Snark is our bread and butter. Snide comments our side salad. Satire and derisive asides our meat and potatoes. In short, Sodblog is built upon the ability to shamelessly cut down whatever and whomever we choose, in a hopefully humorous way.

But could it be that we are nothing but cowards, hunkered down in our protective bunker, hurling insults hither and yon without the possibility of return fire? According to David Denby, author of the new book Snark: It’s Mean, It’s Personal and It’s Ruining Our Conversation, this may just be the case. We’re nothing but a bunch of cowards who offer nothing of value to society.

I caught a review of this new book on Salon.com and I’m not sure that it’s the kind of book that I might not pick up if I saw it at at a book store. It speaks to my baser interests and breaks them down in an academic manner. Or, at least it purports to. The problem is that, in reading the review of the book, it comes across as a one-sided screed against a misunderstood definition of the word that we here at Sod so lovingly use in our namesake; S.O.D., or Snark On Demand.

You can see that this kind of thing might be a problem for us. Snark isn’t only what we do, it’s who we are. We even had t-shirts and hats made to prove it.

The trouble with today’s snarky pipsqueaks who break off a sentence or two, or who write a couple of mean paragraphs, is … they don’t stand for anything, push for anything; they’re mere opportunists without dedication, and they don’t win any victories.

Well, I…shit. He kind of has us there. I mean, we don’t really stand for much, we are more than a bit opportunistic and most of the victories we claim are ones that we construct. Maybe we should rename our site, though. Maybe it should be Satire On Demand, instead. Because we’re more than monosyllabic insult-hurlers. We may not always offer a solution to the silliness and stupidity we see in everyday life, but should we really have to? We’re not the problem solvers in society, we’re the social critics. We’re the idea-men, not the implementers.

The reason we don’t offer solutions is because we need to have something to be against. If everything was perfect, there would be no comedy, hence no satire, hence no snark. We’re not a problem of society, we’re society’s court jester, cleverly needling the problems that actually do plague us all.