their cases is Annex 1 of Volume 1b, the "Forensic Document Review Project," which runs from pages 233 to 276--that is, the last 43 pages of the 1550-page report.  In this section of the Report we learn:

Over the course of its review, the FDRP identified the following significant issues: 
1. There is no reliable estimate of the numbers of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA persons in Canada.
2. The two Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) reports dated 2014 and 2015 on missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls identify narrow and incomplete causes of homicides of Indigenous women and girls in Canada.
3. The often-cited statistic that Indigenous men are responsible for 70% of murders of Indigenous women and girls is not factually based.
4. Virtually no information was found with respect to either the numbers or causes of missing and murdered Métis and Inuit women and girls and Indigenous 2SLGBTQQIA persons. 
Unfortunately, for me and, I suspect, for most Canadians, the reason for the Inquiry's existence was to find answers to these issues, and obviously these questions remain unanswered.  Instead of a dedicated pursuit of answers to these questions, the Inquiry concluded:

The truths shared in these National Inquiry hearings tell the story – or, more accurately, thousands of stories – of acts of genocide against First Nations, Inuit and Métis women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people.

"Cultural genocide" versus genocide

I think it is reasonable to ask how the inquiry can claim, on one hand, that there is little to no accurate, factual information about what happened to these women and, on the other hand, to conclude that these women were victims of "acts of genocide"?  The obvious answer is that the genocide conclusion has little or nothing to do with the findings of the Inquiry but was simply a foregone conclusion based on the already known 150-year history of the relationship between the government of Canada and its Indigenous peoples.

The 2015 report of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee concluded that
For over a century, the central goals of Canada’s Indigenous policy were to eliminate Indigenous governments; ignore Indigenous rights; terminate the Treaties; and, through a process of assimilation, cause Indigenous peoples to cease to exist as distinct legal, social, cultural, religious, and racial entities in Canada. The establishment and operation of residential schools were a central element of this policy, which can best be described as “cultural genocide.”
Doubtlessly, the National Inquiry was compelled to move beyond this "cultural genocide" accusation in order to avoid the criticism of its harshest critics that its work would be redundant.  There had already been some 40 reports on Canada's Indigenous peoples and certainly the Harper Conservative government had argued that a 41st report would not reach any significantly new conclusions.

Additionally, "cultural genocide" has been debated in and ultimately not recognized by the United Nations. The Inquiry's Chief Commissioner, Marion Buller confirmed, in an interview on Power and Politics, that the claim of genocide was a strategy to compel various levels of government to take emergency measures and supply funding for the Inquiry's recommended projects. So far, the Inquiry's 231 recommendations, most of which require additional government funding, together with the accusation of a Canadian genocide against Indigenous women, seem most likely to engender a populist backlash against government support of First Nations rather than effective leverage.  The sympathy of the Canadian population for missing and murdered Indigenous women has, arguably,  been squandered.

Enfranchisement and assimilation deemed genocide

In his monograph, Indigenous Nationals, Canadian Citizens, Thomas Courchene describes "competing models in play in terms of approaching the relationship of Indigenous peoples to the Canadian state."  According to Courchene, "The first of these models is [. . .]  'enfranchisement,' namely converting Indians to regular Canadians, [ . . .] . At the other end of the spectrum is [. . .] an Indigenous-to-Crown relationship that can be characterized as 'institutionalized parallelism,' e.g., separate parliaments and Indigenous delivery of provincial-type services. Neither of these is acceptable; the first because it is now constitutionally impossible, and the second because, among other reasons, it would be prohibitively expensive."

Seemingly the National Inquiry has decided to label the first model as "genocide" and advocate for the second: greater independence and autonomy for First Nations, together with additional government funding and accommodation from non-native Canadians. The Inquiry's extensive recommendations seem, at first glance, highly impractical--certainly there is no discussion of potential costs.  More striking for me, is that the Report offers little evidence or even theoretical argument that the expenditures they are recommending would specifically and effectively redress the victimization of Indigenous women and girls.

Assumptions of cause and effect

The underlying assumption of Reclaiming Power and Place is that if the problems of poverty, education, health care, culture and identity within native communities, and the lack of understanding of police, health-care providers, social workers and institutions outside native communities were corrected, the fates of the Indigenous victims could have been and can be avoided.  These counterfactual claims may, in fact, be valid, but one would hope that the commissioners would offer something more than an underlying, unquestioned general assumption.  Personally, I remain unconvinced that "culture and identity" (pages 327 to 338 of Vol. 1a)  or the promotion of Indigenous arts and crafts (pages 53 to 74 of Vol. 1b) will address the problems of young women who have been sexually abused and murdered both inside and out of their Indigenous communities.  I remain deeply skeptical that the return of "lost traditions" is a solution for young Indigenous women facing alienation, anomie and abuse in their home communities. (See Be Yourself!  Is This Really Good Advice?)

