Ascent of the A-Word Read online

  Table of Contents

  Also by Geoffrey Nunberg

  Title Page

  Introduction

  chapter one - The Word

  Assholes and Anti-assholes

  No Ordinary Rudeness

  chapter two - The Uses of Vulgarity

  Rude Words

  The Necessary Delusions of Vulgarity

  How to Do Things with Bad Words

  Having a Word for It

  The Assholization of the Moral Life

  chapter three - The Rise of Talking Dirty

  The Invention of the Asshole

  The Twilight of Profanity

  Vulgarity in Mufti

  The Repeal of Reticence

  The Rediscovery of Civility

  chapter four - The Asshole Comes of Age

  Naturalizing the Asshole

  Country Boys and Cops

  The Rise of the Anti-Asshole

  The Real Stuff

  Everybody’s Word for It

  Insincerity and Inauthenticity

  chapter five - Men Are All Assholes

  “Men Are All Assholes”

  Heel Replacement

  Backlashholes

  The A-Word and the B-Word

  chapter six - The Asshole in the Mirror

  Broken Hearts Are for Assholes

  Asshole and Narcissist, Separated at Birth?

  What Makes Assholes Assholes?

  chapter seven - The Allure of Assholes

  The Teaching of Decay

  Three Assholes for the Age

  chapter eight - The Assholism of Public Life

  Political Assholes, Political Assholism

  The Personal Is Political, and Vice Versa

  Dekes,Yale Men, Perfect Assholes

  T-Shirt Ideologies

  Assholism Coordinated

  The Politics of “Incivility”

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on the Figures

  Index

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  Also by Geoffrey Nunberg

  The Years of Talking Dangerously

  Talking Right

  Going Nucular

  The Way We Talk Now

  Introduction

  The sun shineth upon the dunghill and is not corrupted.

  —John Lyly, Euphues, 1578

  When Barbara Walters announced the 2011 version of her annual list of the Ten Most Fascinating People, it was headed by Steve Jobs and included Donald Trump, Simon Cowell, Herman Cain, and the Kardashians, along with Derek Jeter, Katy Perry, Amanda Knox, Pippa Middleton, and the actors who play the two gay guys on Modern Family. I make that five out often who are assholes (I’m giving Jeter a pass because he’s a gamer and passing over the reports about his sending his one-night stands home in a limo with a basket of autographed gear). However you reckon it, it was a banner year for high-profile assholes, and if Walters hadn’t been particular about interviewing her choices (the living ones, anyway), she could have easily filled all ten places several times over with other members of the breed. She left out Charlie Sheen, whose drug-addled meltdown in early 2011 so captured the nation’s attention—he was briefly adding more than a hundred thousand Twitter followers a day—that he took it on the road in a national tour. She could have added Hank Williams Jr., who made news when he compared Obama to Hitler, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Silvio Berlusconi, and John Galliano (Hitler again). There could have been slots for Repps. Anthony Weiner, D-NY (lascivious tweets) and Christopher Lee, R-NY (Craigslist trolling). And Walters left out Newt Gingrich, whose presidential campaign unexpectedly caught fire for a while when, having bailed on Trump and Cain, Republicans decided they could overlook his being an asshole to his previous wives because he promised to be just the asshole who could take it to Obama good.

  Yet 2011 wasn’t exceptional in that line. Over the years, Walters’ lists have included a remarkable number of names that are regularly paired with the asshole label: Rush Limbaugh, Tiger Woods, Tom Cruise, LeBron James, Karl Rove, and Sarah Palin (all of whom, along with Trump, made the list twice or more), as well as Jerry Springer, Sumner Redstone, Mark Zuckerberg, Bret Favre, James Cameron, Kate Gosselin, Glenn Beck, Michael Moore, the Jersey Shore kids, “Dr. Phil” McGraw, Mel Gibson, Curt Schilling, Kanye West, Don Imus, Hugo Chavez, Dennis Rodman, Rupert Murdoch, Benjamin Netanyahu, Martha Stewart, and Andre Agassi. Some of those calls may be arguable, and there are other names on Walters’ lists that some people would assign to the category, like Nancy Pelosi, Mark McGwire, Hillary Clinton, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. But whatever adjustments you make, it’s clear that Walters hasn’t had to tip the scales. Assholes may constitute only a small proportion of the figures in public life, but they get a big share of the ink and pixels.

