Compound Irony for Fun and Profit

At Arma Virumque, James Panero helps us cleanse the hip soul of its most tacky component: the desire not simply to revel in self-contradictory bouts of sincere irony and ironic sincerity, but to make a living doing it. The inevitable outcome of working, as Rieff put it, to have our past and eat it too would seem to be the application of the same principle to our present. Add the commodification of emotion and you've got yourself our generation's most sigh-inducing and already trite cottage industry.