Ascent of the A-Word

by Geoffrey Nunberg

  Still, the same broad attitudes are coming into play, and not just in the realm of politics. These asshole/anti-asshole exchanges pervade our discussions of manners and mores, of technology, of finance, of birdwatching (really), of grammar.4 They’ve even become common on sports talk radio, which I had always thought of as the one island of public discourse where hosts and callers are generally committed to civility and mutual respect. It sometimes seems as if every corner of our public discourse is riddled with people depicting one another as assholes and treating them accordingly, whether or not they actually use the word.

  No Ordinary Rudeness

  People who find this sort of thing troubling—and almost everyone does, though selectively—tend to file it under the capacious heading of the decline of civility in public life. Yet there’s nothing new about a contentious political climate. As historians keep pointing out, American politics has a long tradition of vituperation, invective, and even violence. Whatever abuse critics have heaped on Bush or Obama doesn’t have a patch on the things people were saying in the 1864 election, when the Democrats called Lincoln a leering buffoon and Horace Greeley accused the Democrats of stealing the votes of dead Union soldiers. Opponents were no less brutal about the Roosevelts in the 1930s (kids were still repeating Eleanor Roosevelt jokes when I was in high school a couple of decades later, though the only thing we actually knew about her was that she was an old lady with an overbite). And things were even worse in the early years of the Republic. As Ron Chernow observes: “For sheer verbal savagery, the founding era may have surpassed anything seen today”

  Chernow is probably right. By historical standards, we don’t hear a lot of out-and-out verbal savagery in public life these days, though like every other cultural toxin in the age of the web, it isn’t hard to find if you seek it out. What’s different about our disputations isn’t their intensity or bile so much as their setting and tenor. So if we want to understand the differences between the critics of Lincoln and FDR and the critics of Bush or Obama, evoking “a decline in civility” is not going to be very helpful. The point isn’t that we’re more or less uncivil, but that we’re uncivil in different ways. And in any case, the notion of “incivility” itself is too vague and sententious to be helpful. It doesn’t belong to the moral vocabulary of everyday English, like polite, rude, and courteous; it’s a word we learn from op-ed pieces, not at the family dinner table. The word is almost impossible to utter innocently: its very mention invites posturing, sermonizing, calls for “national conversations,” and simplistic narratives of cultural decay.

  The notion of the asshole is a much better place to start. There’s a lot to be learned just from tracking the history and use of the word itself. Unlike civility, asshole operates underneath the radar of reflection. We might deliberate over whether some colleague or relative is better described as an asshole, a prick, or a piece of work, but that’s a debate about personalities, not semantics. In fact, people often talk about the word as if it didn’t actually have much of a descriptive meaning—even dictionaries are content to define it with vague phrases like “an irritating or contemptible person.” In truth, asshole is a lot more specific than that, but in any case it isn’t a word we acquire from dictionaries or explicit instruction. We learn it through what philosophers call ostensive definition, the same way we learn the meaning of pink, wolf whistle, and hook slide, as in, “There goes one now.” Ask people what an asshole is and you’re more likely to get a list of names like the one this book opened with than a semantic analysis.

  Like the attitude it signals, asshole is a very recent addition to our collective life. The insulting use of the word goes back to the GI slang of the 1940s, but it wasn’t until 1970 or so that it became a standard category in our moral repertory, a word that could appear in the mouths of characters in Neil Simon plays, Woody Allen movies, and pieces by Tom Wolfe. The modernity of the word reminds us that we’re dealing with a new category. Not that being an asshole is a wholly novel kind of social vice. It encompasses a lot of the behavior that was already covered by disapproving epithets like phony, lout, heel, or cad. But asshole casts our obligations to one another in a different light. And just as important, it implies a right to respond disrespectfully when people disregard those obligations. Actually, you can hardly avoid being disrespectful when you use the word—you can’t call somebody an asshole without swearing. That right of response is a principle we’ve all come to accept in our encounters in parking lots and around the water cooler, however we may like to dilate upon the virtues of forbearance and courtesy in our idealistic moments. Put simply, you have a right to treat assholes as assholes because the assholes have it coming.

  I’m going to describe this principle, with no irony intended, as the moral logic of assholism. It brings a delicate social calculus into play. Like stupidity, which it closely resembles, assholism is suffused with moral certainty—not just on the part of the assholes themselves, but also from those who level the charge. Those lists of names people give you to exemplify the word tend to reinforce the idea that assholes are a breed apart, with a distinct and well-defined pathology that makes them different from the rest of us. We tend to think of assholes the way we think about lefties; either you are or you aren’t. True, we recognize a distinct temporary state of “being an asshole” or “acting like an asshole,” which we sometimes find it useful to cop to by way of manifesting contrition for an uncharacteristic lapse of courtesy or mindfulness (whereas it’s rarely a good idea to admit to having been a prick). In that sense asshole is very different from a word like narcissist. We don’t usually say, “God, I was being such a narcissist last night”; with narcissism it’s in for a penny, in for a pound. But it would be more realistic and more honest if we talked about a scale of assholism, acknowledging that there are touches of the condition in a lot of the things we do, big and small—one reason why assholism is a more useful term than asshole is.