  What is it that draws us to these people? There’s no one answer. Some of it is just the age-old fascination with Celebrities Behaving Badly, compounded by the ubiquity of technology for capturing and broadcasting their misbehavior and the media’s eagerness to share the details with us. There are assholes who simultaneously intrigue and appall us, like Sheen, Galliano, and Gibson, whose outbursts reveal streaks of hatefulness or unchecked egomania. Some of it answers to the no less eternal satisfaction of watching combat and confrontation, as performed by the barking heads on what Deborah Tannen calls the “let’s you and him fight” genre of talk shows, or more recently, on politically monochromatic programming dominated by a single resident bully like Bill O’Reilly. Some assholes titillate us with their effrontery, like Omarosa, Richard Hatch, and the other reality show manipulators who become celebrities in their own right. And still others suggest the undeniable allure of people who are in a position to indulge the undiluted whims of ego or vent their anger and contempt without concern for the proprieties—cultural rock stars like Kanye West and Steve Jobs, who act like assholes because they can.

  The visibility of these icons of assholism isn’t necessarily evidence for the collapse of civility and the coarsening of public life, much less for a general deterioration of national character. However dire things may seem, on the whole we’re as nice as we ever were, particularly in the way we treat our friends, family, and colleagues. In some ways we’re a good deal nicer. But indisputably there’s an intense interest in the asshole phenomenon. Every age creates a particular social offender that it makes a collective preoccupation—the cad in Anthony Trollope’s day, the phony that Holden Caulfield was fixated on in the postwar years—and the asshole is ours. In fact you could argue that some of those archetypes play a cathartic role for us: Donald Trump acts like an asshole so we don’t have to. But the preoccupation also reflects the modern creation of new and unprecedented settings for acting like assholes, in both public and private life, opening the way to varieties of behavior that people a few generations ago would have found not so much shocking as weird: think of the varieties of digital miscreants denominated lurkers, cyberstalkers, sock puppets, and blog trolls. This isn’t entirely a deplorable development, or at least you can see it as the collateral consequence of some healthy ones. The advent of the asshole is a reflex of very sweeping revisions in the personal and social values that we all share, even if we sometimes find ourselves railing about them. The point of this book, more than anything else, is that the ascent of the A-word and the attention it gets say a great deal about who we’ve become.

  Asshole is always a disreputable word, whether it’s referring to someone’s anatomy or his character. But it’s only the latter use of the word that can move people to laughter. That was invariably people’s reaction when I answered their question about what I was working on by telling them it was a book about assholes. That response made me a little defensive, a
nd my questioner was often obliged to listen to an unbidden disquisition about why the topic was actually worthy of attention. But it was also reassuring to know how many people find it amusing that someone would want to write a serious book about such a topic. The words that make us laugh aren’t usually ones we give a great deal of thought to. To study asshole is to dip into a pool unrippled by deep contemplation, insulated from the airs and distension that can infect a word like incivility, which provides an accurate reflection of what we genuinely think about how we should behave toward one another.

  As my subtitle suggests, I’m really interested not in assholes so much as assholism, along with its close relation assholery. The English language isn’t as accommodating here as some other languages, which have standard words for the things that assholes do, like the Spanish pendejada, from pendejo (literally a pubic hair), and the Italian stronzata, from stronzo (turd). English is an adaptable language, of course, and it isn’t hard to find instances of assholery going back forty years in the works of writers like Thomas Pynchon and John Irving. But dictionaries haven’t yet acknowledged the term (a telling diffidence, in this day and age, when the Oxford English Dictionary is at pains to demonstrate its hipness by including items like wassup and BFF) . And while speakers of other languages seem more disposed to talk about pendejismo, stronzismo, or Arschlochismus—Europeans have a penchant for isms—English hasn’t opened its arms to assholism, either, though the word made its first print appearance more than forty years ago in an essay by the Beat writer Seymour Krim. But “recognized word” or no, I need assholism here, because what I’m interested in isn’t a distinct species of congenital jerks, but a social condition and a disposition that everyone is liable to on trying occasions. In fact I toyed with the idea of writing the book without citing any names at all, just to make the point, but as you’ve already seen, that idea didn’t last long.

