Choosing Sides

I'm a sucker for anything by Joan Didion, but I found her account of America entering an "irony-free zone" in this NYRB forum particularly fetching, because Didion is perhaps the most temperamentally ironical of all our cultural critics, and knows of what she speaks... and like Astaire to Didion's Rogers Darryl Pinckney follows her with a big wallop of irony - "I am full of inappropriate friendliness to white people and even suspect myself of being patronizing toward them"... and to paraphrase one of Pinckney's other points, that time is "on the side of" (some are suspicious of this formulation; they tend to be those whose graffiti-covered graves we will be pissing on in a few years) gay marriage -- I would say that time is on the side of irony.