She has always mocked her unsuitability for the job, a sly sort of mockery since it is precisely her ability to self-criticise, to track a mood - either personal or cultural - that makes her writing so powerful.
It was this same lack of ironic self-awareness (or rather, this absence of any sort of mockery-avoidance technology) that led my generation to pillory the hippies and progressives that's why we were South Park Republicans before we were Daily Show Democrats: because back then, standing for liberal values meant something, and that made you look lame.
Flynn also suggests that military operations should feature a sort of follow-up mockery.
Everett and Kincaid have so many targets that everything, their authorial selves included, gets sprayed with a curiously flat sort of mockery.
It undermines his attempts to be taken seriously as a campaigner, and it opens him up to all sorts of mockery on that world wide interweb.
Hence the endless fixation on Edward Snowden's tone and choice of asylum providers, the flamboyant denunciations of this "29-year-old hacker" for the crime of exposing what our government leaders are doing in the dark, and all sorts of mockery over the drama that resulted from the due-process-free revocation of his passport.
They are in their 20's and 30's, all saturated in the comic sensibility of the early 1980's, a sort of post-Lenny Bruce mockery of bourgeois pretense, a stripping away of the veneer of civility.
There is a German word for this sort of mockery, and it's fremdschämen.
As Dan Ben-Amos, a folklorist at the University of Pennsylvania, has pointed out, the humor of Jews does not consist only of the sort of mockery that qualifies for inclusion in a collection of Jewish jokes.
We have no future if we allow mockery in front of great shrines, and if some see such mockery as a sort of bravery, an expression of political protest, an acceptable action or a harmless joke".
