No Ancient Tweets for Me Please

Lapham's Quarterly is one of my all-time favorite publications. It's packed with art and philosophy, poetry and essays from ancient to modern times. Each issue follows a theme, and they do a fantastic job of bringing all of these works together into a brilliant collection. Their attention to detail is nearly flawless. Everything is thoughtful, polished and professional; the paper, the quality of the photos, the layout the font choice.

I miss reading the classics as often as I did in the past. Somehow I rarely feel like I have the mental energy to tackle "serious" literature these days. The Quarterly is perfect in that respect. I can get a mix of shorter works and snippets of stories, often with some context thrown in about the time of the particular piece and a bit about the author.

But I've found myself reluctant to pick up some of the more recent issues. Often Lapham's chooses a theme that's relevant to the current times, so lately we've had issues on corruption, democracy, climate change, and fraud. Mixed in among the stories are pithy quotes–one of my favorite features of the magazine–here is the opening salvo of quotes from volume V, number 4 on Politics:

Politics, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage. - Ambrose Bierce, 1906

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them. - Paul Valery, 1943

What experience and history teach is this – that nations and governments have never learned anything from history or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it. - George Wilhelm Fredrich Hegel, 1830

You get the idea, these never fail to be brilliant and cutting. But I've been surprised to realize that I'm starting to feel about satire generally the way I feel about it in modern discourse. If I squint my eyes enough, sardonic commentary like this from any time period starts to look like tweets or memes to me.

I'm well aware that humor and sarcasm have been powerful tools for change, and I'm not criticizing an entire form of expression–the issue here is certainly with me. I just have no stomach–to a surprising degree apparently–for anything that looks like making light of real problems, or for using broken things as a means of displaying one's wit. When I see this kind of thing today I become angry. It's too easy to mock, to declare something irredeemable. It's fun and dramatic to make sweeping and damning statements unaccompanied by new insights or solutions or alternatives.

Again, I'm not criticizing Lapham's or these authors or anything (or making a sweeping statement about sweeping statements), just noting a surprising change in my own tastes. It would be sad and fitting if somehow, along with everything else, the last several years have ruined satire for me.