Gynocentrism:  Pros and cons

I understand the commissioners' perspective that global, large-scale solutions are necessary even though the Inquiry's purpose was understood to be (at least in the popular imagination) the very precise and concrete question of what happened to more than a thousand (if not thousands of) missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.  However, rather than a global approach, the commissioners very deliberately opted for a gynocentric focus, making the inquiry dominantly about women's pursuit of answers to problems being encountered by women, and solutions, including governance, to be found in the empowerment of women.  This approach seems laudatory, except that an obvious source, if not the source, of the problems being faced by Indigenous women is Indigenous men.

Although the Inquiry dismissed the claim "that Indigenous men are responsible for 70% of murders of Indigenous women and girls" as "not factually based," the Report offered no contradictory evidence.  In Annex 1 of Reclaiming Power and Place it is noted that in 100% of the 26 solved homicides of  Indigenous women from 2013-14 "the offender was known to the victim."

The Inquiry's response is:
In our view, the RCMP’s reliance on such a small number of cases creates an unreliable basis upon which to focus policy. A focus on spousal violence, on the basis of flawed statistics, has resulted in an erroneously narrow focus on Indigenous men as the perpetrators of violence against Indigenous women and girls, and neglects other significant patterns in relation to missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Canada.
However, the Inquiry has also adopted a very narrow focus.  The Report only gives a little more than a single page to "some men, who are also former perpetrators, [who] came forward to share their story"  (Vol.1b page 37).  The Inquiry decried negative stereotypes of Indigenous peoples and, clearly, did not want the Report to provide fodder for those stereotypes.  However, truth and transparency cannot be achieved if there is an unwillingness to incisively investigate specific cases.  Much of the Report is about grieving and "healing," compassionate objectives we should all support but, at the same time, we have to acknowledge that the purpose of an inquiry is to inquire rather than console.  Numerous testimonies within the Report are impressionistic accounts of dealings with police and health services.  The failure of police to pursue missing-persons cases, the arresting or threatening of the victims in domestic-abuse complaints, the kidnapping and rape of Indigenous women by police officers are all cases which should be thoroughly and objectively investigated and exposed.  The failure of hospitals to provide death certificates to the families of victims is an egregious failure and should be investigated and reported upon in detail.  However, in these instances, the Inquiry apparently took as its role the support and consoling of the victims and their families, rather than the investigation of the details of each case.  The Inquiry rightly criticized the negative stereotyping of Indigenous peoples but, at the same time, has promulgated negative stereotypes of every police office, teacher, health-care worker,  and social worker who has ever dealt with Indigenous individuals--not to mention branding every Canadian family that has fostered or adopted an Indigenous child as perpetrators of genocide.

Theories of causality

Criminology provides numerous theories and empirical data linking crime, poverty and race.  The Inquiry seems to have taken the general tenor of these theories of causation as a priori fact without much review of the available literature and without specifying a particular theory they were adhering to.  Obviously, there could be no empirical study of causes, if the Inquiry had decided at the outset not to investigate Indigenous perpetrators and, by extension, not to investigate perpetrators period.  It is worth noting that the Inquiry's theory of causation is unique.  Genocide is criminal but, beyond that, it is the underlying theory and conclusion of the Inquiry that genocide caused the crimes without being the crime.  In other words, the Report does not provide a single example of the murderer of an Indigenous woman being motivated by genocide but, nonetheless, concludes that the murders were precipitated by genocide.

Untold stories

Is it heartlessness, a total lack of compassion, to be critical of a Report which was such an outpouring of tragedy and emotion?  I return to my overarching question:  "Will this Report benefit young Indigenous women?"  It is disheartening to read in the Statistics Canada  Report on Homicide that in 2017, when the National Inquiry was at the peak of its activities,  38 Aboriginal women were victims of homicide, an increase of 32% compared to 2016. In 2017, 118 Indigenous males were victims of homicide.  According to the Statistics Canada Report,  18% of Indigenous homicides were considered to be gang related.  Indigenous women were 6 times more likely to be the victims of homicide than non-indigenous women, and Indigenous persons were 12 times more likely to be the accused in a homicide investigation than non-indigenous persons.  In terms of missing-persons reports, according to Statistics Canada, "[t]he proportion of victims reported as being missing prior to the incident being identified as a homicide was similar whether the victim was Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal (9% and 7%, respectively)."  The National Inquiry's concern for the fragility and healing of witnesses, together with the narrow focus and self-fulfilling prophesy of genocide, left many potential avenues of investigation and consideration untouched.

