My current writing projects
UPDATE at January 10, 2024: I have closed the books on seeking a Literary Agent to represent my first completed novel. I will return to work on the first novel I undertook to write and again seek representation. If that book doesn't win any of these folks over, I will publish my novels for free online. And that's a promise!
UPDATE at October 1, 2024: I have entered some of my poems in three separate poetry writing contests. Winning entries won't be announced until some time in 2025. And so it goes...
UPDATE at January 10, 2024: I have closed the books on seeking a Literary Agent to represent my first completed novel. I will return to work on the first novel I undertook to write and again seek representation. If that book doesn't win any of these folks over, I will publish my novels for free online. And that's a promise!
UPDATE at October 1, 2024: I have entered some of my poems in three separate poetry writing contests. Winning entries won't be announced until some time in 2025. And so it goes...
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Battleship Potemkin blog
Commentary on current events, never lacking in fury and possibly even signifying something.
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[NOTE: Previously published articles can be viewed on the Past articles page but you must click on "Details" on that page to view content.] __________________________________________________________________________________________ POSTED June 14, 2024
Look how neglected Irony's grave marker has already become! Slightly ironic, yes??
[image credit: Kenny Eliason via unsplash] Obituary
[INTRODUCTION: My original plan for this long overdue new article was to present a potpourri of short observations on recent events, and even a new poem. But when the idea of noting the death of the ability to sense and appreciate irony popped into my head, it was off to the races with that. The result is what follows. —GL]
_________________________________________________________ [EXTRA LAYER OF IRONY: This article has been ready to post for weeks now, but I just kept putting it off!! Such is life and its exigencies.] _________________________________________________________ IRONY Born: Classical Age of Greek Philosophy and Literature, 5th Century BC. Exact date unknown. Died: Spring of 2024, of neglect, after a prolonged and agonizing illness. Again, exact date difficult to determine [see below]. From Wikipedia: “Irony has been defined in many different ways, and there is no general agreement about the best way to organize its various types.” “'Irony' comes from the Greek eironeia (εἰρωνεία) and dates back to the 5th century BCE. … [I]t came to acquire the general definition, ‘the expression of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect.’” Irony got weak in the knees during the Middle Ages when the Church of Rome demonstrated to the world that the way to express Christ’s love for those who had drifted from official doctrine was to devise and inflict upon human flesh some of the most fiendish methods of torture ever conceived. But Irony was still in the prime of his life—for convenience, I am ascribing a male identity to our subject—and managed to survive this onslaught. He could but shrug his shoulders and sigh as ongoing disputes among Christian sects over questions of “the Virgin Birth,” whether Mary should be considered an entity to be worshipped like God the Father, and indeed whether God is One or Three, etc. led to the death and mutilation of God knows (pardon the expression) how many more hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of individuals. Think not for a moment that Irony wasn’t watching and listening when the Founding Fathers of the United States declared that “all men are created equal” while a not inconsequential number of these businessman-philosophers claimed, without blushing, that they had a right to hold human beings in abject bondage and extract profits from their forced labor. Irony had to take a lengthy vacation to recover from that blow. Painfully, he did recall that the Constitution provided no assertion that women should share equally in the realm of civil, or civic if you prefer, rights such as suffrage. Irony went to the Great Beyond well aware that a simple assertion of equality called the Equal Rights Amendment could not be passed in this nation that claims to be “the light of the world” in the area of human rights, freedom and “democracy.” [Historical note: The USA is officially, by design, a republic, not a democracy.] Oh, the other nations were far from innocent in the ensuing centuries. Bibles in hand, they set out to conquer and exploit “backwards/unenlightened” peoples wherever on Earth they could be found residing on top of valuable natural resources. It was claimed that the exploited peoples actually benefitted from these relationships they had not sought. [Fast forward to the Enlightened State of Florida, USA, in 2024 and behold its brilliant governor declaring that kidnapped Africans never had it so good as when they were enslaved on plantations in this country. Songwriter and social commentator Randy Newman wryly underlined this situation decades ago with his song “Sail Away.”] Germany’s “National Socialist Workers Party” promised the citizenry a society free of class distinctions, a veritable Paradise on Earth, the first regime that would offer true Liberty. It took quite a few years for the Germans to dig out from under the rubble of their collapsed Reich. This regime, Hitler and Goebbels boasted, would reign for a thousand years. After a mere dozen, with millions of corpses littering European soil, it went into the Dustbin of History. Kaput. But Nazism still has its admirers in today’s crop of politicians. Irony, I guess, should be (posthumously) grateful he will be spared witnessing where the world ends up this time. But