Ascent of the A-Word

by Geoffrey Nunberg

The surest sign that a group or society has entered into the self-conscious possession of a new concept is that a corresponding vocabulary will be developed, a vocabulary which can then be used to pick out and discuss the concept with consistency.

  —Quentin Skinner, “Language and Social Change”

  I don’t know if you can be authentic if you are not out there being authentic.

  —Rick Santorum

  Naturalizing the Asshole

  We all knew the word asshole when I was an undergraduate in the early 1960s. I didn’t use it very often, and it struck me as stronger and more brazen then than it does today. (I recall one guy I knew who used it a lot who I thought was pretty cool.) When it became a favorite epithet of the movement left a few years later, it was assuredly one of the items the editors of the Wall Street Journal had in mind when they castigated “foul-mouth demonstrators.” In October of 1968, a group of SDS members from Kent State disrupted a Nixon rally in Akron with cries of “you fucking asshole” and “Sieg heil!” (Paraphrasing Bob Dylan, one SDS chapter used the slogan “You don’t need a rectal thermometer to know who the assholes are,” a vivid metaphor if you don’t think it through.)

  But for the movement, asshole was mostly a general term of contempt that was chosen because it made so many people uncomfortable and permitted the mostly middle-class radicals to lay claim to proletarian bona fides. Nixon (who was himself fond of the word), may very well have been an asshole, though to my mind he was something darker and weirder than that. But the point of calling him a fucking asshole wasn’t to distinguish him from a prick or shit or bastard.18 It was meant simply as an insult, just as it was when SDS’s Mark Rudd described Columbia’s president Grayson Kirk as an asshole in a 1968 speech. At the time the phrase sounded theatrically insolent, like the tone Rudd took in his letter to “Uncle Grayson,” which concluded: “I’ll use the words of LeRoi Jones, whom I’m sure you don’t like a whole lot: ‘Up against the wall, motherfucker, this is a stick-up.’” (As Todd Gitlin has noted, Rudd’s disregard for Establishment institutions didn’t extend to flouting the rules for using whom.)

  As long as asshole could be outrageous and not merely coarse, it wasn’t yet entirely naturalized as a Standard English word used by all groups and classes. But that process was already under way, even though the movement left and the counterculture had very little direct role in it. If you had to assign the emergence of the asshole to a period, it belonged to what the historian Bruce J. Schulman has called the “long seventies” that stretched from 1968 to 1984—though it would be just as informative to say it roughly coincided with the TV runs of MASH (1972–1983) and All in the Family (1971–1979). The tendency to associate the sixties and seventies with their most flamboyant and vociferous actors obscures the fact that, like all decades, these were lived out in a lot of places at once.

  By the early seventies, it wasn’t just the hippies who were letting it all hang out. The new frankness was also transforming mainstream mores and institutions. It was the age of Playboy and Cosmopolitan, of soft- and hardcore blockbusters like Emmanuelle and Deep Throat, of full frontal nudity and free-speech absolutism. Authors who had once used better words now only used four-letter words, as Cole Porter had observed thirty years earlier, though by now “four-letter word” denoted the ones beginning with f and s, not h and d. (Bemused by the new openness, the slang lexicographer Paul Dickson asked, “Is it my imagination or is there a law that requires all movies made after 1965 to have the word ‘asshole’ in them?”) Even lexicographers were swept up in the changing Zeitgeist; when the American Heritage Dictionary first appeared in 1969 it was the first major dictionary to include fuck and cunt—and not, it’s safe to assume, owing to the influence of Jerry Rubin.

