So it says something that Jobs’ assholism hasn’t been retouched for public consumption the way Patton’s was. That has a lot to do with the anti-heroic temper of the times; we demand all the dirt, especially on our heroes. But it also suggests a different idea of what makes these asshole achievers compelling, even to those with no interest in emulating them. Jobs’ tantrums and rants don’t evoke the resolute toughness of a Leader of Men so much as the temperament that we associate with creative genius. He styled himself as an artist rather than a businessman, the turtlenecked begetter of the cool exuded an age in which people found it natural to compare the launch of the iPhone to the previous generation’s Woodstock, and it seemed to license the prodigal shittiness that goes with being a Bernini, a Picasso, or a Pound—or, for that matter, a Robert Plant. One reviewer of the Isaacson book compared reading it to “going backstage at a Led Zeppelin concert in the seventies and seeing your heroes wasted, and babbling like babies, surrounded by bimbos.” Indeed, Jobs was a rock star, in a sense that Bill Gates couldn’t possibly be, not just because he was idolized, but because he was one of those people like Jim Morrison, Kanye West, and the Metallica guys, whose behavior as flaming assholes is taken as evidence of being exceptional enough to be able to get away with it.
Donald Trump comes closer than anyone else to being the archetype of the species; crossing genres, he exemplifies all the ways an asshole can capture our attention. He’s in a different league from Patton or Jobs, whose assholism is perceived relative to their other achievements—they’d be remembered even if they had been even-tempered and self-effacing, though perhaps not the subjects of a best-selling biography or an Oscar-winning biopic, whereas Trump would have no more claim on our attention than Harold Hamm, Charles Ergen, Dannine Avara, or most of the other hundred-odd Americans who have more money than he does.
But Trump is a pure asshole in a way that very few people are ever a pure anything, as one dimensional as the villain in a Batman movie. Everything he says reveals the workings of a hermetically self-referential mind. Here he is explaining his objections to gay marriage:It’s like in golf. A lot of people—I don’t want this to sound trivial—but a lot of people are switching to these really long putters, very unattractive. It’s weird. You see these great players with these really long putters, because they can’t sink three-footers anymore. And, I hate it. I am a traditionalist. I have so many fabulous friends who happen to be gay, but I am a traditionalist.
Not even Stephen Colbert could have come up with that; whatever else can be said about Trump, he writes his own stuff.36 And controversial as he is in other regards, no one disputes that he’s an asshole, though people have very different reasons for finding that compelling. Some regard him with de haut en bas disdain. In its heyday in the 1980s, Spy magazine made a fetish of his arriviste coarseness with the recurrent epithet “short-fingered vulgarian” (in retrospect, the “Not our class, dear” condescension of that phrase is a reminder of how tricky it is to deride an asshole from above). Others take pleasure in seething at his outrageousness. His presidential foray in early 2011, with its opportunistic rekindling of the birther dementia, briefly made him Topic A not just on the right but on the left—at the Huffington Post, mentions ofTrump trail only those of Sarah Palin, who has been at the game much longer. At the time, even his online supporters conceded that he was an asshole, though they either looked past it or saw it as a plus. To some it meant that he was someone who would get the job done, à la Patton; to others that he wouldn’t mince words in letting the world know what an asshole Barack Obama is:I will vote for him. The guy might be an asshole but the economy needs a fucking businessman at the helm.
I will vote for Trump, precisely because he is a jerk, but a jerk who knows when he’s getting screwed on a deal, and will make sure it is America that comes out on top.
Trump may be an arrogant asshole but he says what he thinks.
He says what so many ppl are thinking but is afraid to say it because of PC. trump is so fearless and does not give a dam about what ppl think about him. most ppl are afraid to speak their mind and say what they really believe because they will be called racist bigoted etc.