  This is also a book about the word asshole, its true, but chiefly because of what it conveys. There are some vulgar and obscene words that are compelling in their own right. Fuck is the quintessential taboo word of English in all its uses, literal and figurative, as verb, intensifier, interjection, the focus of a long history of controversy and litigation. As a word alone, it’s worthy of the book-length treatment that the lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower gives it in The F-Word. But asshole is of linguistic interest only so far as it colors the concept it names. True, it isn’t purely by historical accident that asshole came to denote assholes and prick came to denote pricks (though the connection is obvious only after the fact—prick was once a term of endearment, and when asshole first appeared in GI slang during World War II, some people thought it meant something like nerd). But there are a lot of other words that people use to more or less the same effect. It’s in the nature of slang to churn out mutations and variants, and asshole has more than its share. The word was just a few years old when ass wipe appeared (it made its first print appearance in 1952 in Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March), and over the years it has been joined by asshat, assclown, and assbag, among others, while unrelated items like douchebag, dipshit, and dickhead circulate in the same semantic neighborhood.

  In language as elsewhere, we don’t like the idea of a difference without a distinction, and you can find people who will explain the subtle points that distinguish an asshole from an assclown or a douchebag, though usually without much precision or consistency (actually, dictionaries don’t do any better with these). But despite the variation, everyone recognizes asshole as the primary name of a basic category of American moral life. People agree about prototypical cases like this one (which was actually witnessed by someone I know):On Sept. 11, 2001, with all flights cancelled across the country, you’re in the Hertz rental agency in Manhattan, trying desperately to rent a car to get home to your family in Texas, along with a large crowd of anxious people trying to do the same thing. A man walks in, pushes to the front of the crowd, and asks the clerk, “Where’s the Hertz Gold Card line?” You turn to your friend standing next to you and say, “What a(n) __________!”

  That was one of the questions I put on a brief questionnaire that I gave to a few dozen people, speakers of English and other languages, asking them to give me the vulgar word that best fit the situation. Among the Americans and Canadians who answered, ranging in age from twenty to sixty-eight, almost all said “asshole,” apart from two who offered “douchebag.” You wouldn’t call it science, but it was close enough to confirm that most people classify that sort of person in the same way. The agreement was almost that general when the question was:A policeman stops a motorist for speeding. The motorist, a well-dressed man, says, “I’m a lawyer and I’m late for an important court date. Wouldn’t your time be better spent arresting real criminals?”What word(s) would you expect the police officer to use to describe the motorist to his fellow officers?

  But they reacted differently to another example:“Eddie tricked his partner Larry into putting the firm’s accounts in his own name, then let Larry take the blame when the fraud was discovered by the authorities. What a(n) ___________!”

  Here the answers ran to shit and bastard, with only one person offering asshole and nobody offering douche. So the respondents more or less agreed that the first two belong to the same category and third to a different one. True, you wouldn’t expect to see the kind of uniformity here that you would if you asked people about the difference between chairs and sofas, say. That’s partly because of linguistic variation (a lot of people don’t have douchebag in their vocabularies at all, particularly women) and partly because we subdivide the moral landscape in somewhat different ways. Still, when we hear Clint Eastwood or Woody Allen describing somebody as an asshole, we all have a pretty clear idea of what he’s saying.1