somehow it has been our own country that continued to get Irony’s attention most sharply over the years, doubtless due to the immensity of its hypocrisy. Irony fell quite ill in 1947 when the United States, a country whose territorial integrity had not been disturbed by an invading army since 1812, changed the name of its military apparatus from the Department of War to the Department of Defense. Ever since, the USA has waged nothing but wars of aggression around the globe, killing millions of human beings. Whether this cosmetic alteration of nomenclature inspired George Orwell to conceive of Big Brother’s “Ministry of Truth”—a bureaucracy entirely devoted to falsifying the historical record—would be a good topic for research. (The novel 1984 first appeared in 1948.) “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” Thus spoke a US Army colonel to the Press Corps during the American War in Vietnam after a whole community—within the zone supposedly “liberated” from “communist tyranny,” mind you—was intentionally incinerated. “Better dead than Red,” right? No wonder reporters eventually would call the daily briefing in Saigon on the “progress” of the US war effort “The Five O’clock Follies.” There was a proper appreciation of Irony! The assault on Irony--the ability to recognize and appreciate it, which is what we are really examining here—was escalated tremendously when a despised real estate “king” of New York City threw his hat into the political arena in 2015. Donald J. Trump, while building his political following by appealing to the most vile racist/xenophobic elements in American society, proclaimed he was the least racist person imaginable. Not to be outdone by himself, he eventually started his own social media operation incorporating the word Truth. This despite 99% of his public utterances being outright lies or gross distortions of fact. Still trying to top his previous heights of absurdity, this man who tried to steal the 2020 election riles up his rabid followers by arguing that he is the victim of a stolen election. Irony was fortunate to have already entered a near-comatose state when the Trump Bible went on sale. We may be confident that Irony had no doubt that in his private life, Trump is an atheist: Donald J. Trump is the only entity he worships. It was already stale news that virtually every new business venture Trump launched—Trump Steaks, Trump Wine, Trump University, etc.—went belly-up. This from the guy whose ghost-written book, The Art of the Deal, boasted of his brilliance in the business world. But things really turned bad for Irony within the past nine months or so. He had to be hospitalized, gravely ill, after President Biden and his underlings started to shed crocodile tears over the humanitarian crisis created for the Palestinian refugees huddled on the Gaza Strip as Israeli forces launched their campaign of extermination in the wake of the events of October 7, 2023. It appears to have totally escaped the intellectual grasp of US officialdom that to shed these tears while simultaneously financing that war and supplying weaponry and ammunition empowering Israel to carry out the massive slaughter and maiming of men, women and children who have no escape route, is the very essence of unintentional irony. This is to say nothing of Israel, which claims to speak for all Jews everywhere, being engaged in an attempted genocide. As if the historical fact that European Jews suffered this fate during World War II somehow gives Israel the right to engage in such a practice. When did two enormous wrongs ever add up to even the smallest right? And so, Irony, such a useful literary and rhetorical device over two-and-one-half millennia, finally slipped beyond the pale of potential recovery. The exact date could not be determined because Irony had been moved to an isolated wing, previously housing prisoners, in a Washington D.C. hospital. Due to a wildcat work stoppage by hospital staff protesting their own inability to afford proper healthcare for themselves and their dependents on their current wages, no one had bothered to check Irony’s vital signs for a solid week. A slightly ironic situation. END _____________________________________________
* * * Why "Battleship Potemkin"? Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 movie about the mutiny in the Tsar's Black Sea fleet during the failed 1905 Russian revolution is acknowledged as a masterpiece of cinema. The author of this website endorses the film's message: To rise against cruel oppression is not only justified, it is essential for the preservation of human dignity. |
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Previous two blog articles, available on Past articles page:
Previous two blog articles, available on Past articles page:
- The (Not-so)-New McCarthyism
- On the Shedding of Blood
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INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS NOTICE: Unless otherwise indicated, owner of this site is the sole author and owner of all material posted (with exception of public domain graphics). Permission is granted to share contents of this site elsewhere on the Internet or by other means of reproduction provided original author (Gregory Laxer) is credited. Please include a link to this website as a courtesy. If only excerpts are shared, original context must be accurately conveyed and, again, credited to original author. Please include a link to this website. EXCEPTION: Selections from my as yet unpublished memoir (see Memoir Page of this site) may not be reproduced elsewhere without express permission of the author.
DISCLAIMER: The author/owner of this website is not responsible for or necessarily in agreement with ideas expressed on other websites to which links are provided, nor does he endorse products that may be advertised on this site by the website service provider.
