In 1999 I wrote two short, topical essays a month for the Web site FEED. I thought, then, that I'd re-examine these pieces a year later to see what had been on my mind and to see if I still agreed with what I'd written. Here they are. Take a look at my 1999 Journal for this month, below, and join me in the Wicked Pavilion to discuss it.

September 10, 1999

Imitation, it's been said, is not necessarily the sincerest form of flattery: sometimes it's just plagiarism. According to an article in the September issue of the conservative Jewish journal Commentary, Edward W. Said—the distinguished author of Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, and one of today's few outspoken "public intellectuals"—has for decades been plagiarizing the Palestinian narrative of dispossession and diaspora to fashion his own personal biography and exile cred. Justus Reid Weiner, an Israeli scholar, insists that Said's story of expulsion from Palestinian Jerusalem into Cairo is "made up in equal parts of outright deception and of artful obfuscations." Said, responding in Cairo's Al-Ahram Weekly last week, dismissed the attack as the specious sophistry of right-wing Zionists trying to discredit Palestinian claims to return and compensation, a central issue in the current peace process. Weiner and Said may both score points here, and the details are murky in spots, but what's most apposite is the new light the controversy throws on Said's influential theory that "exile" is often just a state of mind.

The Said scandal has already been compared with that of Rigoberta Menchú, the Nobel Peace-Prize-winning Mayan Quiché Indian and Marxist-Leninist guerrilla whose autobiographical account of political violence in Guatemala (I, Rigoberta Menchú) turned out to be full of holes. But Menchú's claim to be Every Maya was exposed by a serious scholar who worried not that Menchú had lied about her personal history, but that she had misrepresented the willingness of peasant Indians to join forces with insurrectionary guerrillas. Said, on the other hand, hasn't been accused of misrepresenting the plight of Palestinians. Rather, he was brought low by questionable research funded by an obscure Israeli right-wing organization in Jerusalem, underwritten by "Michael Milken of the junk bond fortune,"as Said's friend Christopher Hitchens scathingly noted in Salon on Tuesday. Weiner's scornful conclusion, that Said's bogus life story is akin to those "myth-driven passions that have animated the revanchist program of so many Palestinian nationalists, whose expanding political ambitions [seem] permanently insusceptible of being satisfied," is ideology in its most naked state.

While it is clearly mendacious of Weiner to suggest that Said, and by extension all Palestinians, were not the victims of violent dispossession at the hands of Israeli troops, it also seems apparent that by 1947 Said and his family were already living, at least half the time, and quite comfortably, in Cairo. In his new memoir Out of Place, and in other, earlier sources, Said has acknowledged these truths about his early life—though it's clear that he has suggested otherwise on occasion. But Said, despite having served as go-between for Arafat and Carter, and as a member of the Palestine National Council, never was a political leader like Menchú, posturing as a representative of his people. He has long wrestled with the question, as he puts it in Representations of the Intellectual, "Is the intellectual galvanized into intellectual action by primordial, local, instinctive loyalties—one's race, or people, or religion—or is there some more universal and rational set of principles that can and perhaps do govern for the intellectual: how does one speak the truth?"

A social critic must, Said has long argued, practice "counter-habitation," a willed state of exile from all things taken-for-granted. In fact, as he suggests in Culture and Imperialism, the exiled figure is nothing less than the embodied consciousness of liberation itself. This is not to say, however, that intellectuals ought to exist in a sort of universal space, bound neither by national boundaries nor by ethnic identity. While exiled intellectuals can uniquely "see things that are usually lost on minds that have never traveled beyond the conventional and the comfortable," for Said they are at the same time called to the "terribly important task of representing the collective suffering" of their people, and by extension of all oppressed peoples. In the end, this distinction suggests that whether or not Said is, as the New York Post's Op-Ed page was shameless to assert, the "Palestinian Tawana Brawley," his personal life should have little or nothing to do with his role as a public intellectual "speaking truth to power," fighting on behalf of Palestinians who were dispossessed and driven into exile.

