Ascent of the A-Word

by Geoffrey Nunberg

  RIGGS: That’s a real badge. I’m a real cop. And this is a real gun.

  There are even darker complexities in Detective Vic Mackey in the FX series The Shield, who is capable of killing an officer sent to spy on him, planting drugs on suspects, and letting a dog maul a cornered rapist. And then there’s Detective Jimmy McNulty in David Simon’s The Wire on HBO, a devoted cop, but one whose drinking, compulsive philandering, and self-centeredness exhibit an assholism that is evident to everyone: his superior (“You are a gaping asshole”), his ex-partner (“You’re not the run-of-the-mill asshole, Jimmy, you’re a special asshole”), the deputy chief (“the most swollen asshole in American law enforcement”), his colleague (“Natural po-lice. But, Christ, what an asshole!”), and his ex-wife and girlfriends. What redeems McNulty, at least in part, is that he defies the indifference, self-dealing, and other varieties of assholism that infest the apparatus of law enforcement and magnify the urban putrefaction at the center of the drama. The moral of the series is really not different from that of the Dirty Harry movies, though it’s made deeper and more problematic. You have to set an asshole to catch an asshole, it says—ultimately, the same principle that drives the pervasive anti-assholism of public life.

  The Real Stuff

  For Harry, as for police officers and country singers, the notion of the asshole was rooted in a transformed notion of class. That’s one thing that makes the asshole a creature of his age. There have always been disparaging terms for most of the people we think of as assholes, but almost all of them suggested someone of an inferior social class. Some were derived from words for bumpkins or laborers, such as boor, lout, scut, knave, wretch, churl, and blackguard (originally a menial who cleaned the pots and pans). A cad was a townsman who helped university students with odd jobs (the word is connected to caddie). Other words suggested people who gave themselves airs above their station, like whelp, puppy, or upstart. A bounder was, as one Victorian defined it, “a swell, a stylish fellow, but of a very vulgar type,” someone beyond the pale of society, “out of bounds.” In one way or another, that is, the words all leveled their criticism from above; they suggested someone who fell short of being a gentleman, either in his social rank or his character.

  But asshole launches its attack from ground level, in the name of ordinary Joes, people whose moral authority derives not from their rank or breeding but their authenticity, which is exactly the thing that the asshole lacks. Inauthenticity is implicit whenever we speak of a “sense of entitlement,” another phrase that entered the American idiom around the time asshole did. (It isn’t necessary to qualify “sense of entitlement” with “unwarranted”—the phrase itself implies that the entitlement isn’t justified.) It’s telling that the increasing use of inauthenticity and sense of entitlement both tracked the spread of asshole in the language, as Figure 4-1 makes clear.23

  The connection is intrinsic to the idea of the asshole, who imagines that his role or status gives him privileges that aren’t really his to claim: the motorist who thinks his importance gives him leave to give lip to a patrolman, the boss on The Office who takes his position as justifying his meddling in the personal lives of his employees. The asshole’s obtuseness makes him incapable of separating his sense of who he is from what he does or what he has or what he knows, which is what it means to be inauthentic. When you hear somebody say indignantly, “Do you know who I am?” it’s a fair bet that he doesn’t, either.

  FIGURE 4-1. Assholes V. Inauthenticity V. Sense of Entitlement

  The growth in popularity of authenticity and inauthenticity was linked to a subtle but important change in their meanings. The words first became voguish in the 1960s. Around forty years ago, Lionel Trilling described authentic as “part of the moral slang of our day”; you can only imagine what Trilling would have made of books with titles like Authentic Personal Branding and Genuine Authentic: The Real Life of Ralph Lauren. If you listen only to the rhetoric of authenticity, very little seems to have changed in the interval. Then as now, people define authenticity simply as a matter of being oneself, doing one’s own thing, knowing who one is; as one book title has it, Be Yourself, Everyone Else Is Already Taken: Transform Your Life with the Power of Authenticity. That leaves a lot of room for variation, of course; “I Did It My Way” means different things in the mouths of Frank Sinatra and Sid Vicious.24 But despite the rhetorical continuities, the notion of authenticity itself has been transformed, as well. As Abigail Cheever observes in Real Phonies, the postwar ideal of authenticity stressed separation and independence from the social context: “authenticity required defining oneself against the expectations of society and culture.” To be authentic was to be a one-off—an iconic loner like Neal Cassady or James Dean, someone who’s “not just one of the crowd,” in the words of the Crystals’ 1962 hit “He’s a Rebel.” By the end of the century, by contrast, authenticity had evolved into what Cheever calls “a standard of belonging,” a way of affirming one’s group identity. That isn’t immediately evident from the things people say about authenticity—about being a maverick and refusing to kowtow to the dictates of fashionable views. Under closer examination, though, the brotherhood of the defiantly unfashionable swells to the 80-plus percent of Americans who define themselves as “politically incorrect,” and the proof of one’s authenticity is an association with a group that’s viewed as unaffected and “natural,” like the working class, blacks, or other ethnic minorities, or simply Middle Americans. It’s not odd these days to hear politicians trumpeting their own authenticity, a claim that an earlier age would have considered self-cancelling. But when Michele Bachman, Rick Perry, and Rick Santorum say “I’m authentic,” they’re not evoking the shade of Neal Cassady. They’re pointing to credentials that make them just like everybody else—a childhood on a West Texas farm, a coal miner grandfather. (Iowa governor Tom Vilsack was admirably diffident about the claim when he was considering a run for the presidency in 2006: “I’m a Catholic from Iowa. My wife tells me I’m authentic”) And even if they haven’t actually used the word, politicians like Sarah Palin, John Edwards, and Bill Clinton have staked their own claims to authenticity on the unprivileged backgrounds that give them a legitimate right to drop their g’s.25

