Consider the Snark

In cataloguing blog-related irritations, Sherman Dorn says, "Your snark isn't nearly as funny as you obviously think it is, and it's going to be less funny tomorrow." My first reaction was "The funniness of my snark will live FOREVER, dammit!" but of course Sherman is mostly right. Snark is at best a means of making a point and amusing your audience simultaneously, at worst a particularly belittling and divisive kind of discourse. This reminded me of a passage in a book I was reading over the weekend, Consider the Lobster (And Other Essays), by David Foster Wallace. The essay was Wallace's lengthy (of course), footnote-laden (also, of course) and altogether brilliant (see prvs.) review of Bryan A. Garner's A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, originally published in Harper's earlier in the decade.  As is the case with most of his essays -- and most great essays in general, come to think of it -- Wallace uses the occasion to touch on a variety of deeper and more generalized truths about the human condition, including: 

Issues of tradition vs. egalitarianism in U.S. English are at root political issues and can be effectively addressed only in what this article hereby terms a "Democratic Spirit." A Democratic Spirit is one that combines rigor and humility, i.e., passionate conviction plus sedulous respect for the convictions of others. As any American knows, this is a very difficult spirit to cultivate and maintain, particularly when it comes to issues you feel strongly about. Equally tough is a D.S.'s criterion of 100 percent intellectual integrity — you have to be willing to look honestly at yourself and your motives for believing what you believe, and to do it more or less continually.

A true Democratic Spirit is up there with religious faith and emotional maturity and all those other top-of-the-Maslow-Pyramid-type qualities people spend their whole lives working on. A Democratic Spirit's constituent rigor and humility and honesty are in fact so hard to maintain on certain issues that it's almost irresistibly tempting to fall in with some established dogmatic camp and to follow that camp's line on the issue and to let your position harden within the camp and become inflexible and to believe that any other camp is either evil or insane and to spend all your time and energy trying to shout over them.

There's a truncated version of the essay here (I think this is what was actually published in Harper's) but in addition to missing lots of good material it puts the footnotes at the end, rendering it semi-unreadable, so really you should buy the book and read the whole thing, along with Wallace's similarly profound reflections on the pornography industry, John McCain, talk radio, Dostoevsky, Tracy Austin, 9/11, John Updike and, of course, lobsters.