In the weeks after 9/11, everyone who mattered was telling us that irony was dead. The line is usually attributed to Graydon Carter of Vanity Fair—otherwise best known for being a sissy, for his bad food restaurants, and for the fact that his V.F. Oscar party is no longer “hot”—but the same sentiment was trotted out by the essayist Roger Rosenblatt, and even the teams behind The Daily Show and the Onion. I had, at the time, just turned eleven years old, but even then I caught a whiff of the fascism in the air, the nightmarish combination of aggro bloodlust and sentimental pap. This was a time when every dweeby columnist in America was publicly frotting themselves against some piece of U.S. military technology, practically begging to be packed into a vertical launching system and fired headfirst into Jalalabad—but then they’d soften. Because we’re the good guys: we’re the kind and empathetic empire, full of moral clarity, and we care deeply about the women and girls of Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, thousands of miles away in London, boys in my school had started spontaneously breaking into song about bombing the Taliban. (One of my teachers, desperately trying to make grammar relevant in these new times, asked us all to write a mock newspaper article about the attacks; I decided to produce an Afghan newspaper celebrating this heroic strike against the imperialists. We had to have a long talk about it after school.) But of course children got caught up in the madness of those months. The Disney Channel even produced a series of interstitials in which its stars gushed over the flag. “I saw a fire truck pass by the other day,” said a fourteen-year-old Hilary Duff, “and it had an American flag on it and it was blowing in the wind, it was so amazing, everyone just started clapping and cheering, it was really special.” The worst thing about this story, of course, is that it might not even be untrue.

It’s worth asking now: why was it that irony had to be the first casualty of America’s wars? Why was double entendre suddenly a security risk? Why was the global struggle against terror also a war on antiphrasis? After all, you can say what you like about Salafi Islamism—it’s nothing if not sincere.

As later commentators like to point out, irony did not in fact die after 9/11. That frenzied moment ended; today, the Disney Channel is far more likely to put out videos on the importance of black lives than the American flag. For a generation of young people, the events have themselves become ironied, a kind of meme: it’s funny to say that Bush knocked down the towers. Today, we can recognize just how much of a cruel joke the entire aftermath has been, from the American Sikhs murdered by sausage-brained vigilantes in 2001, to last month, when twenty years of occupation in Afghanistan ended with the Taliban recapturing the entire country in roughly twenty days. Now we know that the whole of history is a satire on itself.

In fact, this development didn’t take particularly long. Only a few months after the attacks, the Guardian published a special satirical Sunday pullout by Armando Iannucci and Chris Morris, featuring news items like this:

A New York banker whose car was hit by a man jumping out of the burning north tower is suing the dead man’s estate because he failed to curl up into a neat ball to minimise the damage. The City of New York is to sue firms occupying the upper 38 storeys of both towers because as they crashed earthwards, they added hugely to the numbers of people on the lower floors, thus “momentarily breaking fire regulations”.

But like Bush before us, we might be declaring mission accomplished too soon. I’m not so sure that the death of irony really was greatly exaggerated; I think it’s been growing, slowly, unseen, ever since. Consider that the Iannucci and Morris bit above was published by the Guardian (technically the Observer, but it amounts to the same thing)—which has since become the single most utterly priggish newspaper in the English-speaking world. Would they dream of printing a multi-page satirical pullout mocking the victims of a tragedy today? It’s unthinkable.

In a way, things have gotten much, much worse. Twenty years ago, when every government and every media outlet wanted you to cheer on the violence to come, we still had an anti-war movement; there were still some people who could stand up and say no. But today, everyone wants you to think that Ted Lasso is good television, and there’s absolutely nobody who can stop them.

Ted Lasso is a much-celebrated half-hour comedy from Apple TV+ with a record-breaking 20 Emmy nominations, a gentle piece of entertainment delivered by the most valuable private company in the world. According to the New York Times, it “leads a new era of sincere TV,” moving away from ironic modes towards something more heartfelt and genuine. Older comedies tended to be about broadly unpleasant people—Basil Fawlty, Larry David, David Brent. The comedy comes from the gap between how they see themselves and how they really are: an ironic distance. But watching Ted Lasso, “you believe that Ted Lasso is decent, and so do the supporting characters, and so does Ted Lasso.” The show is, per the New Yorker, a “warm hug of nice.” It’s also a piece of fascist propaganda about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The story concerns a fictional London football club, Richmond AFC, which has been taken over by its billionaire owner’s ex-wife after a messy public divorce. Trying to destroy the one thing her husband loved more than anything else, she hires a new coach: Ted Lasso, a grinning home-baked slab of American innocence hired from the college football circuit. Ted is also recently divorced, full of inspirational quotes, and entirely ignorant about soccer. In his first press conference, the scummy British journalists start quizzing him about the game. Can you even name any footballers? “Well sure, you’ve got Ronaldo, and the fella who bends it like himself.” What’s a goalie? “Uh, the fella with the big Mickey Mouse hands by the net.” The journalists hate him, the fans hate him, and so do the players. But Ted is playing the long game. He plays politics, pitting the teammates against each other. A few episodes in, these preening overpaid shaggers have been entirely won round by Ted’s insistence on seeing the good in everyone—and so is the club’s owner, who turns out to be quite emotionally vulnerable; before long, she’s a deeply sympathetic character. And while Ted doesn’t manage to save the team from relegation, winning isn’t even the point: the point is simply to be better as a team; kinder to each other, more loveable, and more sincere.