  The pervasive cultural theme of the period was the infor-malization of social relations, one of those recurrent relaxations of ritual and manners like those of the 1920s, the fin de siècle and the Jacksonian era. The formal indicators of hierarchy and status were abandoned in favor of a conspicuous egalitarianism of address and interaction (in a 1980 piece in Time, Roger Rosenblatt listed first among the contemporary “voices of terror” the sentence “Hi. My name is Jeff, and I’m your waiter”). The new ethos was signaled by the mainstreaming of the counterculture’s music, dress, and language, divested of any of the subversive implications they had acquired in the mid-1960s. The change in attitudes towards long hair on men was indicative. When the Beatles first appeared with their mop-tops, the style was ridiculed as androgynous but wasn’t seen as a frontal assault on civilization. Within just a few years, though, long hair and beards on men were linked to “a wholesale attack on . . . the American way of life,” as the Wall Street Journal put it in a 1968 editorial, warning that the counterculture’s slovenliness signified “an assault not only on a political system but on the dignity of the individual and of human life itself.” But by the 1970s, long hair on men had been thoroughly domesticated. The shaggy haircuts of the boys in high-school yearbook photos signified little more than what the anthropologist Edward Sapir once called “custom in the guise of departure from custom,” as did the more coiffed versions sported by middle-aged businessmen. Jeans became a universal signifier of freedom, informality, and classless democracy—or at least until the end of the decade, when Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein restored the old order of fashion. And the use of vulgarity, too, became a conventional badge of liberation from the tired strictures of conventionality.

  Those shifts in lifestyle—itself a word that first became popular around 1970—facilitated the spread of asshole. More people felt comfortable speaking the word, and fewer were uncomfortable about hearing it.19 The word was becoming naturalized, even as the figure of the asshole came to populate everyday life. One way to think of this shift is to ask when and how asshole ceased to be slang. True, a lot of people still think of it that way—most dictionaries label the word as “vulgar slang.” But to call a word slang isn’t simply to say that it’s highly colloquial or informal or that it’s particularly vivid or colorful. Slang is in its nature an alternative language, “something that is willfully substituted for the first word that will present itself,” as the great linguist Otto Jespersen defined it in 1922. By that definition, short, wheels, and ride are all slang for automobile; bug off and scram are slang for go away; and chuck and deep-six are slang for discard. But for us today, asshole isn’t a colorful substitute for jerk or boor. It’s the first word that comes to mind when an asshole crosses our line of sight. Asshole has no prehistory for us: it doesn’t seem curious or contingent that a single word should cover such a variety of offenders, and it doesn’t occur to us that there might ever have been an alternative. The asshole seems as basic and universal a type of miscreant as the coward or the traitor. That’s what it means for a concept to be naturalized: we call them assholes because that’s what they are.

  That process of adaptation happened remarkably quickly as social concepts go, but even so it could only take place by stages and degrees. Groups altered the word as they applied it to the situations and people that mattered to them, like an adolescent style that has to be taken in or let out a bit when it’s picked up by the other gender or by a more mature market. And even as the word was spreading throughout the community, the very notion of authenticity that the word evoked was being redrawn in ways that touched every aspect of American culture, transforming the meaning of asshole along with it.

  Country Boys and Cops

  It didn’t take long for the cultural and stylistic changes set in motion in the sixties to reach the white working class and make themselves known in the world of country music. At first there was resistance: in his 1969 “(Proud to be an) Okie from Muskogee,” Merle Haggard had enumerated all the traits of the counterculture lifestyle that Middle Americans rejected, including marijuana, LSD, draft-card burning, beards and Roman sandals:We don’t make a party out of lovin’,

  We like holdin’ hands and pitchin’ woo.

  We don’t let our
hair grow long and shaggy

  Like the hippies out in San Francisco do.

  “Okie” was generally interpreted as a panegyric to the “Silent Majority,” a phrase popularized in a speech in that year by Richard Nixon, who proclaimed it one of his favorite songs and invited Haggard to perform it at the White House.20 Things had changed considerably by the time Charlie Daniels recorded “Long-Haired Country Boy” six years later. Long hair had become a badge of obstreperous redneck pride, and the range of consciousness-raising substances had been extended beyond white lightning:I don’t want much of nothin’ at all,

  But I will take another toke. . . .

  If you don’t like the way I’m livin’,

  You just leave this long-haired country boy alone.

