THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU, a professor of English literature, writes in response to the previous post, which is a curse upon the author of this site:

The writer A.C.’s contribution (as one could call it) to The Thinking Housewife interests me as a specimen of contemporary liberal rhetoric – I am particularly struck by the perverse use of the verb to hope in the first, controlling sentence, of the item, ramped up in its perversity by her coupling it with the verb to do, which she uses modally for emphasis. (“Hope” appears again without the modal verb in the second sentence and becomes “to wish” in the second paragraph.) Talk about “the audacity of hope”! A.C. is, of course, trying to be ironic; but irony is a tricky device that requires mastery of understatement, a quality conspicuously missing in the actual construction. I would guess that A.C. is incapable of irony, an intuition that I base on the naked brutality of what amount to invidious curses, offered without embarrassment in a public forum, or let us say a public discussion. What those who cannot bring forth irony invariably conjure when they think they are being ironic is: sarcasm – a Greek term meaning “to beat a victim” or “to flog a corpse.” (The element sarc, in sarcasm, refers to the body, as such.) In modern English usage, sarcasm refers to a low, scapegoating type of verbal behavior in which the speaker feels free to indulge in abuse on the assumption that, for whatever reason, the abused party will not respond in kind. 

One should note, however, that A.C. cannot remain contented merely in heaping abuses on Laura Wood, but extends her perverse “hope” to husband and children, whom her figures of speech would enroll as proxies in the “violence” of “A.C.’s” primary hatred. These figures – of the husband beating Mrs. Wood and the children returning hate for love – belong consistently with the sarcastic tone of the larger locution, but they have another meaning, as well. They are sacrificial, as René Girard has defined the term: A.C. imagines a circle of persecutors immolating a victim, who, as in all the classic scapegoat myths, has violated, or rather stands accused of having violated, the ritual proscriptions of the community. As Girard says, the actual historical persecutors whose action gives rise to myth think of themselves as supremely justified and their victim as supremely guilty – as having committed polluting transgressions that are, whether it is the case of Oedipus from the viewpoint of the Thebans or Laura Wood from the viewpoint of political correctness, “repulsive.” (I use A.C.’s own inevitable term.) 

The palpable envy in A.C.’s words makes me willing to hazard a few additional guesses about her. She is divorced; she has strained relations with her children. She is college educated, but not beyond a master’s degree, probably in the social sciences, or perhaps in “women’s studies.” She resents existence, which she believes has cheated her of various entitlements, and she spends a good deal of time meditating on her subjective feelings of mistreatment by the world – which naturally intensifies those feelings. She is as passive in her relation to life as she is vituperative. 

Allow me to close by returning to the topic of irony. There are two basic types of irony: the irony of intention (that gesture of words which only great masters and lovers of language can control) and the irony of structure. A.C. is a perfect case of the irony of structure: Thinking to be ironic (the rhetorical ploy that she fails to pull off is called reversal), she fails; but remaining unaware of her failure (incapable, indeed, of imaging that she even could fail) she makes herself a figure of irony for outside observers acute enough to grasp that she is the purest instance of what she purports to denounce: bigotry and closed-mindedness. I find a consistent and similar sacrificial character in all politically correct and left-liberal discourse.

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