The Week in Blog: I Have a Shoe (Bill Scher & Matt Lewis)

[Ray]

Originally Posted by bjkeefe

The reason I hope this is that despite my occasional snickering about wingnuts, their lack of a sense of humor, and their tendency to be perpetually on the prowl for excuses to feel aggrieved, it actually does pain me that certain of their ilk; i.e., you, seem unable to detect even the slightest bit of context or subtext. Hyperbole, irony, sarcasm, parody, whatever; it is apparently all lost on you. I must say that this is categorically subhuman.

Ah, well. Poe's Law, I guess. But naming the problem does little to alleviate the concern I have about the bottom quarter of our country.

"there is no form of irony in the world that won't be taken seriously. I once wrote a piece of which I was at the time very proud (I maybe shouldn't go back and read it again), arguing somewhat ironically that socialism in the United States was the result of organized sports. It takes people at a vulnerable age and makes teamwork, more than individual work, the thing. It subjects people to the authority of the team captain or the coach, and as I say, this is at an age where people are vulnerable. And therefore, team sports are the breeding grounds for socialism and must be watched very carefully. And I had an organization in the piece -- this ran in Harper's -- called "the CIA": the Congress for Individualist Athletics. It was written under a pseudonym because I was then an ambassador, I couldn't write under my own name. One day the postman struggled into my room at Harvard with a pile of letters this thick that had been sent on from Harper's from people who, well, they fell into three classes:

* people who wanted to know whether it was real or not;
* people who wanted to join; and
* people who demanded that I exclude baseball from the list because baseball is not, as they said, a "socialist" sport: when you're up at bat, you're on your own.

Well, it's an example of the dangers of using irony. Under the best of circumstances, many people are going to take it seriously. But in any case, that's a rather long answer to a short question."

J.K. Galbraith, 1986.

And you meant, "e.g.".