  The spirit of Daniels’ song was actually not that different from Haggard’s. Both were defiant affirmations of proud independence and were solidly in the country music tradition of rebellious populism. In fact Daniels’ political views were as insistently patriotic as Haggard’s. But the style, trappings, and particularly the language had changed. Country outlaws like Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and David Allan Coe wore beards and earrings and took advantage of the altered Zeitgeist to lace their performances with vulgarities, asshole prominent among them. The word had been a fixture of working-class speech since the war. Now it was made an emblem of contempt for the presumption and self-importance of middle-class professionals, managers, and other authority figures, a meaning that reclothed its World War II use in jeans and cowboy boots. The attitude was provided with an anthem in the early 1980s in August Campbell’s “Asshole Song” (“The I-95 Song”), which was covered by numerous other country singers:Were you born an asshole?

  Or did you work at it your whole life?

  Either way it worked out fine

  ’cause you’re an asshole tonight.21

  It was around this time that law enforcement officers incorporated a similar use of asshole into their jargon. Recalling his days as a young San Diego patrolman in the late 1960s and 1970s, the former Seattle police chief Norm Stamper explains how the police divided the world into three categories:We dealt in pukes and assholes in those days. A puke was a longhaired youth who flipped you off, called you a pig, or simply had that “anti-establishment” look about him. An asshole, on the other hand, was a doctor, a lawyer, or a clean-cut blue-collar worker who gave you lip as you wrote him a ticket . . . The world was conveniently divided into “good people” vs. pukes and assholes.

  And writing in 1978 about his work with police officers, the MIT ethnographer John van Maanen described a similar triage of the people officers had to deal with. He reported an apocryphal exchange that dramatized their notion of the asshole:Policeman to motorist stopped for speeding: May I see your driver’s license, please?

  Motorist: Why the hell are you picking on me and not somewhere else looking for real criminals?

  Policeman: ’Cause you’re an asshole, that’s why—but I didn’t know that until you opened your mouth.

  From the officer’s point of view, the asshole is someone who doesn’t understand that whatever his social role or status, he’s obliged to defer respectfully to the officer’s authority and control. If he doesn’t, the officer feels entitled to treat him abusively, to cook up an excuse to arrest or ticket him, or to subject him to “thumping” or some other form of street justice; as van Maanen explains, “the uncooperative and surly motorist finds his sobriety rudely questioned, or the smug and haughty college student discovers himself stretched over the hood of a patrol car and the target of a mortifying and brusque body search.”

  The officers’ “asshole” category is a reaction to what Richard Sennett and Jonathon Cobb called the hidden injuries of class. It’s a handy ersatz for the groups that impose cumulative indignities on them, like community elites, courts, politicians, and the press, whom the officers will never be able to confront directly. The label legitimates an aggressive response as an outlet for the officer’s anger and frustration with both the individual asshole and the elite he stands in for. No less important, it creates a solidarity of shared values and experience among patrolmen, and not simply by drawing the members of the group together the way a common enemy always does; it can also “define to a surprising degree what the police are about.”

  That’s a crucial function of asshole. Like any word that names a form of social deviance, it implicitly defines a social norm, as well. When we call somebody an asshole we make a claim about ourselves, not just individually, but collectively. “You’re an asshole” implies not just “You’re not like us,” but also “We’re not like you,” and in an important codicil, “And we’re like each other.” As van Maanen says, asshole “swallows up and hides whatever differences exist among patrolmen.” Often, indeed, to say we’re not assholes is more specific than any positive statement we could make about ourselves. Like most derogative words, asshole lacks a positive antonym—what’s the opposite of a schmuck, a nerd, a ditz, a phony, a scumbag? Vices are always more vivid and specific than the virtues they depart from.