Alternative solutions

Claims of Indigenous perpetrators and criminality in Indigenous communities in no way contradict the indictments of the National Inquiry Report that we must all stand behind and support Indigenous persons and communities as they deal with cycles of violence and incomprehension.   Unfortunately, claims of a Canadian genocide put the question of perpetrators, intentions and motives foremost in Canadian minds. The challenge, which has been recognized since the 1970s  (as opposed to assimilation as the only option in 19th-century thinking), is how to offer Indigenous communities and individuals both independence and support at the same time.  A first step, as Courchene suggests in Indigenous Nationals, Canadian Citizens, is to recognize how the Canadian state systematically undermines the economic development of Indigenous communities.  As Courchene points out, "Canadians tend to lay the blame for the dire straits of most of the reserves at the feet of the Indians"; however, as a matter of "federal policy," Indigenous people do not have property rights over the reservation land where they live.  Consequently, "banks are most reticent in providing loans for capital investment or for mortgages because the Indian Act legally restricts banks from seizing and selling the asset in the event of default."  The possibilities of economic development without venture capital are negligible to nil; hence the endless cycle of government subsidies which always fall short of ending poverty.  Courchene comments:
It is incomprehensible that Canada and Canadians have allowed this federal instrument of mass impoverishment to reign so long over the hundreds of Canada’s First Nations reserves.  (Italics in the original)
Recognizing that smaller reserves have neither the population nor the resources to be financially viable, Courchene proposes a Commonwealth of Sovereign Indigenous Nations, modeled on the existing "Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nation [ . . .] the representative body of the seventy-four First Nations in Saskatchewan."   An Indigenous commonwealth could be provincial or inter-provincial or, ideally, pan-Canadian, and it would give united Indigenous peoples the possibility of economic development.  If poverty and discrimination and lack of independence are the underlying causes of criminality and the deaths of Indigenous women and girls, then here is a large-scale, revolutionary approach worth considering.


Footnote

*Courchene's comment, in Indigenous Nationals, Canadian Citizens, on the 1991-1996 Royal Commission of Aboriginal Peoples paralleled my thoughts on no-one reading Reclaiming Power and Place:
Entitled People to People, Nation to Nation, RCAP consisted of five volumes, 440 recommendations (over a thousand if one includes sub-recommendations), 80,000 pages of hearings and 250 commissioned research papers.  Intriguingly, because it was so encyclopedic, not only did it defy summarizing, but it also ensured that no core message could emerge.
Consequently, the prevailing view was that the Chrétien government "more or less ignored the RCAP."

Courchene, Thomas J.. Indigenous Nationals, Canadian Citizens (Queen's Policy Studies Series) (p. 6-7). MQUP. Kindle Edition. 

Monday 3 June 2019

What Is Irony?

What is irony?

Irony is the interruption or disruption of an established or expected discourse.  (This definition might not seem immediately helpful, but bear with me.)   Let's begin with a simple example of verbal irony.  You and a friend are looking out the window on a cold and rainy day.  Your friend says, "Beautiful weather."   Your friend is being ironic.  In the context, the "expected discourse" is "what terrible weather!"  You assume that what your friend "really" means is that the weather is terrible because that is what you would expect him to say.  In fact, some people claim that "saying the opposite of what you mean" is a definition of verbal irony.  However, it is rare that the intended meaning of an ironic statement is exactly the opposite of what is said.  Irony is almost always ambiguous (see Do No Harm:  Avoid Irony).


Verbal, situational and dramatic irony

There are three different kinds of irony:  verbal irony, situational irony and dramatic irony.  Irony resists definition because these three types of irony seem totally different from and unrelated to each other.  Verbal irony is saying one thing but meaning something completely different (nearly the opposite) of what is said. (As in the example above.) Situational irony is when what happens seems surprisingly, strikingly different from what you expect to happen.  (Example:  A ballerina, famous for her balance and grace, trips and falls while crossing the street.)  Dramatic irony is when we in the audience know something that the characters in a play or film don't. (Example:  John's best friend Peter is hiding in the bedroom closet.  We, the audience, know Peter is there and has been sleeping with John's wife.  In this dramatic or comic situation, John's telling his wife how much he admires his good friend Peter is dramatic irony.)  What each of these three different types of irony share is that they are the interruption or disruption of an established or expected discourse.


                                              

What is a discourse?

A statement, a speech, an announcement, a text, a paragraph can all be synonyms for "a discourse."  When we talk about "discourse" what we are referring to are all the ways in which sentences or utterances or images are connected together.  Analyzing the discourse of a paragraph, we could be looking at something as simple as the words used to connect one sentence to the next--words like "however," "although," "furthermore," "therefore" and "consequently" which connect one sentence to another and tell us the relationship between two sentences.  In the discourse analysis of a speech or a television commercial or a literary work, we might consider the themes, motifs, tone, style, patterns of repetition, the use of specific words or images; in short, all the elements that hold the parts together.

