The Last Gasp of 90s Irony
I, Tania by Brian Joseph Davis Book Review
Before 9/11 Americans treated politics like a joke. The Cold War was over. The Russian premiere was drunk. Conspiracy theories were funny. Terrorism happened overseas. Bill Clinton was disappointing but blow jobs. Then Bush became president, the dot-com bubble collapsed and Osama Bin Laden became a household name.
Remnants of the time period remained. South Park was still popular. Bill Maher smirked his way through the decade. Before fading into obscurity, Neal Pollack wrote the essay “Regarding the War: Just Shut Up”. It had its fans but the cool cynicism felt like an anachronism. I, Tania was similarly dated.
Published in 2007, I Tania came into the world ten years too late. In 1997, a book beginning with Patty Hearst killing her ghost writer and delivering a treatise on why “I Feel Love” by Donna Summer is a profound psychological manifesto would have been transgressive. In 2007, it was nostalgia. After a punchier version of the “my father was a financier” introduction, the chapter ends with gags about combining Soldier of Fortune with True Romance. Everything from the Pinochet Coup to the Spanish Civil War becomes a love story.
I Tania is amusing, but it tries too hard to be glib. A long discourse on the fashion sense of terrorist groups with lines like “The IRA was a mess of tweed until Consuelo Vanderbilt introduced sharp black tans into their look” follows an extended joke about the guest list of the Symbionese Liberation Army Ball. Of course, Sha-Na-Na is on the list. Davis is making a point about revolution co-opted by privilege, but once you get that point, it’s hard to care for jokes about Karl Marx ruining his career with infomercials or the SLA watching Convoy to understand poor people.
Near the halfway point, the author finally gets bored with celebrity Marxist jokes and throws in a chapter about sex toys with names like Fellow Traveler and Urban Guerrilla. This is when the book falls apart. Brilliant Marxist interpretations of The Bad News Bears and Cujo aside, the latter half of the book becomes a tedious slog centered on an imaginary interview between Patty Hearst and Katie Couric. Name checking Mary Lou Retton, John McEnroe and the Clash feels more whacky than rebellious.
Ultimately, I Tania, feels like a mile long rollercoaster ride — at first thrilling but ultimately boring. By page 50, the author has made point. Everything else might as well be the script to a pretentious remake of Remember the Spartans.
In 2007, I Tania would have felt dated. In 2020, it feels like an insult, a snide little manifesto mocking all revolutionary movements as hierarchy. When Tania pontificates that the only true revolution is dancing, the reader might feel tempted to celebrate an innocent time when dancing felt revolutionary. After four years of the Trump administration with all the xenophobia, ally betrayal, and concentration camps, we need more than dancing. Even before 2016, school shootings and militarized police departments refused to be danced away.
I, Tania was published 10 years too late. It has only become more dated in the intervening years. It was easier to joke about the Pinochet Coup or the Spanish Civil War when we weren’t afraid of a repeat. In 2020, police are throwing tear gas at peaceful protesters. Neo-Nazis are more active than ever. The government still refuses to recognize the KKK as a terrorist organization. In Nebraska, Neo-Nazi Jake Gardner went to a Black Lives Matter protest and outright murdered a black man. He’s getting away with it because Don Kleine, the prosecuting attorney is a white supremacist. The current White House resident is firing everyone who investigates him. One day, civil war and terrorism will be funny again. They weren’t that amusing in 2007 and if we were honest with ourselves, we shouldn’t have been so eager to laugh these things off in the 1990s.