Trump’s preeminence in this line testifies to his mastery of the mechanisms of publicity. Apart from Colbert, no one in public life understands better than he how engaging assholism can be, both in real life and in its broadcast simulacra. The Apprentice epitomizes the genre of reality television built around situations in which people can be abusive to others who have willingly consented to take part in return for money or celebrity. Every episode arcs towards a finale that gives the viewers the opportunity to watch a powerful man acting like an asshole towards his supplicants, dispatching the losing competitor with a brisk, “You’re fired.” The phrase is supposed to evoke the pitilessness it takes to survive in “the ultimate jungle,” but we don’t actually feel much compassion for the losers. They’ve fought to get there, after all, and any residual sympathy we might have had for them is dissipated in the final boardroom scene where they’re incited to act like assholes themselves, selling each other out in an effort to be spared the axe. And anyway, “fired” here really means “playing a subordinate role in the rest of this season’s episodes.” So there’s none of the vicarious outrage we might feel watching a movie of the week that depicts Leona Helmsley summarily discharging a busboy who spilled some tea in her saucer.
Those scenarios are reproduced, with variations, across many of the genres of reality television, from American Idol to What Not to Wear to Gordon Ramsay’s Restaurant Makeover (which offers, Gina Bellafante said in the New York Times, “the thrill of . . . witnessing someone so at peace with his own arrogance”). In each instance, the format keeps the “reality” 37 close enough to the actual so that the asshole’s behavior is distressing to his targets without ever reaching so deep into their lives that it becomes genuinely disturbing to the viewer. They allow us to enjoy the spectacle of social aggression without experiencing any vicarious moral risk, in the same way that “dare” shows like Fear Factor allow us to watch contestants attempt to jump from one building to another without any real physical danger. On the contrary, our indignation over the behavior of the designated assholes on the job-search shows like The Apprentice and the documentary-style shows like those in the Real Housewives franchise isn’t diminished by knowing how much of it is engineered by the producers or simulated for the camera. It’s the same suspension of disbelief that makes possible the Comedy Central roasts, in which some celebrity, ideally a high-profile asshole himself, winces good-humoredly as comedians who have never met him take turns making pointed put-downs at his expense. (“When Trump bangs a supermodel, he closes his eyes and imagines he’s jerking off.”) There have been eras that took a far more intense interest in spectacles of cruelty than ours, but none that was so transfixed by watching people act like assholes.
That fascination is fed in equal parts by our fantasies of rock star self—indulgence and the resentments and anxieties that assholes evoke. Both are popular themes in recent cinema. I’m not thinking so much of the innumerable comedies and dramas that feature assholes as their stock villains, but of movies in which the assholes are the focus of dramatic interest. Some of these are tales of asshole redemption, like Rain Man and all those other Tom Cruise vehicles. Others are more equivocal about the condition, like The Company of Men, The Politician, Greenberg, Margin Call, and Rules of Attraction, as well as the mean-girl movies like Heathers and Mean Girls itself, which break new generic ground. Meanwhile, television has made a mini-industry of the dirtbag sitcoms that I mentioned earlier. And one should make a special place for The Office, especially the original version with Ricky Gervais, which created one of the most incisive modern portraits of the asshole’s clueless self—delusion. Gervais’ David Brent elicits contempt and irritation, pity, even affection—a sign not so much of the complexity of the character but of how conflicted we are about the type he personifies.
Some of these assholes are just old curs warmed over, but others are creatures new to film. The Social Network, for example, could have been subtitled Asshole 2. 0. There are obvious resemblances between Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs as driven high-tech creators, but the character of Zuckerberg created by Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher (which by all accounts is substantially different from the real Zuckerberg) belongs to a different genus of assholes. No one would be tempted to describe him as a “master of psychological manipulation,” as Newsweek did Jobs; he’s arrogant, self—absorbed, and insensitive to the point of near—autism. In the opening scene, he preens and condescends to his girlfriend, Erica, in a Cambridge bar (“You don’t have to study . . .You go to BU [Boston University]”). She tells him he’s an asshole, breaks up with him, and walks out. As if to prove her right, he goes back to his dorm and posts some unflattering and sexist remarks about her on his blog, then, in a misogynistic follow-up, creates the “Facemash” application that allows people to rank the women students for hotness. Later we see him cutting out his best friend, who put up the money for the project, and responding with prodigal snottiness to a lawyer who’s deposing him:GAGE: You don’t think I deserve your attention. . . .
