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War not right place for irony

(Last updated: 06/02/09 7:21pm)

There’s a group of people on campus that you might not know much about. They don’t belong to any formal association, but their presence is noticeable.

Ian Johnson

Are you reading this in Espresso Royale? Do you see a lot of wool clothing? Watch out, you’re surrounded by them. In fact, if you’re drinking coffee and reading a college newspaper opinion column, you might be one yourself.

They’re hipsters.

And Joshua Cohen is their messiah.

One of the most important tenants of hipsterism is irony – the love of things that are the opposite of what you expect. Cohen, a hipster himself, set himself up for what would have been the most ironic death ever. It all started when he was in an art gallery.

Of course.

The aspiring underground journalist was enjoying a gallery in New York, when he was hit with a sudden realization. Each piece of art in the exhibit was a protest of the Iraq war. This repetitiveness upset him. Protesting the war has been overdone and was now becoming a cliché. “No Blood For Oil” was so 2003.

That’s why he decided to enlist. I’ll let him explain.

“I thought it would be pretty funny — since I totally hated the Bush administration — if I went to Iraq to fight a war I didn’t believe in,” he said to The Huffington Post. “Plus, I’m way too intellectual to be a soldier, so it would be super-ironic. That sold me.”

I swear The Onion didn’t just make this up.

Far be it for me to question the motives of anyone willing to fight for the country, but I’m a little worried about Cohen. He might be detached from reality.

Cohen’s level of comfort with fighting in a war he doesn’t believe in is unnerving. He didn’t enlist out of a strong drive to defend the country, he did it as a literary device. It seems like he was fully aware of what he was getting into, even though this decision would indicate otherwise.

But there is a train of thought here to be followed. Most hipsters pride themselves on being different, but that usually takes the form of acting similar to other hipsters. To stand out from his peers, he needed to do the exact opposite of what they were doing, which by Cohen’s logic meant signing up for the Marines. Maybe he isn’t stupid after all. Maybe he’s just overly self-aware.

The war protest has been completed and Cohen recently received a Purple Heart after being wounded in combat. Cohen officially has fought in and survived a war he didn’t – and likely still doesn’t — believe in.

But I’m asking myself the same question Cohen must have asked himself from time to time: What if he died?

It must have been a reality for him. He saw action and was wounded in combat, so the fear of dying must have been there. He couldn’t possibly have done this all because he liked the irony.

I think he’s under the impression his life is a book.

“War is actually pretty tough,” he told The Huffington Post. “I was expecting to just hang out in the green zone, and maybe ironically torture some innocent Iraqis — I wasn’t expecting to get shot at so much. A lot of my buddies died in my arms. I’d read ‘Catch-22,’ you know? Rang true.”

He seems to have blurred the line in his mind between reality and fiction. He needs to realize there’s no story being told of his life. The fact that he came home and some of his friends didn’t isn’t poetic, it’s morbid chance. There’s always the possibility he considered dying better to his story. Dying for a cause you don’t believe in is far more profound than just fighting for one.

If any number of things went a little bit differently he wouldn’t have been here to write his own book, which he’s already comparing to “Slaughterhouse 5.”

He would have just been dead. A dead soldier in Mesopotamia – the birthplace of the ideologies that spawned this war – with the weight of the world’s irony on his shoulders.

Originally Published: 06/02/09 7:16pm