  This isn’t always easy to see, because being an asshole is by nature a form of self-delusion, so that one doesn’t recognize it in oneself at the time. I’m always retrospectively mystified by my obtuseness when I look back on some of the things I’ve done that scream Asshole! to me now. But I have no more insight into the conduct than I would if I read about it in a newspaper. And it isn’t only at a remove of weeks or years that the veil drops over my past behavior. I can feel that way just a few seconds after I get off the phone with the Comcast customer service representative, as I try to console myself that he must have learned to shrug off customers acting like assholes a long time ago.

  Recognizing the deceptive pervasiveness of assholism also involves acknowledging the pleasure that being an asshole can provide, particularly if we have some clear exculpatory provocation in the form of a Comcast overcharge or of someone’s stupid political remarks. In our condemnations of assholism, we tend to slide over how gratifying it can be, even vicariously. In fact it can be more pleasurable to watch someone being an asshole to someone you dislike than to be an asshole to them yourself, which after all is rarely free of some suppressed glimmer of guilty self-awareness. The genius of Rush Limbaugh and Stephen Colbert lies in their remarkable ability to convey the pure joy they take in being assholes without suggesting they suffer even the slightest pangs of conscience.

  My main reason for writing this book was to explore the role that the notion of the asshole has come to play in our lives. I don’t have a stance on the word, for or against, though I don’t see how anyone could condemn it out of hand. There’s no end of assholes in the world who deserve to be called out as such. There always have been, though under different titles. At root, the urge to denounce somebody as an asshole is only a modern expression of saeva indignatio, the savage indignation that inspired the scabrous satire of Martial and Juvenal, though admittedly the texture of the anger is somewhat different. And anyway, by now the asshole is a stock character in the everyday drama of modern life, even for those of us who don’t allow ourselves to pronou
nce his title. It’s a name past repealing.

  Still, the asshole as such is also a new addition to the dramatis personae of everyday life, and in the following chapters I’ll be tracing the way it has worked its way into the moral lexicon over the past half-century or so. But at this point let me mention just one curious property that makes it different from antecedents like the phony and the heel. It’s in the nature of the word asshole that it’s only appropriate for use in certain contexts. You can’t usually print it in a family newspaper, or not nakedly, anyway, even when it’s obviously newsworthy. When George W Bush was overheard on a live mic calling the New York Times reporter Adam Clymer an asshole during the 2000 campaign, only a few newspapers were willing to print the word in its orthographic fullness; the others resorted to strategically placed hyphens or asterisks or to coy circumlocutions like “sounds like casserole” or “sounds like glass bowl” (though no one thought to rhyme the word with Picasso the way Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers did in a classic 1972 song). The Washington Times called it “a vulgar euphemism for a rectal aperture,” which suggested a certain confusion about what a euphemism is.The New York Times itself, no doubt feeling that asterisks and nudges were beneath the paper’s dignity, merely described it as “an obscenity,” which made it sound a lot more scabrous than it actually was.5

  But why a vulgar name at all? If it were merely a question of charging someone with arrogance or an unwarranted sense of entitlement, we could just as easily have called assholes goobers, say, in which case we could label them for what they are on Meet the Press or in a New York Times op-ed. By giving this notion a vulgar name, we signal that it can only be appropriately invoked in the settings in which such words are permitted. Of course there are certain publications and certain ranges of the television dial where asshole is allowed to appear, but even there, it’s almost always put in the mouth of a fictional character or third party rather than used as a direct disparagement, particularly in serious discussion. The word has appeared in the New Yorker around 150 times in the last fifteen years or so, and it wouldn’t be at all odd to see a story there that quoted the remark Senator Bob Kerry made some years ago about his colleague Rick Santorum: “Santorum—isn’t that Latin for asshole?” But a New Yorker journalist or political writer won’t baldly assert, “Rick Santorum is an asshole.”6 If the charge can’t be leveled in public discussion, it isn’t just because the word is vulgar, but because of the values and assumptions it trails.

  Or at least that’s how things ought to be. What’s disquieting about the asshole-baiting style of political discourse is that it tends to efface the line between the conduct appropriate to public and private life. This is a far-reaching modern phenomenon that has a lot of causes: it owes something to the technology of modern communication, something to broad shifts in the cultural background, something to the personalization of political discourse, and something to the deliberate manipulations of the creators of these formats. But the crucial point is that a lot of what people are quick to denounce as the “incivility” of public life isn’t necessarily the sign of a moral failing or a collective character disorder, but rather of a muddying of boundaries, a confusion about the proprieties that govern our conduct in different spheres. But before I can return to asking how the moral logic of assholism became an interloper in public life, I want to look at how it works on its native conversational ground.

  chapter two

  The Uses of Vulgarity

  Frank: Did you say excuse me or something like that? Learn some manners, asshole.

