TONE

A significant deficiency in most Americans (which is the fault of their culture, not necessarily of their personal dispositions) is to be unable to gain access of any sort to the mode of irony.  For instance, a USA toll chastised me recently for using “Um a lot”, which apparently was not to its taste.  But if you listened to the way I used the pause tone in the particular video, it was purely ironic.  I was saying, “I am stuck for words, because the following topic isn’t usually one I would address and in fact I find it a bit distasteful to try.”

Nonetheless, trolls serve a task of being revelatory as to the sweeping nature of American cultural blind spots.  If I can think of anything that is quintessentially un-American, it is appreciation for irony in tone.   They simply cannot take it in, and so sentences that were actually delivered with an ironic twist are taken as a kind of point blank plodding (which probably replicates the troll’s own plodding stupidity).  This leads to people of remarkable stupidity criticizing Irigaray’s writing from their lowly heights (a few yards below her feet in height) and accusing her of being unscientific.  Similarly, Nietzsche is read as telling Americans to note well that masters are good and slaves are evil.  (I think Nietzsche endears himself to stupid Americans by seeming to be simpler than he is, but in fact he does employ something akin to the Hegelian dialectic when talking about the masterful shaping forces and the internalizing reactive forces and how both of these make up human reality. )  

From long terms observations I can say that when a beginner is picking up a new book, from a culture or historical period he does not yet know much about, and is reading “a tone” into it, he is generally reading his own tone and existing range of experience into it.  He would need to persist much longer, and with much more intellectual commitment than a beginner usually has, to gain access to the book’s real tone and flavor.