Disrupting the discourse of a eulogy

Imagine that Felix is delivering the eulogy at the funeral of his best friend George.  In the middle of expressions of admiration and his sadness at the loss of his friend,  Felix inserts "and George was a terrible golfer." This interruption of the tone and theme and formal register of the eulogy would be understood as irony.  What exactly does "and George was a terrible golfer" mean in this context?  It doesn't mean that Felix has decided to criticize George's golf at this moment.  Nor does it mean the opposite, that "George was an excellent golfer."  Exactly what an ironic statement means is always ambiguous.  Why did Felix say it?  We can imagine lots of good reasons for Felix's decision to interrupt his own discourse.  Irony--among men--often signals a bond of mutual understanding and communication.  (You can tell that two men are old and good friends by the way they freely insult each other.)   Felix may have wanted to lighten the tone.  The aside and comic relief are typical instances of irony.  Perhaps Felix knew that too much sadness, even at a funeral, wasn't George's style and this interruption would hold back the pathos. The irony might even make people laugh; even at funerals, it is sometimes good to laugh.

Can a situation be a discourse?

Anything can be called "a text."  (See Structuralism, semiotics and readings of the everyday world.)  Since anything--your life, my life, what happened at lunch today--can be considered and "read" as a "text," it can be analyzed as discourse.  So:  today at lunch you decided to abandon your habit of eating junk food and opted for the "healthful salad" instead . . . and consequently got food poising.  That is ironic.  The expected discourse of your narrative (the story of your lunch) and your decision was that you were going to be healthier, but the opposite (or near opposite) happened--you got sick.


Even dramatic irony interrupts a discourse

The basis of dramatic irony is that we know something that a character doesn't.  The literary critic Northrop Frye describes any literary work where the reader felt superior to the characters as being in the "ironic mode."  In my example above, we can see that John's, the cuckold's, discourse is interrupted and disrupted by our knowledge of the fact that Peter is hiding in the closet.

Where's the irony?

A constant problem in defining irony is identifying where exactly the irony is?  Is irony in the intentions of the speaker?  Is irony a matter of interpretation? Both are possible, but as Linda Hutcheon has argued, ultimately, irony just happens (Irony's Edge).  It happens in life, in situations, in stories and books, in performances.  Sometimes it is intended; sometimes it isn't.  Sometimes it is interpreted, sometimes it isn't.  Like the sound of that infamous lonely tree falling in the desert, irony exists when it is perceived.

Irony as a trope or figure of speech

A potential problem with what I've been saying here is that every trope or figure of speech is a disruption of literal discourse.  When Mary announces that "John is a pig," she is speaking metaphorically--even if she is unaware of the fact.  Her statement is a trope, a turning away from, the literal meaning of her words.  She is not saying that John is a four-legged source of pork chops.

As Paul de Mann has claimed, "Irony is the trope of tropes" ("The Concept of Irony," Aesthetic Ideology). Viewed in the other direction, every figure of speech is a shift, a disruption or interruption, moving the discourse from a literal meaning to a figurative meaning. Each of these figurative shifts is minor or subtle or micro or partial or local in relation to the macro shift of irony.  Consider the possibility that when Mary says "John is a pig," she is being both metaphoric and ironic.  The metaphoric level of her words is minor; in fact, would go unnoticed.  However, if she is being ironic--let's imagine that everyone knows that John is obsessively neat and clean--then the shift of meaning is of another magnitude.


Irony as "random"

I find it instructive that when millennials encounter a delightful example of irony, they often describe it, gleefully, as "random."  It is an intuitive observation that irony disturbs a pattern or sense of order by introducing a non sequitur; that is, something disconnected, that doesn't fit and might, in the extreme, seem completely "random."


The origins of "irony"

The word "irony" is derived from a stock character in Greek comedy known as the eiron--the superficially "dumb guy" who turns out to be quite clever.  The eiron is a dissembler who hides his intelligence beneath a facade of ignorance and humility.   There is no verb in English for "being ironic" but, if we wanted to imagine a good possibility, it would be a combination of "dissemble" (meaning to disguise or the opposite of "resemble') and "disassemble" (meaning to take apart--in this case, the expected discourse).  

Paul de Mann suggests that, as a rhetorical feature, irony is basically parabasis; that is, a shift of register in a discourse.  (De Mann's observation is the inspiration for my definition of irony.) The typical example of parabasis is an aside, but the etymological root is the chorus in Greek theatre which would interrupt the actors' speeches with their own comments.



Keeping it simple

If all this seems too much to hold onto, a simple definition of irony would be "The near opposite of what is expected happening or being said." By the way, in this post, I have included the image of an "Irony" wine bottle.  Other than the name the image doesn't have much to do with the post:   I was being ironic.



Also, I've seen Al Morrisette's daughter being criticized because the lyrics of her song "Ironic" aren't ironic.



Actually, the song is about situational irony, and I assume her critics were expecting verbal irony.  How ironic!

 
 




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