  The level of agreement obviously falls off once we leave the North American continent. The British have the same word, or rather arsehole, but it shares its semantic space with a family of native-grown epithets like tosser, wanker, and git, not to mention the C-word, which is much less shocking to British ears than to American when it’s used for an obnoxious man. (Some of the British speakers I asked about those examples favored wanker for the Hertz example, though some offered arsehole as well.) Even so, it’s fair to say the British and Australians recognize the asshole as a type—they’re quite clear about what Eastwood and Allen are saying, too. And asshole has equivalents, if not exact synonyms, in other Western lan-guages—French connard, Dutch klootsak, German Arschloch, Italian stronzo, and Spanish pendejo, boludo, or gillipollas, depending on the region. Each of them has its quirks, but if you know what an asshole is you’re going to get stronzo and Arschloch right at least 90 percent of the time. It would be absurd to suggest that all those peoples organize their notions of appropriate social behavior along the exact same lines that Americans do. But when that asshole appears at the Hertz counter waving his gold card we can all roll our eyes at each other with a reasonable confidence that we’re thinking pretty much the same thing. So while I’m looking only at American language and American attitudes in this book, I think a fair amount of it applies to other places that have undergone a lot of the same modern experience.

  Considering how often the word asshole appears in the book, I can see where it may seem a little coy to have referred to it on the cover only as the A-word and in the derived form assholism—all the more since titles with vulgar words are so du jour right now Not long ago, the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) columnist “J.C.” (James Campbell) took a passing shot at what he called “the blood-draining horror of mainstream Christmas fare (Do Ants Have Arseholes?, My Shit Life So Far, etc.).” He could have pointed as well to recent American titles like Sh*t My Dad Says, Go the F*ck to Sleep, and If You Give a Kid a Cookie, Will He Shut the F**k Up? Asshole has gotten a lot of work in this line, too. The Stanford Business School professor Robert Sutton had a business bestseller a couple of years ago with The No Asshole Rule, and the “advice, how-to, and miscellaneous” shelf features entries s
uch as A Is for Asshole: The Grownups’ ABC’s of Conflict Resolution; Dear Asshole (“101 Tear-Out Letters to the Morons who Muck up Your Life”); A$$hole (“How I Got Rich and Happy by Not Giving a Damn about Anyone and How You Can, Too); and A**hole No More (“A self-help guide for recovering a**holes and their victims”). There are lad-lit books like The Complete A**hole’s Guide to Handling Chicks, complemented by monitory lass-lit titles like Let’s Face It, Men Are @$$#%$ and Are All Guys Assholes? And in a class by itself—and my favorite of any genre—is a zombie parody called Night of the Assholes, by Kevin L. Donihe, the plot of which turns on the premise that people who treat assholes in an asshole way turn into assholes themselves, which in a way is the point of this book, too.

  I don’t find any of this quite as blood-draining as the TLS’s Campbell does, but even so I had reservations about using the bare word asshole in the title. I suppose I could have appealed to the dispensation that allows disinterested scholars to address indelicate matters without impropriety, to touch pitch and not be defiled. But it doesn’t quite work like that. Vulgar words like these tend to bleed through quotation marks; they jerk and quiver even on the dissection table. Most of us aren’t troubled about seeing them in the printed pages of a book, which involves a quiet conversation between us and the author (anyone who does find it disturbing presumably hasn’t gotten this far). But even in a linguistics class, I prefer not to say them aloud if I can avoid it, since that’s sure to evoke either tittering, or more often, the sound of people audibly not tittering. And on the cover of a book, before the compact between author and reader is sealed—well, it isn’t quite the same as wearing a T-shirt that says “Instant Asshole, Just Add Alcohol,” but it’s hard to argue that it isn’t being partly done for effect. Often that’s entirely defensible: What else would you call a parody about zombie assholes, Night of the Vulgarians? And in a very different way, I imagine that when the philosopher Harry Frankfurt wrote the engaging essay “On Bullshit” (which appeared in the Raritan Review before it was published as a book in 2005), the title was intended to make the point that the importance of bullshit to the theory of truth ought to make the vulgarity of its word irrelevant. But I don’t think for a moment that the vulgarity of asshole is incidental to its meaning (actually, I don’t think the vulgarity of bullshit is, either). I take it very seriously, as something central to the work the word does for us, for better and for worse. If asshole weren’t crude, we’d have to find something else to call the guy who’s yelling at the harassed airport gate agent about his upgrade. So if I dance around the word in the title of this book, you could think of it as an homage to its power. Considering all it does for us, and to us, asshole doesn’t get nearly the respect it deserves.