Irony Deficient

For those of you who don't know, Paul Wellstone was senator for Minnesota for 12 years until 2002, when he died in a plane crash while campaigning for reelection, less than a week before the election. He was known to be very liberal and very outspoken, reputed among those who loved him to be a hard fighter for what was right rather than what was simply popular (yes, I am one of those people). A lot of people in Minnesota still mourn him and lament his passing and you can still see people sporting Wellstone campaign bumper stickers and other ones reading "WWWD?" (What Would Wellstone Do?).

So tonight I passed a truck with a bumper sticker reading "Wellstone's gone, get over it." While I was sitting there, silently cursing him out (he can go fuck himself, really), I noticed something else. The rest of the back of his truck was covered with Dale Earnhardt stickers. Now don't get me wrong here, I liked Dale Earnhardt too. You'd be hard pressed to find a better race car driver and he had a certain gentlmanly, yet rebellious appeal. But he's been dead for more than 5 years now, and while he is still often memorialized in NASCAR, the sport has moved on.

I told my guitar instructor about this incident, and he gave me a phrase for it: "irony deficient." Other examples of irony deficiency would be the parent in Texas who wants to ban the book Fahrenheit 451 (a book about the dangers of censorship) or people who drive very large gas-guzzling SUVs with "Support Our Troops" bumper stickers on the back (that one he actually pointed out to me, but I get it now).

He wants to coin this as a common phrase, so pass it on. And keep up the war on irony deficiency.