Appreciating snark

Callimachus at Done With Mirrors won acclaim in some circles last week by revisiting what a now-defunct Web site used to call "a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun." The target in this case was snark, and Callimachus declared himself against it in an eloquent series of bumper sticker generalizations about "wit borrowed on interest and spent wastefully" that "debases the coinage of commentary."

The problem with snark, Callimachus would have us believe, is that even in the hands of able practitioners who do not insult others just because they can, it never rises above the level of the smart-aleck wisecrack. That is a noble assertion, but in the absence of supporting evidence for it , I can't help wondering whether the exasperated Callimachus is overfond of his own high-mindedness. He has all the indignation but none of the humor of Ignatius Reilly in pre-Katrina New Orleans railing against the world in the pages of a Big Chief tablet.

We can probably agree that snark is speech or writing loosely characterized as "snidely derisive." Let's stipulate further that the recipe for snark includes equal measures of sarcasm and contempt. What I want to know is whether that rhetorical tone is always and forever to be decried, and I suspect the answer is "absolutely not." Moreover, I think writers of the caliber of Winston Churchill, George Bernard Shaw, Dorothy Parker, and P.J. O'Rourke agree with me. What was the famous exchange between Churchill and Shaw over theater tickets if not an example of premium snark? A delicious quip like Parker's "if you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to" could also be called snarky, and O'Rourke's takedown of a now-forgotten farm bill is nothing if not a 706-word masterpiece of snark.

Callimachus may object that the foregoing examples blur the line between wit and snark, but that line is a tough one to see. If such an objection has any merit -- if Callimachus hastens to reclassify the examples above as "honest invective" or "keen satire" because they do not gore an ox of which he is himself fond -- it would undercut the case he's trying to make.

One need not appeal to the pantheon of famous wordsmiths in making a case for snark, either. Consider my friend Cassandra, whose snark is flavored with a Morticia Addams-like willingness to lean on French when making a point. Did You Say Something, Dear? is a trifle of a post, but also a representative sample of Cassandra's modus operandi. Note that she invokes both Batman and Casablanca to good effect. She can be efficient. She can feign amazement. She can shift between world-weary and dryly amused in the same post, even using medieval syntax like "verily, the mind boggles." In other words, you are not likely to find the gimlet-eyed Cassandra's name on any list of pundits whose rhetorical or analytical talents have been dulled by snark. Would Callimachus call her the exception that proves the rule, or speculate that the Shakespearean allusion in Cassandra's blog title somehow innoculates her writing against the curb-level sarcasm that trips lesser minds? That is weak tea, friends, and not because it's been diluted by rampaging Sons of Liberty who hurled crates of it into Boston Harbor.

Here's a better-known example: Ann Coulter is frequently derided by friend and foe alike for having built a career on snark. Who but the rhetorical equivalent of a demolition derby driver would turn in a column titled "Studies Show: Felons Smarter than Liberals," or write books about How to Talk to a Liberal (if you must)? By every measure worth the name, Coulter's style ranks high among the kind of writing that has Callimachus in a snit. So is Coulter's stock in trade what a fair-minded person would call "the self-satisfied snort of slaves and eunuchs?" We cannot simply call Coulter annoying, abrasive, or hateful and leave it at that, because Callimachus has charged that snark fuddles minds. Unfortunately for his argument, Coulter remains lucid, as even a cursory glance at her fiery denunciations of current immigration policy would show. Long-form writing doesn't scare her, either.

Am I cherry-picking these examples? Of course. Coulter can mop the floor with amateur snarks like Michael Moore and Al Franken. The point is that good, even necessary, snark is absurdly easy to find. Christopher Johnson snarks in the service of orthodox Christian theology. His is not the voice of the "smacked ass smirking at the hand that slapped it," it's the commentary of a disillusioned Episcopalian using the step-stool of sarcasm to see over walls erected by the trendy leadership of his denomination. Anyone who thinks a more irenic tone would make the case for orthodoxy as well as Johnson does with snark has not heard the dictum that "the Internet doesn't do nuance."

While it is true to say, as Callimachus does, that "Solzhenitsyn came not by snark," it is preposterous of him to declare that Mark Twain and Galileo Galilei ignored that rhetorical tool. Among Twain's many epigrams is "I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying that I approved of it." Galileo isn't as quotable, but wasn't above snark, either. As Vincent Carroll and Dave Shiflett observed in their excellent book, Christianity on Trial: Arguments Against Anti-Religious Bigotry, Galileo was a controversialist, "an intellectual who relished the parry and thrust of debate," a stubborn man who "misjudged the value of his relationship with Pope Urban VIII and pushed the pontiff beyond his limit." And how did this happen? Not in the peer-reviewed pages of a journal of science where fearmongering clerics might read a defense of the Copernican cosmos. Why, Galileo used the very thing that Callimachus says he did not stoop to: "With almost suicidal rashness, Galileo created the character of Simplicio in 1632 for his brilliant Dialogue, and then let the simpleton mouth the pope's own arguments. This was the insult that brought the great scientist down."

Callimachus, then, is only 1 for 3 in his examples, and the one is shaky at best, because it's safe to say that Solzhenitsyn didn't need snark to highlight the horrors of the Gulag Archipelago, or he'd have used it, too, with the explosive scorn that Ace now brings to muddle-headed "news" reports of alleged "diversity" in Islamic terrorism.

Snark is a tricky weapon to use well. I'll concede that much. But another metaphor springs also to mind: snark is sometimes the basil and oregano without without which the pasta sauce of commentary in our politically correct age is just so much tomato paste. As an occasional, often humorous, alternative to dispassionate or even impressively irenic argument, snark can torpedo false notions of moral equivalence, or expose hyprocrisy with an economy of words utterly foreign to "the chirp of minds that choose be small yet can't cease to feel important."

In short: Hey, Callimachus! Your diagnosis needs work. All the little birds on Jaybird Street love to hear the robin going "tweet! tweet! tweet!"