Seems pretty much everybody's in a funk these days. A bit of a funk, a deep funk -- whatever the level, it's the kind of world-weariness that makes you read the paper or listen to the news with the phrase "Yeah, right" forever on the tip of your brain.

Sept. 11, 2001, was supposed to mark the end of irony. Within weeks, that terrible day had been touted as the death knell of popular culture's perpetual smart-alecky posturing. Faced with true evil, we had to surrender our urbane detachment.

So we became once again, without embarrassment, the land of the free and home of the brave. David Letterman, the king of television irony, made the change official, surrendering his cool for a cracking voice and simple sincerity when he returned to the airwaves from New York City, days after the attacks.

That was then. This is now, and if anything, irony and its twin, cynicism, loom larger in the public psyche than ever. But what are you supposed to do when people in high places keep doing things that make you roll your eyes and utter a side-of-the-mouth "Oh, puh-leeze"?

One of the region's big eye-roll-inducing stories lately has been the M.B.A. degree that West Virginia University officials fraudulently awarded to Heather Bresch, chief operating officer of Mylan Inc., a gigantic drug manufacturer headquartered just southwest of Pittsburgh.

Ms. Bresch started as a lowly data entry clerk at Mylan in 1992, when her father, Joe Manchin, was merely a West Virginia state senator. She moved up the company ladder, serving four years ago as company spokeswoman during a high-profile battle with legendary corporate raider Carl Icahn.

Sure, her success coincided with her father's successful gubernatorial campaign -- heh heh -- but a corporation with worldwide 2007 revenues of $1.61 billion is not going to make an incompetent employee its chief operations officer just because her dad is governor of one of this country's smallest states.

Ms. Bresch could have stood on her own record, but she apparently coveted the piece of paper that would say she was capable of doing what she'd already done. She pulled political strings to prove that she hadn't needed to pull strings to reach the top.

How ironic is that?

In the political arena, we've been treated in this presidential election cycle to the spectacle of Hillary Clinton complaining bitterly (and justifiably) about the kid-glove media treatment accorded her opponent.

Hmmm. Some of us may remember the exact same complaint during the 1992 campaign between President George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton -- except way back then, the boomer-dominated media was rejecting the old guard (Mr. Bush) to drool over the first viable candidate of its generation (Mr. Clinton) and largely failing to scrutinize his character and associations.

Irony can exact a cruel price.

It may do so again. Barack Obama, Mrs. Clinton's adversary and the media's darling, vaulted to the front of the Democratic primary pack by promising to heal our wounds and mend our divisions. But this man who would transcend America's tragic history of racism had as his pastor and "spiritual adviser" a man of the cloth who preaches racial hatred.

Hypocrisy creates the need for irony, but don't point out this disappointing situation to Mr. Obama's college-aged believers, however, or they will call you, weeping at your cynicism. Sigh.

You take a big step from childhood to adulthood when you realize that things are often not at all what they seem. You reach maturity when you realize that despite this state of affairs, despite humanity's flawed condition and the steady diet of irony this reality offers, you have to choose to believe something.

Because irony truly wears people out. Just ask David Letterman. I love him, always have, always will, but the sardonic edge that made him Mr. Zeitgeist of the 1980s and '90s had become, at the millennium's end, wearying.

Then came news of big changes in his life, and I tuned in for each to see how he would respond. His just-in-time quintuple bypass in 2000, his post-9/11 broadcasts and the birth of his son Harry in 2003 all disrupted that iconic, ironic stance. He finally seemed happy to be alive.

That would be nice culture-wide. It would be energizing and uplifting, in fact, to come across something that could be taken at face value, something or someone to believe in, something to pierce the funk.

There's hope, I suppose: Right now, we Pittsburghers believe in hockey.