E PLURIBUS UNUM REDUX: The New Sincerity

It has happened. It is happening. It has been happening.

& It will continue happening.

Everything is new. The old forms of the 20th century are perishing. The mass television media is stupefied, like neanderthals shown the telegraph. They cannot understand. As I watched the results unfold from CNN and Fox streams, they were only two of the many tabs I had open on my screens. I texted family and friends. I tweeted and had discussions in my DMs. When Wolf Blitzer bothered me I muted him. This has been the way of world for years now. When will they realize?

I suspect that they cannot. As Trump’s unprecedented rout became undeniable, the pundits began muttering explanations. They are senile. They cannot understand. “It was when she said ‘Deplorables’” said one. “There was that moment in the second debate…” said another. They cannot understand. None of these hallucinations mattered at all. The television did not matter at all. The newspapers did not matter at all. None of these “moments” mattered. What matters is this.

The old media does not matter anymore.

The world is new. The 21st century is beginning to show its character.

Much has been said about this emerging newness under the label “New Sincerity.” The idea was popularized in America by the author David Foster Wallace in his prophetic 1993 essay titled “E unibus pluram: television and U.S. fiction.” A key idea underlying his essay is that media and media technology are the environments in which we live, that our technology is an extension of ourselves and drives internal changes in our understanding of ourselves. This is quite obvious, of course, just as a fish obviously lives in water and obviously comes to know itself in it’s environment of water- but the obvious punchline to this joke is the fish asking the other fish “What the hell is water?”

DFW gave a well known commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005 titled “This Is Water,” in which he deployed this joke. I believe that jokes are no joke. I agree with Wittgenstein when he said “A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.” The unprecedented failure of our media institutions to comprehend our new political reality has been one long joke. Seth Myers, at the infamous 2011 White House Press Correspondence Dinner quipped that Trump would not run as a Republican, but “as a joke.” The Huffington Post giving Trump a 1% shot, the New York Times prediction meter flipping from 10% to >95% in mere hours, the entire Intellectual-Yet-Idiot class “literally shaking” as their delusional reality crumbled around them- all hilarious jokes. Let us enjoy our laughter, but let us also inspect these jokes. It has come time for us to understand our new media environment.

“Make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us.” -DFW



We are emerging from our ironic era into a post-ironic era. The days of Jon Stewart, Jon Oliver, Samantha Bee, and all the other so-called “comedians” of the Bush and Obama age are ending. Despite their ostentation to rebellion, their form of political irony is as much a relic of the television age as the relevancy of CNN. Their opinions were never dangerous to hold in polite bourgeois society. In fact, they merely painted the consensus view of the establishment elite with punk-rock spraypaint, like a hedge-fund manager wearing a Rage Against the Machine t-shirt. This trick had already been mastered by advertisers in the second half of the 20th century. DFW spells out how exactly this sort of irony tyrannizes us:

“Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like a hysteric or a prig. And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability to interdict the question without attending to its content is tyranny. It is the new junta, using the very tool that exposed its enemy to insulate itself.”

TL;DR:

“There is no real America.” – Jon Stewart

“I’m just a comedian.” xD



We have staged a rebellion against this tyranny and we have won a major victory. DFW predicted that the tyranny of irony would someday end. I ask you to read these words with Trump’s victoryand the AltRight pepe-posters in mind.

“The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of “anti-rebels,” born oglers who dare to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse single-entendre values. Who treat old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point, why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk things. Risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. The new rebels might be the ones willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “How banal.” Accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Credulity. Willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows.”

TL;DR: The only way to rebel against the tyranny of irony is with a new sincerity.

What DFW did not predict was that the rebels of new sincerity would risk far more than ridicule. Cries of Sexist, Racist, Misogynist, Fascist, Nazi, Deplorable; threats of doxing; loss of employment; banishment from social media… Attacks were made by all levels of the establishment to stop and silence the rebellion. But their attacks were all in vain. They did not realize that their tactics were relics of the 20th century; of outmoded media.

“World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.”

– Marshall McLuhan (Culture is Our Business)

The most ridiculous assertion of the old-media establishment is the idea that Russia was behind Wikileaks. If anything shows how the establishment is stuck in 20th century mentalities, it is this Cold War rehashing. The truth was explained quite eloquently by Trump in August. There is a world war going on between nationalists and those who long to surrender sovereignty to the “false song of globalism.” This culture war is not over comrades. It has just begun. Trump’s victory has provided us a foundation to rebuild our culture. The future does not belong to the ironic School of Resentment, but to the new sincerity of tradition. We must Make America Sublime Again.

The real question is our medium for accomplishing this. The relevancy of the written word has been another casualty of the Internet. Although much has been written claiming that more people are reading books than ever before, this rings falsely in my ears at least. Bob Dylan just won the Nobel Prize for LITERATURE for fuck’s sake. If I make reference to David Foster Wallace too much, it is perhaps because he is one of the only “literary figures” of recent memory. However, I do not think that his model is one that anyone should idealize. As much as he rails against the medium of television in his work, he was an admitted television addict. In an interview he claims that he does not own a television, because if he did, he would do nothing but watch it. When he disparages the “intellectual” who has an ironic love/hate relationship with the medium, he is talking about himself.

The medium that fits our age of “guerrilla information war” is probably talk-radio, citizen journalism- the various figures like Cernovich, Milo, Alex Jones, Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh- who have essentially memed themselves into relevancy by combining their lives with their commentary in such a fashion that they are impossible to separate. Unlike Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert or Oliver, Samantha Bee, etc. they did so within a structure of their own creation. They are not a part of the televisual system of control. The tragedy of these sorts of figures, from my view, is that they ultimately become “lifestyle brands”; making their money on T-Shirts, tours, or else selling supplements like the gurus, conmen, snakeoil salesman, and revivalist/televangelist preachers of yesteryear.

David Foster Wallace wrote derisively of this medium in his article titled “Host” which was about John Ziegler. His article ends with this: “one can almost feel it: what a bleak and merciless world this host lives in—believes, nay, knows for an absolute fact he lives in. I’ll take doubt.” He interpreted the fire and brimstone apocalyptic sincerity of Ziegler as an authoritarian and unappetizing mode of rhetoric. The doubt that DFW preferred was a shield of ironic detachment, which condemns authenticity as proletarian, too “simple.” Narratives that aren’t the narrative of the impossibility of understanding “the whole picture”; narratives that are not “all narratives are spurious and incomplete” are rendered anachronistic. How dare any individual think his “point of view” to be the Truth. How dare anyone claim the privilege of judgement. Though, of course, the irony of this sentiment as a judgement escapes him; or perhaps it tortured him.

Ziegler wrote a rather accurate and harsh rebuke of DFW as an obituary titled “Death of a Salesman.” It is worth reading alongside “Host.” He found himself agreeing with Harold Bloom. “He can’t think, he can’t write. There’s no discernible talent” said Bloom; “David Foster Wallace was an overrated writer in life. His suicide should not be used to elevate him even further beyond what he deserved, in death,” said Ziegler. Since his suicide in 2008, DFW has had a film made about him, titled “The End of the Tour” in which Jason Siegel plays him as a tortured awwshucks artist, a sympathetic and authentic figure. He’s become a sort of secular saint, which is extremely ironic. One can’t help but think that what he wanted was exactly this; that his suicide was laid out like a red-carpet to literary immortality; with his unfinished book about Death and Taxes splayed out before him for others to make sense of.

The joke is that it still didn’t get him the Pulitzer.