Adam Nayman, top-five film critic writing today, includes the following line in a recent review:

There’s no such thing as pure entertainment, of course…

It irks, not because it isn’t true, but because of the little rhetorical flick to the nose at the end: “of course.” If it’s self-evident that all entertainment without exception is political, then you don’t need to assert its self-evidentness by fiat. The “of course” is thus not an argumentative tactic but a signal that Nayman, too, is in the know, among the wise, part of the social set that knows better than the defeated defenders of apolitical entertainment.

It’s doubly self-defeating, moreover, because the political point is a postmodern one, and another postmodern claim—underlying the whole—is that no assertion is self-evident because all assertions are by nature contested and contestable. Which means: Whenever a postmodern writer attempts to make a postmodern point by simply declaring that the knowing know it to be true and the ignorant, sadly, do not—in a word, IYKYK—then you know that the writer in question is cheating, and therefore is either not on his game or, perhaps worse, insecure about his position.