Politics & Power Quote by Kenneth Koch

Koch’s wry “Certainly” is doing more than clearing its throat; it’s staging a miniature surrender to modern life’s baseline condition: you will be lied to, and you will be expected to smile about it. As a New York School poet, Koch wrote in a register that could sound breezy while smuggling in a jagged awareness of public speech’s corruption. The line’s casualness isn’t innocence, it’s strategy. By sounding like a friend chatting over a drink, he draws you into a recognition that should feel scandalous: deception isn’t an exception, it’s infrastructure.

The pivot from “irony” to “deception” is key. Irony can be aesthetic, even pleasurable, a double-voiced game. Deception is ethical: someone intends to mislead you. Koch collapses the distance between the two, implying that in a culture saturated by politicians and advertising, irony stops being a literary mode and becomes a survival tactic. You learn to read everything with an eyebrow raised, because earnest language has been colonized by slogans, talking points, and seduction scripts.

The parenthetical “I mean” signals that he’s translating from poet-speak to plain terms, refusing to let irony remain a chic abstraction. The subtext is a critique of postwar American public life: the rise of mass media, the professionalization of image, the selling of reassurance. Koch doesn’t thunder like a moralist; he shrugs like someone who knows that outrage has been commodified too. That shrug is the point: the world’s fraudulence is so routine it feels almost polite to mention it.