The Hunting of the Snark

A blog brought to you by poetry. I just heard, or reheard really, the final lines of Whitman's Song of Myself: "Missing me in one place search another, / I stop somewhere waiting for you." I first heard these lines from Angels in America and Walt Whitman really is an American prophet. Anyway, I love those lines so and wanted to share them with you. Or remind you of them, as I'm sure you've all read/heard them before.

I've been catching up on my RadioWest podcasts, and first of all I cannot even imagine how much people like Doug Fabrizio have to read. In nearly every episode he carries on an intelligent, hour-long dialogue with one person, usually discussing that person's latest book, and this is usual on NPR programs. Recently, he had David Denby on who is a movie critic from NYC and they were discussing his book Snark: It's Mean, It's Personal, and It's Ruining Our Conversation. Snark is another wonderful word we owe to Lewis Carroll and his sublime "nonsense" poem The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony in Eight Fits. In the poem the mysterious and elusive Snark turns out to be a dread Boojum that swallows the Baker whole.

What Denby wanted to talk about was that snark is so pervasive in our Internet Age and Blog Culture and it's a travesty. Denby is not an adversary of comedy, quite the opposite. For example he is a fan of satire, even acidic, Juvenalian satire a la Jonathan Swift. Good satire is complex, ironic, intelligent, funny and takes a strong position on an aspect of society. Snark, on the other hand, is cheap, cowardly, shallow, and bulimic. It takes something in and throws up a quick quip--it has ingested nothing and therefore contributes nothing. It cannot add to our conversation or create a dialogue, whereas satire adds to our culture.

Snark lives notoriously in the blog culture behind handles and anonymous profiles. In the largely unregulated cyberspace, bloggers can post nasty, even libelous information about anyone (friends, family, neighbors, strangers) which can be quite damaging to anyone's character or reputation upon a Google search. And we've all seen comment sections where a lovely exchange of dialogue is occurring, but eventually some random person will post a vicious comment completely derailing everything--and the comments will forever go on as a very divisive, polemic, personal "debate." And this is the whole problem with snark. It's mean and it's personal. It doesn't attack content but quips about the person instead, and it's never constructive but always destructive criticism. It doesn't create a dialogue but polarizes people. The Ann Coulters and Bill O'Reillys are our snarkers-in-chief. Their goal is not to create an open conversation of ideas, but to energize the right (or left) and snark about the other side spewing venom and contributing nothing.

The other problem is that it's so pervasive in our culture. In the mid to late eighties, televised news started to be scored like a movie, and we all know that news today is a production--it's entertainment. Seinfeld also came out which is admittedly a funny show, but taught us that we must shun earnestness in a quest for self-deprecating humor. The show was also famously about nothing. If something is about nothing then all it has got to say is a lot about nothing, and how is that helpful? And the media is so terrified of being ten seconds behind that it refuses to research and edit and provide in-depth coverage and analysis, but produces sound bites which is bulimic news.

And so we live in an age of irony and snarkiness. People who have written successful blogs and then gone on to write books and articles for magazines and whatnot have often capitalized on snark. This in turn has inspired a generation of bloggers looking to became journalists and freelance writers to snark away. Another component to snark is that it's easy to do and we all enjoy it. We think it's funny, but snark isn't even particularly witty. It's certainly not thoughtful or intelligent. I've been guilty of snark. I am frequently glib, which can be just as superficial, but it's much more innocuous. Glibness is not usually mean or personal, and while it may not significantly contribute to our conversation, I don't think it's destroying it. Nevertheless, we could all use a little more depth and thought. Snark has created partisan, shallow, sound bite politics, and I think with the advent of Obama we could all use a little more earnestness and a lot less snark. Or we may not like where we find ourselves:

In the midst of the word he was trying to say,
In the midst of his laughter and glee,
He had softly and suddenly vanished away--
For the Snark was a Boojum you see.