Mario's Onantiad gala: absolution via irony

The anthology's cleanest naming of irony's social function. The whole I.-Day gala runs on ironic reception — the room hecklers, cheers "ironically," cracks wise, does baritone mimicry of the disliked President, throws sweets that stick to the screen to give Gentle "a sort of carbuncular look that everyone approves" — and the narrator diagnoses the mechanism precisely: absolution via irony. To watch your nation's dark history (annexation, waste-imperialism, the swallowing of Canada) and get off the hook by mocking it is the American move, irony as a laundering of complicity. And it is set against a control group: the Canadian boys sit "unhatted, chewing stolidly," because they "remember only hard facts" and cannot be absolved of a history that is happening to them. Irony here is not a style but an exemption the powerful grant themselves.