September 28, 1999

"I am not wildly interested in irony," Jedediah Purdy insisted in a Slate Dialogue last week. "These days, though, it seems to be interested in me." Accuse Purdy, the 24-year-old author of For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today, of "unctuous sentimentality," "manipulative pseudo-sincerity," and "eat-your-vegetables earnestness" if you must. (Certainly, the Max Beerbohm wannabes in the media have done so vigorously over the past couple of weeks.) But while years of book-larnin' insures he'll never catch your favorite Reality Bites reference, Purdy knows irony when he sees it. Sure, For Common Things kicks off with a heartfelt diatribe against those pathetic cynics—you know who you are—who lazily substitute an ironic pose for trust and commitment, but as far as sincere "love letters" to the world go, the book isn't particularly mawkish, sanctimonious, or preachy. Why, then, are professional ironists so consumed with Purdy these days?

In part, Purdy has become a whipping boy for the New York Observer, Harper's, Salon, Slate, and the New York Times Book Review because he's dared to say what we all quietly know already: one important reason most of us can't be bothered to engage with "common things"—moral values, social institutions, the natural world—is our Seinfeld-like inability to "cleave to demanding values," or even to "remember how to value what we value." The real problem with this diagnosis, according to many of Purdy's subtler critics, is not necessarily that it's incorrect, but rather that Purdy radically misuses the term "irony." Homo Seinfeldus may, as the book argues, be pathologically cynical, smirkily sarcastic, emotionally disabled, self-aware to the point of narcissism, and "sophisticated" in an adolescent sort of way, but such a sad figure hardly exhausts the possibilities of irony. For instance, Cervantes and Shakespeare—and even Purdy's heroes Twain, Swift, and Montaigne—were satirically detached from, while simultaneously engaged emotionally and politically in, everyday life. As Purdy's Slate interlocutor, Michael Hirschorn, pointed out with avuncular concern, we need irony to combat shallow cheesiness and posey earnestness alike. Put that in your corncob pipe and smoke it, Nature Boy!

But the debate doesn't divide so neatly into these two camps. Though Purdy has been praised by the cultural conservatives at Time for "panicking the languid sophisticates"—which is to say that he's now been both honored and scorned as an avatar of the "pundit-invented trend away from sarcasm and toward deep sincerity," as Suck accurately put it—the tsunami of commentary about him is itself ironic, for Purdy is not anti-irony at all. In fact, both before and after the publication of For Common Things, he's written and said things like, "for centuries, [irony] has been a friend of the human spirit," and "I do not hate irony, or want it to go away," and "America might benefit from more of the Socratic kind of irony." The latter comment is important, because Socratic irony is, in Kierkegaard's great formulation, an "infinite absolute negativity" which heroically shatters the taken-for-granted in all its guises. Purdy champions precisely this type of irony (he calls it "ecstatic irony"), which is neither frivolous, aestheticized, nor apolitical, and which helps us pay more attention to the seemingly trivial details of daily life to which his book's title also refers.

Irony of the ecstatic sort might best be described as a form of seriousness. As worked out in the life and thought of someone like Oscar Wilde (whose ironic pose Purdy has elegantly praised as "a lightness that is subtly aware of its moral weight"), irony is less a cop-out from risks and relationships than it is an equilibrium between a feeling of earnest involvement with a situation on the one hand, and a comic appreciation of its absurdities on the other. To be sure, Purdy is way over on the earnest side of this equation, and his appreciation of absurdity is marred by his poor understanding of pop-culture (which is often awkwardly cribbed, as though he's read books about TV but never actually watched it). But it's also clear that, like Wilde, Purdy's participating in the grand tradition of Socratic irony. He's trying to employ what he calls "an intelligent and resourceful irony" against "the human reserves of pompousness, self-seriousness, and the leaden earnestness that always threatens to run molten." And like Wilde—like Socrates himself, for that matter—he's being persecuted for it.