[On war as ironic]: It's ironic because everybody believes that life is pleasurable, and they should. They have a right to believe that, especially i… - Paul Fussell
" "[On war as ironic]: It's ironic because everybody believes that life is pleasurable, and they should. They have a right to believe that, especially if they're brought up under a Constitution that talks about the pursuit of happiness. To have public life shot through with that kind of optimism and complacency is the grounds for horrible, instructive irony when those generalities prove not true. War tends to prove them not true. War is about survival and it's about mass killing and it's about killing or being killed — that is, in the infantry — and it is extremely unpleasant. One realizes that a terrible mistake has been made somewhere, either by the optimistic eighteenth century or by mechanistic twentieth century. The two don't fit together somehow, and that creates, obviously, irony.
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About Paul Fussell
Paul Fussell (22 March 1924 - 23 May 2012) was an American cultural and literary historian, professor emeritus of the University of Pennsylvania, and author of books on eighteenth-century English literature, World War I, World War II, and social class.
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Additional quotes by Paul Fussell
After every war, there's an immense overhaul of language, which in the Western world has created really the cultural and artistic phenomenon of what we call modernism; that is, a paring down of everything to minimal size, including language and ideas of grandeur, and ideas of a possibility of the state making everybody happy, and things like that. That modernism is really a form of skepticism or minimalism. You cut out everything that has deceived you and throw it away, and that leaves you with things like the Eames chair and Picasso and numerous other outcrops of modernism.
Irony is a great help in helping to penetrate fraudulent language. In the Second War especially, the language became virtually identical with the language of advertising. It was seen through by the troops, who knew what the truth was. It helped to sustain civilian support for the war, which was its purpose, after all. … And euphemism has remained, of course. It's a large part of the tone of public discourse. … It's now practiced on so wide and so official a scale that it's grown out of all proportion to what it was in the war.
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