Singularly Unuseful

Let's combine some recent themes. Here is David Foster Wallace on irony (via):

Irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything it debunks. …The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit “I don’t really mean what I’m saying.” … Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like an hysteric or a prig. [from E Unibus Pluram]