All Knowing

This irony has got to stop. We wear untrendy clothes like they're going out of fashion. The boys prance around in their ironically ripped-up jeans, ironic porkpie hats, ironic t-shirts with ironic slogans to which we burst out in ironic laughter. The girls don leggings, ankle-warmers, ill-fitting charity shop jackets and weird wollen bobbly green hats that would best be seen under a car wheel. On television we watch the fifty greatest moments of whatever they didn't show the week before, and look on as the presenter shows us clip after clip with a nudge and a wink; we know he knows we shouldn't be watching this, and that makes it all ok. We listen to music so bad it's good, but what is this good badness? We buy so many copies of a crazy frog he races to the top of the charts, and suddenly our taste is defined by him, and we refine our definition of success. We no longer dance with a Saturday night fever in clubs, now we throw shapes like a wedding reception, every step pondered and preened over, dissected and discussed as everyone tries not to try; we do the macarena, the running man, the robot, all in a bid to see who knows most about being least co-ordinated. Television reduces its production values, sets are wobbly, dress sense is deleted, all in a bid to squeeze under the magical umbrella of kitchiness. As long as we know they know we know it's meant to be that bad, all is acceptable. Ah, how clever clever we are all being. But, as we become ironic with our irony, and nobody knows truly what anyone means anymore, or if in fact anyone is any good at anything these days because we're all pretending to be so bad at it, the elegance of truth has fallen by the wayside. The thing is, post-modernism is all very well, but is does get tiresome.