The Devil’s in The Irony
Leaving the bookstore my boys and I were happy. The guys had each picked a LEGO mini-figure and with their anticipation to open it, we walked into the cool air, sun shining, masks on.
No sooner were we halfway to the car, when a tall unmasked man approached us walking the other way. He was weighted down by a big pack, and incidentally, he was also carrying his righteous pugnacity.
“The virus has not been isolated or quantified,” he said to us. “Think about that.”
He walked on, and so did we.
The kids were unfazed.
I, of course, looked back, and for a moment, I wanted to return the passive aggression and shout back with some insult to his political philosophy, but I let it go. What was the point? I was in a good mood and with my family.
Later, I realized the best comeback would have been: “Well, at least you acknowledge there’s a virus!”
Yeah, that would have been it. Just the retort for a conspiracy theorist. But wait, who was the conspiracy theorist here? Was I a co-conspirator to a theory that the virus is real and that my children and I need to protect ourselves and others at all costs? I mean, he was the guy who was walking around free to be himself, not constricted by some dumb mask, able to edify strangers about false pandemics.
That’s the funny thing about the fact and fiction. They’re flexible in either direction. One man’s truth is another man’s fiction, and vice versa. What’s even funnier is the incongruity between truth and lie. Where my truth is to keep myself and my family safe from this unseen enemy, that man’s truth is to face the false enemy because there could be no consequences.
Right?
When I hear of the passing of an acquaintance’s mother from the virus, the family who were all deniers, I thank my version of the truth. When my neighbor, an Emergency Nurse shares with me that our local hospital used to have one Covid floor but now has three and that they are full, mostly with young people, I thank my version of the truth again.
I don’t thank that man’s version of the truth because I believe it to be false. And so goes the stalemate we continue to be stuck in. Will there be a winner of this game? Perhaps when our versions of the truth come to get us.
Sure, I may be going steadily crazy by the day unable to live my normal life, but yeah, I don’t have the virus.
And sure, that man can wander about as a liberated itinerant philosopher living life as it should be, but he could also end up in a Covid floor at the hospital—or in a grave—sooner than he can say, “It was all a hoax!”
There again lies that incongruence that could either kill us all or propel our species into the next evolution. Perhaps having an imbalance of believers and deniers—in all things—is what keeps nature humming along. It’s the reason we will always have incongruity in what’s real and what’s fake. It’s why irony will always reign supreme.
As author Judith Shulevitz once wrote about irony, “It’s a lens that is morally neutral, deployed for evil as easily for good.”
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Photo by Photo Boards on Unsplash