Basically, it’s Emily in Paris for men, but this time nobody wants to see the ugly American for what he is. Have the critics actually watched this show? They keep talking about it as if it’s a comedy, but it’s absolutely nothing of the sort. The most basic duty of comedy is to find what’s funny, to dig out the inherent absurdity in seemingly very serious situations. This is what Chris Morris and Armando Iannucci did with their 9/11 special: they found a way to turn the deaths of thousands of people into something that would make an ordinary, psychologically healthy person laugh. But Ted Lasso performs this procedure in reverse. We start with a decent comedic premise, and then spend the next few hours delving into the emotional cores of everyone involved. Instead of a punchline, we get redemption. Instead of the mocking laugh, a lesson in empathy.

A century ago, Walter Benjamin diagnosed this kind of writing: “the dreadful cobbling-together of disparate elements that loosely make for characters in novels of an inferior sort,” with the “repulsive crust of the psychologically palpable covering it all.” By contrast, “the ancients set an example for us by presenting events dry, so to speak, drained of all psychological motivation.” Storytelling still achieves this, in fables and fairytales, but so does a joke: a good sharp punchline can say more about the condition of our times or the inner workings of the human soul than a thousand pages of crummy realism. This is something culture can no longer achieve. (See, for instance, HBO’s The White Lotus—notionally a kind of anti-Ted Lasso—which does pretty much the same thing. The first two episodes are an excellent satire, culminating in a scene in which a couple try to have a romantic dinner on a chartered boat while a drunken weeping woman hysterically fails to scatter her mother’s ashes into the Pacific. This is the last time on the show that anyone’s suffering is played for laughs: from then on, all the drama becomes very human, therapeutic and defanged. We’ve lost the courage to make caricatures; everyone is too desperate to be liked.)

Ted Lasso is something finely tuned and terrifyingly efficient, but it simply does not work as a comedy. Drain the bath of coziness, and what other meanings might be bobbing about under the surface? Here’s an American, trying to escape his own domestic problems, who gets drawn into a foreign adventure by some cynical local elites. As soon as he arrives, he starts manipulating the various factions, playing them off against each other; he makes a client out of the most downtrodden, while failing to actually protect them. He doesn’t really understand anything about the situation he’s wandered into, but he has absolute faith in the power of his own good intentions. He knows that inside every dour sarky Brit, there’s a bright-eyed American waiting to escape. . .

The New York Times was wrong; Ted Lasso is exactly like Larry David or David Brent—but here, the show wants you to believe in his delusions. Ted Lasso is the empire’s mad image of itself; he’s George W. Bush, as seen by George W. Bush.

As the Taliban sweep over Afghanistan, as Iraq tears itself apart, as the New American Century overdoses on Chinese credit, Ted Lasso presents a fantasy in which the post-9/11 wars all worked out. Here, the natives put up some token resistance, but in the end they’re grateful. Here, your moral decency and good intentions really are all that matters. Here, in the end, your intentions really were good. Turn off the footage of desperate Afghans falling from US planes as they flee Kabul Airport, and sink into your warm hug of nice.

Not long after the 2005 bombings on the London Underground, some Tube workers started writing messages on the little whiteboards inside the stations, the ones that normally tell you whether there’s a delay on the line. Blitz-spirit stuff; general sentiments to the effect that we are Londoners and we aren’t afraid. In the years that followed the threat of terrorism receded, but the messages never went away. A few days ago, I saw one in North Greenwich: “You are NOT weak, you are tired from being strong. If you feel like crying, then please cry. It’s okay to cry.” Travellers bustled past, as if it were perfectly normal that a quasi-governmental entity was now officially ordering them to weep hot tears over their pathetic wasted lives. Once again, terrorism flows into sappiness. What on earth is going on?

