Pope Francis gave expression to Christian irony when he prayed and praised God in these words: “You are immense and you made yourself small; you are rich and you made yourself poor; you are all-powerful and you made yourself vulnerable.”
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The word “irony” comes from the ancient Greek, meaning “dissimulation, feigned ignorance.” “Dissimulation” is to hide under a false appearance—to let on, to make out, to pretend. We use the word “irony” today to mean that what appears on the surface to be expected or true is radically different from what is. It is “the deliberate use of language which states the opposite of truth. Irony is often used by writers to create a contrast between how things seem (appearances) and how they really are beneath the surface.
Some people are “confident that the world is exactly the shape that they see it as, and that all it needs is themselves and those like them to be put to rights, they experience no tension in whole-hearted commitment to their cause; they take delight in the denunciation of their opponents as the unwashed and unrighteous enemies of the good, i.e., themselves. They live in a world cramped enough to be commensurate to their self-righteous egos. In such a world, irony is a crime against reality.”
There is irony in Trump’s executive order accusing TikTok of spreading COVID-19 misinformation. Trump accuses TikTok of spreading conspiracy theories about the origin of the coronavirus. This order comes even as Twitter and Facebook pull down Trump’s posts related to COVID-19 for relaying false information. That’s ironic!
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