  —John Bishop, The Trip Back Down: A Drama in Two Acts, 1975

  She turned to look at him. “Before the revolution, asshole, learn some fucking manners. ”

  —Nicholas Evans, The Divide, 2007

  The man sitting at the booth slammed his fist into the table in protest. “You better learn some manners real fast, asshole,” he warned.

  —Kevin James Sweeney From the Blood of Cain, 2006

  Rude Words

  “Mind your manners, asshole.” It ought to be a lame joke, a blatantly hypocritical utterance like “Watch your mouth, fuckwad.” But it doesn’t strike most people as funny right off. In fact it’s a cliche that most of us have had occasion to utter, or at least mutter, though sometimes the “mind your manners” part can be dispensed with: a bald “Asshole!” can make the point all by itself.

  Indeed, who lives a life so fortunate that the sentence never crosses their mind? Asshole is a basic category of our everyday existence, our reflexive remonstrance for people who behave thoughtlessly or arrogantly on the job, in personal relationships, or just circulating in public. It’s the word that comes immediately to mind when a neighbor starts his leaf blower at seven-fifteen on Saturday morning or a driver behind us scoots into the parking space we were about to back into. Or if we’re being honest with ourselves, it’s the word people yell or mutter at us when we do those things, and the one we use to apologize for them on those fleeting occasions when it’s given to us to realize how we must have sounded to others. True, there are some of us who won’t say the word. The proportion of Americans who claim they never curse runs from 6 to 19 percent, and you figure some of them must be telling the truth. But it’s one thing to refuse to let a word pass your lips and another to exclude the concept it stands for from your mental life.

  Still, there’s a paradoxical irony in appending asshole to “mind your manners.” Asshole is the paradigmatic example of a rude word, in two meanings of rude: it’s both “indecent, coarse” and “unmannerly, uncivil.” So it’s striking that it should be the word we instinctively reach for to rebuke inconsiderate behavior. A lot of people would see that as a telling sign of what we’ve come to: rude even in the way we condemn rudeness. People who deplore the mounting incivility of modern society invariably cite the increase in swearing and foul language as Exhibit A, right up with cell-phone abuse, telemarketers, and aggressive drivers, and a lot of them single out asshole for special mention. Pamela Fiori, the editor of Town and Country, begins her introduction to a recent anthology of essays from the magazine’s Social Graces feature by saying:Shortly after I became editor-in-chief of Town and Country, I became painfully aware of just how strongly civility was under assault. Forgotten thank-yous and the indiscriminate use oflongshoreman’s parlance—especially by people who should know better—had become the common currency of social interaction. . . Our behavior toward each other was disintegrating rapidly.

  Whether or not they would describe vulgar language with that quaint “longshoreman’s parlance,” most Americans concur with Fiori’s assessment of it baneful effects. In a 2002 Public Agenda survey of attitudes about civility, 84 percent of the respondents said that it bothered them when people use bad or rude language out in public, and three-quarters wanted parents to teach their kids that “cursing is always wrong.” Granted, only a few of those people teach that lesson by example. Most of those who disapprove of swearing would concede that they occasionally engage in it themselves, even regrettably devant les enfants. But where would swearing be without hypocrisy? To learn what it means to swear, a child has to both hear the words used and be told that it’s wrong to use them, ideally by the same people. Every time we tell our children not to use the F-word and then use it ourselves within earshot, we’re making a little investment in the future health of profanity.

  Still, like some other minor vices, vulgarity is clearly more widely tolerated than it once was. Time was these words were completely absent from polite discourse, and women with pretensions to gentility could go through their life pretending to be ignorant of them. (“She had never heard such words before,” a character says in the 1866 novel Mirk Abbey of a young lady who has witnessed an altercation, “and could scarcely force her innocent lips to repeat them.”) In our age, vulgarity, like slot machines and beachside nudity, is permitted in designated areas and prohibited in others. Words that were okay in Sex and the City when it ran on pay cable had to be bleeped on free
cable and replaced by anodyne equivalents when the show was run on broadcast television. So if many people still disapprove of vulgarity in principle, it’s hard to find anyone who can honestly claim to be scandalized by it. Nowadays, in fact, critics of vulgarity are often at pains to demonstrate their worldliness, and the words are much more likely to be criticized as uncivil than as indecent. When people praised a figure like the legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden for never swearing, it was meant as a testimony to his even-temperedness, not his purity of mind.