Ironic sterility
The British have colonized Manhattan, acquiring minute rent-stabilized apartments in the West Village that they pass on to each other like hereditary titles. It’s hard to spot the women—unless they open their mouths. But the British men can be identified by their cropped hair, which they shave to obscure their genetically endemic premature hair loss. They imagine it gives them a street-hard look. Most Americans think they look like gay Marines with deformed ears. They wear their blue jeans like their school shorts—too high and too tight, leaving them with severe moose knuckle. They will occasionally wear items of indigenous clothing—a baseball cap, a plaid work shirt—just to show that they’re not tourists. But they wear them with irony. Indeed, Brits are rarely seen in New York without their magic cloaks of invisible irony—they think that, on a fundamental level, their calling here is as irony missionaries. They bless everything and everyone with the little flick quotation marks, that rabbit-ear genuflection of cool, ironic sterility. How often their mocking conversations about the natives return to the amusing truth that New Yorkers have an unbelievable, ridiculous irony deficiency, which ignores the fact that a city that produced Dorothy Parker, Robert Mapplethorpe, Abstract Expressionism, Woody Allen, and Woody Allen’s love life has quite enough irony to build the Brooklyn Bridge.
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Nursing beers and a well-thumbed ragged project. They’re all here not making a film, not writing a book, not selling a sitcom. Don’t tell me about your latest script. You’re not a film writer. You’re a handyman. You’ve never made so much as a wedding video. You do a bit of decorating, some plumbing, and you house-sit plants. There’s no shame in it. It’s what immigrants do.
No le gustan sus compatriotas expatriados en los EE.UU. a quien escribe esta diatriba contra ellos en Vanity Fair. No es el único. Llevo ya mucho tiempo viendo inmigrantes o gente de paso en este país tratando como pueden de asumir que no están en su país y que, además, están en este país. Si hablas español tienes que negociar además cómo te incorporas a esa otra comunidad. En fin, tampoco es preciso ser tan negativo como este individuo, aunque en abstracto yo también he llegado a evitar concentraciones de compatriotas como las que describe. Aunque estaría por ver a quién siento de verdad como compatriota. Y en todo caso los sentimientos casi siempre hay que domarlos. Me gusta de todo esto la idea de la ironía estéril. Por ponerme críptico, ironía sin fe.