ZUCKERBERG: You have part of my attention. You have the minimum amount. The rest of my attention is back at the offices of Facebook, where my colleagues and I are doing things that no one in this room, including and especially your clients, are intellectually or creatively capable of doing.
Only in an incongruously mawkish final scene does Zuckerberg reveal a dim awareness of his isolation and loneliness, as he sits alone at a conference table in the offices of his lawyers and sends a Facebook friend request to his former girlfriend, Erica, then keeps compulsively refreshing the page to see if there’s a response. All of a sudden he’s pathetic, and for the first time strikes us as a possible object of sympathy. “You’re not really an asshole,” his lawyer, Julie, has told him, but what the scene really shows is that he’s only an asshole, not an unmitigated shit like most of the other characters—the slick hustler Sean Parker, the supercilious and self-infatuated Winklevoss twins who accused him of stealing their idea.
That last scene put several critics in mind of Charles Foster Kane’s “Rosebud,” and it seems to set the movie in the long line of American stories that show successful figures repaid for their unchecked ambition with loneliness. The scene is obviously meant to leave the audience with the consoling thought that it profiteth a man nothing if he gains the world but loses his soul mate. But there are no real film antecedents for the figure of the emotionally stunted nerd billionaire (a very far cry from Mickey Rooney in Young Tom Edison), just as there are no media precursors of the digital culture that seems to many to foster a kindred sense of disconnection and casual meanness. Or at least that’s the perception of many people in the generation of Sorkin and Fincher, who were in their late forties when the film was made. They obviously meant for their Zuckerberg to personify the digital culture, as they signaled in the ambiguous title The Social Network. That’s how Zadie Smith read the story in the New York Review of Books:Shouldn’t we struggle against Facebook? Everything in it is reduced to the size of its founder . . . Poking, because that’s what shy boys do to girls they are scared to talk to. Preoccupied with personal trivia, because Mark Zuckerberg thinks the exchange of personal trivia is what “friendship” is . . . We were going to live online. It was going to be extraordinary. Yet what kind of living is this? Step back from your Facebook Wall for a moment: Doesn’t it, suddenly, look a little ridiculous? Your life in this format?
But that’s not how people who grew up with Facebook see either Zuckerberg or his creation. When I talk to Berkeley undergraduates about the movie (which they’ve apparently all seen), they acknowledge that Zuckerberg behaved badly, but they don’t see him as the alien and alienating figure that Sorkin and Fincher made him out to be—he’s a routine sort of jerk, and if they have it in for him, it’s more often because of Facebook’s privacy policies than any of the wrongs committed by his movie avatar.38 Nor would they recognize either Facebook or themselves in Smith’s description of the online world. They don’t see their walls and profiles as the places where they live their lives, just as one of the many venues, material and immaterial, where they circulate. And they’re quite clear on the difference between friends and “friends.” As one student of mine wrote, after describing the assortment of postings on his Facebok wall from classmates, acquaintances, and already forgotten high-school chums, “If I thought this was a representation of my actual life, I’d need to reevaluate it pronto.”
In the same way, digital natives aren’t as disturbed as their parents are by the snark and assholism endemic in the online world, not because the perpetrators aren’t assholes, but because they’re relatively harmless ones. It’s a curious feature of the age that the forms of assholism that people find most alarming tend to be those that have less drastic effects on their daily lives. Abusive blog comments are easier to ignore or shrug off than rude remarks from people behind you in the line at the DMV But for just that reason, the more remote and impersonal forms of assholism are easier to engage in without rippling one’s conscience too much. And while these activities don’t generally inflict the personal injuries that assholism can at work or school, they can be enormously destructive of the fabric of public life—the problem I started out with, and that I’ll come back to now.
chapter eight
The Assholism of Public Life
The political can derive its energy from the the most varied human endeavors, from the religious, economic, moral, and other antitheses . . . What always matters is only the possibility of conflict.
—Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political
JESUS LOVES COWS ON A SESAME SEED BUN I ABORTED JESUS ON MY WAY TO THE GAY BAR
—T-shirts on sale at cafepress.com
Political Assholes, Political Assholism
A list of assholes who personify the Zeitgeist wouldn’t be complete without someone drawn from politics or the political media. Survey respondents consistently rank those areas as the most uncivil of American life, ahead of professional sports, Hollywood, the music industry, and even traffic. Trump technically qualifies, it’s true, but his reputation as an asshole was firmly established before his dalliance with politics began. For a truly exemplary figure you’d be better off picking one of the political broadcasters who have built careers around the spectacle of assholism. To judge from the energy they give to preening, sneering, and bullying their guests and callers, a lot of these people are personally assholes, particularly the most successful ones—in talk radio, as in baseball, nice guys finish at the bottom of the division. In that regard, the assholes on political talk radio and cable news aren’t different in kind from the ones you see on reality shows; in fact you could think of political broadcasting as just another subgenre of reality television. What makes politics different, is that its assholism isn’t simply a matter of rudeness or personal arrogance. It’s a rhetorical style aimed at creating a sense of solidarity and partisan identity, and it works off a different dynamic.
At a talk Ann Coulter was giving at the University of Ottawa in 2010, a seventeen-year-old Muslim student asked her how Muslims are expected to travel if they shouldn’t be allowed on airplanes, as Coulter had earlier suggested. “Take a camel,” Coulter responded. Not surprisingly, the remark created an uproar, and Coulter’s subsequent talk had to be cancelled. It was clearly an asshole thing to say, but not exactly in the everyday sense of the word. Coulter defended it as “satire,” as she often does, but she doesn’t actually satirize anything, unless it’s her own outrageousness—this isn’t like South Park or Thank You for Smoking. And while she clearly had no qualms about offending Muslims, her real object was to outrage liberals who disapprove of racist remarks, and titillate her admirers in the process.
Political assholism is a variant of anti-assholism. But in this case you aren’t responding to a specific
person or a specific insult, the way you are when you give the finger to someone who cuts you off on the highway. In fact you don’t really care if any particular person is actually offended by your action, so long as you and your listeners can imagine the outrage it would engender. The process recalls the infantile pleasures of schoolyard swearing, and it’s not surprising that conservative audiences often greet Coulter’s remarks with the titters and giggles that are the sound of unconscious material bubbling to the surface. That was the response to the crack she made to a conservative group in 2008: “I was going to say something about John Edwards, but it turns out that you have to go into rehab if you use the word faggot.” After she was widely criticized for the remark, even by conservatives, Coulter insisted she wasn’t trying to say anything anti-gay, and I don’t really think that was her objective. She was just looking for something that would épater the liberal bourgeoisie, and if that required presuming that everybody in the room was homophobic, so be it. If she could have achieved the same effect by saying “pee, poo, belly, bum, drawers,” she would have gone with that instead.
In some ways, this kind of assholism is close to snark—“a strain of nasty, knowing abuse spreading like pinkeye through the national conversation,” as David Denby defines it in a recent book dissecting the attitude. Snark tries to be quippy and droll, and when it’s well honed and aimed at a deserving target—Newt Gingrich, John Edwards—it can be very funny indeed. But it’s essentially cynical and destructive, asking the reader to share a sense of superiority to its target, often by appealing to familiar prejudices. Snark is Sarah Palin on Obama’s pre-politics experience—“a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities”—and it’s the South Carolina Democratic chairwoman Carol Fowler on Palin: “Her primary qualification seems to be that she hasn’t had an abortion.” It’s the tone that ran through just about everything in Spy magazine, and that has become a house style at sites like Gawker, Wonkette, Jezebel, and Deadspin, as well as the day-to-day MO of Gail Collins and Maureen Dowd in the Times. And while Denby regards snark as a phenomenon whose native habitat is blogs, op-ed columns, and book reviews, it has colonized the everyday language, too: think of the exclamation Fail! and the um that announces a sarcastic correction of a gaffe or dumb mistake: “Um . . . Ringo was the band’s drummer?”
Ascent of the A-Word Page 15