123hop at comcast.net wrote:
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> roughly parallel to the three means of attaining enlightenment:
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> attention, attention, attention.
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> I met Dorothy at a wedding reception in L.A. in the seventies. She seemed a decent and quite cheerful woman.
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> I don't know about cultivating irony. It always struck me that "irony" is a mood for those who have a choice about collaboration. The vast quantity of the working class has no such choice, unless the other option is death. So "irony" is for the "middle" class, those who do have a choice. Much of agitational literature is suffused with irony. I don't think this really reflects the existential position of the working class, and I think it is demoralizing.
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There are details to be worked out here -- but this is essentially correct.
I would put it a bit stronger: leftists should _never_ use irony. Irony, as is most obvious in Socratic irony but is in fact a general characteristic, _always_ involved a pretence of not knowing, and the suggestion is usually (perhaps always) that the prtender in fact knows while the reader does not. In other words, the implied reader of irony is a fool!
It is the weapon of the detached observer, in defence of his/her detachment. What fools these mortals be.
If one know any Athenian history, and the relationships of the 30 tyrants, and links that to the Socratic persona as shown in Plato's dialgoues, the decision of the jury to give Socrates the hemlock makes perfect sense.
Carrol