The Expulsion of Irony from Kitsch and the Metonymy of terror

Here’s the thing: I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. About how kitsch stopped being ironic. I mean, I’ve been talking about it for a while, how that defined the post-9/11 discourse. I hate to hand it to Kundera for being right. Some of his writing is beautiful and on point, but when he tries to generalize it’s usually annoying. But he said that kitsch is the absence of shit, and while it’s one of his vaguely astute soundbites, the last year and a half has unpacked that sentence in a way that is true. I prefer to think about it as elimination of irony. Kitsch by definition is unironic, that’s what makes it kitsch, but in true pomo fashion, that’s what has made items of kitsch ironic signifiers that could be used for counterdiscourses. I thought about it last night as people holding candles in Union Square acapellaed their way through Kumbaya and Ain’t Gonna Study War No More. I thought about how much sing-ins and drum circles annoyed me but how any sort of resistance now will have to be reinfused with sincerity, in order to at least measure up as a little David to the Goliath of the media; donning kitschy items as ironic comments on American ethnocentrism/globalization/whatever simply won’t fly anymore. The space for that particular discourse has been erased. Americana Kitsch-in-earnest has become a vessel for the new kind of framework, which is the metonymy of terror. It’s kind of like taking referential mania from Nabokov’s “Signs and Symbols” and interpollating all the messages and signals into this kind of schizophrenic matrix where everything stands for everything else which can stand for terrorism (which becomes the primary category even for things that have nothing to do with terrorism, which are illuminated and demarcated through phrases like “there is no conclusive evidence to link X to terrorism), where in a post hoc/undistributed middle fallacy salad, thanks to this grand synecdoche, retrospectively--but really synchronically!--anything can be terrorism, unless it has proved its solemn kitsch cred. The metonymy of terror is the way to link Saddam Husein to 9-11. It is all-powerful. It transcends categories of history and logic. It deactivates cause-and-effect directionality. It amalgamates Saddam and Darth Vader, biblical binaries and moral imperatives, Hitler and the weasels featured on the cover of the New York Post a few weeks ago. Metonymy of terror creates a forum where Chris Matthews on Hardball can say that Bush’s decision to go to war is like choosing a C-section instead of waiting for a problematic delivery(na-ah he di-in! yes he did. last night.) Sure, that’s a metaphor, too, but that’s just within the context of the phrasing and the establishment of a referent and an analogy. But it’s also a metonymy for the badness of abortion, desired by selfish, slutty women who want their babies vacuumed out of them, as opposed to the goodness of a C-section, which is a medical procedure that is PAINFUL and SCARRING for a woman, and performed unnecessarily by scalpel-happy doctors all the time all over the place, but it’s good because it adheres to the Bible party line of sexuality/birth/pain and because it encompasses a sacrificial (almost ritualistic, no?) element (and our president sure had something to say about sacrifice in tonight’s address, didn’t he?) leading to the sacred birth. And on it goes, the sliding down the metonymical umbilical cord of signification, where it all feeds into the Biblical/Star Wars discourse that busts out of the realm of allegorical and into the literal.