Frederick Douglass's oration, "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" is a rhetorical masterwork of irony. It illustrates a strategy for enlisting the liberatory potential inherent in the detached and multiple perspective of irony without allowing that detachment to culminate in political impotence. The speech accomplishes this through opening before its audience the expansive visual and temporal spaces in which irony thrives, then collapsing those spaces so irony cannot be sustained. The speech therefore exemplifies a kairotic management of irony's scopic attitude, emphasizing for its audience the importance of seeing when irony is appropriate and when it is not. (Contains 57 notes.)