On satire
Beth, I think you might be interested in Time for the last post from the Financial Times. The interdependence of kairos and satire plays some part in it:
And if Gawker was a kind of guilty pleasure people enjoyed after the horror of 9/11 had lingered just a little too long, it is a pleasure that has begun testing readers’ limits. A posting in August noted that a woman had been knocked down and killed crossing the street in front of an Urban Outfitters store: “You know we’re completely in favor of anything that suggests NYC is edgy,� wrote Gawker. “But we’d argue things have gone too far when shopping for ironic T-shirts becomes a potentially fatal extreme sport.�
The woman turned out to be an 86-year-old Holocaust survivor, which lead The New York Times to accuse Gawker of turning “everyday heartbreak� and “heinous� crimes into “inflection points for irony�.
Much as the outpouring of humour in New York in the 1920s that gave rise to the Algonquin Round Table was a temporary post-traumatic cultural reaction to the shock of the Great War, the Gawker spirit is wearing a little thin in light of a seemingly endless bloody insurgency in Iraq, a mesmerising failure of government to deal with the massive catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina, and revelations of corruption on Capitol Hill. “Satire,� said Choire Sicha, “is the most useless cultural effluvia one could possibly produce out of the cultural situation in America right now.