Part of the problem with this whole issue is that people—and not only stupid people—seem to have entirely the wrong idea about what it is that irony opposes. Hegel tore into the “so-called irony” in his Aesthetics: irony is a destroyer; it announces “the vanity of everything factual, moral, and of intrinsic worth, the nullity of everything objective and absolutely valid.” So irony is a kind of Mephistopheles, a spirit that denies: “What has arisen from the void deserves to be annihilated!” In his essay E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction, David Foster Wallace shrunk from the “exclusively negative function” of irony, its “blank, bored, too-wise expression.” He wanted a writing full of “reverence and conviction,” one that upheld “retrovalues like originality, depth and integrity.” Is this what we have now? Now we’ve got rid of irony, now that we’re plunged back into a pre-Simpsons landscape of infinite worthiness, is it integrity that’s coming out of our screens?

The strange thing about irony is that all definitions of irony end up being definitions of language itself. There’s the everyday, Alanis Morissette-type usage: irony is a kind of coincidence, a way in which random events come together to produce meaning out of nothing. Pedantic types like to argue that this isn’t actually irony, but it is a decent model of the process of signification, in which an aleatory jumble of sounds coincides with the world of things. In a stricter sense, an ironic statement is one that actually means the opposite of what it says. But as Freud points out in The Antithetical Sense of Primal Words, every word contains its own buried negative—and meanwhile, “a thing in a dream can mean its opposite”: clearly, there’s something perversely ironical deep in the operation of the unconscious. An ironic text is one that’s self-referential, a novel that draws attention to its own status as a novel—but isn’t this just literature in general? A piece of writing that simply says exactly what it means to say might be a political screed or the back of a cereal packet; a literary text is one that tries to involve the reader in the complex processes of saying.

At its root, irony is just an attention to the way that words can mean many different things at once, an attempt to keep that ambiguity open, and live in the indeterminacy of it all. Irony is not a detachment from the things that matter; often, it’s the only way of genuinely engaging with a deeply contradictory world. Irony is not the opposite of sincerity or conviction—the 9/11 satire above was profoundly ironic and deeply sincere at the same time: an impassioned, barbed assault on all the cruelties of its age.

If irony has an opposite, it’s paranoia.

Paranoia is the neurotic search for clear, singular meanings; it’s a kind of fetishism of the sign. Deleuze and Guattari describe this mode of language very well. “Your wife looked at you with a funny expression. And this morning the mailman handed you a letter from the IRS and crossed his fingers. Then you stepped in a pile of dog shit.” What does it mean? Foreclose on every ambiguity: everything has to stand for something, all signs have to glue themselves to referents, in a precise one-to-one correspondence between words and things. Turban? Terrorist. Flag? Hope. The exact same thing is happening when people smugly tell you that ironic racism is still racism, or act as if mentioning a racial slur is the same thing as endorsing it. Large swathes of people now seem to believe that everything a character thinks or says or does must necessarily be endorsed by the author, so that the films of Martin Scorsese, for instance, become a celebration of white male violence. Today, the most prominent literary forms are autofiction and memoir. Twenty-something content creators who haven’t yet achieved anything particularly interesting still churn out books on the experience of growing up as themselves: my journey as an X person of X. Novelists avoid any messiness by taking themselves as their only subjects. No Alex Portnoys, no postmodern tricks with characters who have the same name as the author but die halfway through. Just a wail: like me! Empathize with me! I’m flawed but relatable and ever so sincere! Well, what else are they supposed to do, when the last remaining mode of art criticism is so deeply paranoid? We no longer ask if something is good or worthwhile, but simply what side it’s on—does it impart the right moral lessons, or is it dangerous? Is it with us or with the terrorists? And the terror is everywhere: the towers have fallen, and we are all under attack.

The post-9/11 era is one of paranoia. The bad are everywhere; you must constantly announce yourself as one of the good. This demands a very particular relation to words: in a time of global war, every utterance has to carry the full clarity of a military order. Twenty years on, every mawkish TV comedy is part of this militarization of language. And even if they don’t know it, every pouting autofictionalist is a shock trooper for the Pentagon’s war on the semiotic realm.

But this might be changing. NATO’s total humiliation in Afghanistan marks a kind of climax of paranoia. See how desperately they’re trying to enforce a single rigid meaning on such a profoundly overdetermined event. Suddenly, the twenty-year occupation stands purely and simply for the protection of Afghan women. All those fingers taken as trophies from murdered civilians, the Viagra doled out to boy-raping warlords, the skyrocketing opium production, Mackinder’s Pivot of History—it was all so little girls could go to school. But the war is lost. Can we hope that the imperialists really have been defeated? David Foster Wallace imagined the coming of “a weird bunch of anti-rebels” who have “the childish gall to actually endorse single-entendre values,” who are “willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists.” We have those people now, and they’re a nightmare. Might the pendulum start swinging the other way? Maybe soon there will be people who are willing to say something interesting rather than something nice, who can engage with the world in all its contradictions rather than hawking a branded version of themselves, who will not seek care or healing, and who will send Ted Lasso to the Hague for his crimes and the millions dead.

Sam Kriss is a writer and dilettante surviving in London.