He Who Shall Not Be Named

Ok. I admit it. I’m an irony defender.

See, the word irony used to mean something. Irony was supposed to be this terrible thing where you set out to do something and accomplish the opposite. And, of course, most of the time, you’d be laughed at.

When Superman sets out to save the world and accidentally destroys it, that’s irony.

But, most people use the word irony more liberally. Just about any coincidence that is amusing gets called irony. Look at the Alanis Morissette song. Very few of those lines actually qualify as irony by my definition. Most of ‘em are just plain bad luck. And - that’s cool. But, it’s not irony.

So, I usually chime in. When someone says “oh, that’s kind of ironic, isn’t it?”, I answer: “No. It’s not.” Or, when they tell me a story that’s supposed to be ironic, I ask: “How is that ironic? It sounds coincidental.”

Buzzkill, right?

Here’s irony. I bought a pocket classic Karl Marx book for $3 at Barnes and Noble this weekend. I think Karl would have got the irony. The very book in which he coined the term “commodity fetishism” now being sold as a commodity.

I was watching a Frontline DVD from Netflix last night, called “The Persuaders”. It was about marketing and advertising folks, and how they create “emotional connections beyond reason” for brands and products. There was a statement in there that seemed dismal but true: when marketing is successful in creating value associations for commodities in our culture, then culture suffers a loss. And, ultimately, it becomes more difficult to assign value associations to commodities.

Great brand equity is like death magic. You can get it, but it depletes some unrecoverable part of culture every time you do.

I bought the Marx book with cash. No need for the credit card companies to have that piece of data. (They’ll never find me here on this blog. . . hiding in plain sight.)

Bad news for cold warriors: Marx is not dead. By ending the cold war, we’ve opened the door for people to read what this man said again. An entire generation, or two, spoke his name only with a special reserved hiss of contempt. They knew, without needing to read a word, that he was evil and nefarious. So, they never read him. But now, the communist experiment is over. It has failed. And, Karl Marx’s 2,000 page critique of capitalism still stands. And, so many of its words are still so meaningfull.

Commodity fetishism.

100 years ago, this concept was hard to explain. Now, it’s simple. Just say one word: Ipod.