  The Rise of the Anti-Asshole

  While it was hard to describe in precise words the asshole’s antithesis, he could be personified in the figure of a new culture hero, the anti-asshole—or rather a set of culture heroes, one for each type of asshole that people discern. The police officers’ asshole became the foil for the anti-asshole epitomized by Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, the model for the stock character who would be played in later movies by the likes of Bruce Willis, Steven Seagal, and Mel Gibson. Eastwood’s Harry Callahan is tough, blunt, and disaffected. He is yes-ma’am courteous to law-abiding ordinary folk, but abusive and contemptuous to the criminals and lowlifes he has to deal with, and openly scornful of the people who keep him from doing his job: the police hierarchy, civilian authorities, the courts, the press, and other various other bleeding-hearts. Those antagonists are all assholes, a term Harry uses both for the bad guys and for his superiors. Told by his captain in The Enforcer that he is being transferred to personnel, he says, “Personnel? That’s for assholes!” The captain stands up and says, “I was in Personnel for ten years” and Callahan responds, sardonically but sotto voce, “Yeah.”

  Like all archetypes, the Dirty Harry character has antecedents—you can see traces of him in the movies of Bogart, of Kurosawa, and of course of John Wayne. Wayne said in an interview that he had been offered the Dirty Harry role but turned it down, though after he saw the picture, “I realized that Harry was the kind of part I’d played often enough; a guy who lives within the law but breaks the rules when he really has to save others.”22 But Harry operates in a different moral world from that of Wayne’s characters. It’s hard to imagine the laconic Wayne playing someone as volubly and obscenely sadistic as Dirty Harry is (“Fuck with me, buddy, I’ll kick your ass so hard you’ll have to unbutton your collar to shit”). Nor can we imagine any Wayne character giving free rein to Harry’s ruthlessness and casual violence—choking a prostitute to get information from her, forcing a hood’s head into a toilet bowl with a plunger and then flushing, blowing up a militant with an anti-tank rocket—much less admitting to taking pleasure in being given the excuse for it, as Harry does with his signature “Go ahead, make my day.” And while Wayne could be insubordinate to his by-the-book superiors, he wasn’t capable of Callahan’s vulgar insolence:HARRY CALLAHAN: Here’s a seven-point suppository, Captain.

  CAPTAIN MCKAY : What did you say?

  HARRY CALLAHAN: I said stick it in your ass.

  The difference, in short, is that Dirty Harry—and here I mean the archetype, not just the Eastwood character—is himself a kind of asshole. If we don’t react to him as to an ordinary asshole, it’s because everything in these films is contrived to make him seem righteous and his adversaries despicable. His superiors think only of their public image and keeping their jobs; the police psychologist spouts psychobabble; the minority leaders and the press are cynical and exploitative; and the
arch villains are histrionically sociopathic—and usually middle-class whites who whine about their rights when they’re finally disarmed. As a result, the viewer can enjoy the cathartic satisfaction of watching someone do and say really terrible things to people who manifestly have it coming. An unused studio tag line for the first Dirty Harry movie made the point unequivocally: “Dirty Harry and the homicidal maniac: Harry’s the one with a badge.”

  The only thing that distinguishes Dirty Harry from the assholes he takes on—the thing that generally makes the anti-asshole different from the asshole simple—is that he knows he’s being an asshole, a role he justifies in the name of moral duty. If there’s some self-deception in that, Harry doesn’t tip his hand—he never seems to worry about what it actually takes to make his day—which is what makes him at once a powerful cultural archetype and an artistic nullity. In other, more textured films in this genre, directors have explored the moral ambiguities of a hero’s assholism to dramatic advantage. In the Lethal Weapon movies directed by Richard Donner, Mel Gibson’s Riggs is unbalanced and suicidal, given to psychotic rages and even scarier simulations of them: DRUG DEALER: Fuck you, man. That badge ain’t real . . .

  DRUG DEALER TWO: But you’re sure as hell one crazy fuck!

  Riggs’ eyes begin to blaze. His nostrils flare. Like a maniac, he lunges at Drug Dealer Two.

  RIGGS: YOU callin’ me crazy!? You think I’m crazy! You, wanna see crazy? I’ll show you crazy! This is crazy!

  Riggs then proceeds to slap and pummel the Drug Dealer in the manner of the Three Stooges . . . complete with “WOO-WOO” sound effects. But he ends the routine by pulling a nine-millimeter Beretta from behind his back and pressing it against the neck of Drug Dealer Two.