  But one can also assert one’s authenticity indirectly, by identifying with the values of one of those g-dropping groups. That’s the claim we make about obstacles when we call somebody an asshole; it presumes that we’re authentic and that the target is on the other side of the line. Some of that follows from the word’s vulgarity, in the modern sense of the term. To the Victorians, “vulgarity” suggested a connection to vulgar people—people who were, as the OED puts it, “coarsely commonplace; lacking in refinement or good taste; uncultured, ill-bred.” Few people today would go near any of the terms in that definition: to describe someone as “common,” “ill-bred,” or “coarsely commonplace” sounds, well, vulgar. If there’s still an idiomatic association between vulgar language and truck driver or “ghetto” speech, it’s only by way of reinforcing the useful myths that give swearing its power—the idea that vulgarity is an impulsive and unmediated effusion of honest emotion, unimpeded by middle-class affectation or delicacy. Those virtues are typified by the working class, whose members have ostensibly been spared the early repression that middle-class people are subjected to, but they’re ones that any of us can achieve. From that point of view, class and status are like dealer options tacked on to the basic human being, and using vulgar words is evidence of an ability to set them aside and make contact with our immediate, authentic selves. When Dick Cheney was picked up by a CNN camera on the Senate floor telling Senator Pat Leahy to go fuck himself in 2005, the Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer praised Cheney for his “demonstration of earthy authenticity” in a chamber in which authenticity of any kind is to be valued.” The sense of “class” that asshole evokes, that is, is as much a matter of your attitudes and tastes as of your wealth or where you went to college. That’s what enables An
n Coulter, out of Cornell by way of New Canaan, Connecticut, to effuse in a paean to New York City’s outer boroughs: “Queens, baseball games—those are my people. American people.”

  It isn’t surprising, then, that asshole entered the general American idiom around the same time that social groupings based on cultural values seemed to be superseding economic divisions, especially in political life. Thomas Frank tried to draw all of these factors together in What’s the Matter with Kansas?: Class, conservatives insist, is not really about money or birth or even occupation. It is primarily a matter of authenticity, that most valuable cultural commodity. Class is about what one drives and where one shops and how one prays, and only secondarily about the work one does or the income one makes. . . . In red land both workers and their bosses are supposed to be united in disgust with those affected college boys at the next table, prattling on about . . . big ideas for running things that they read in books.

  This is a suggestive picture of the shifting conception of class in post-1960s America, and the last sentence in particular makes it very clear where the notion of the asshole fits into it: “those affected college boys at the next table”—what would you call them but assholes? Vague as they were, these class conceptions rested heavily on the identification of assholes, who could define authenticity by opposition, by embodying its antitheses. (As the pollster John Zogby has noted, summarizing the results of his surveys of American attitudes about authenticity: “Collectively, we Americans might not know exactly what ‘authentic’ is, but for the most part we know what it is not.”) This is the moment that kicks off the assholization of American political discourse, when the qualifications for belonging to the “elite” shifted from power and wealth to lifestyle and attitude, blurring the word’s political sense with the meaning it has in society pages and the names of florists.

  No conservative has sketched this picture of class so fluently and plausibly as David Brooks, who also embraces the image of the country as cafeteria, but sees it as a less rancorous place than Frank does: Americans do not see society as a layer cake, with the rich on top, the middle class beneath them and the working class and underclass at the bottom. They see society as a high school cafeteria, with their community at one table and other communities at other tables. They are pretty sure that their community is the nicest, and filled with the best people, and they have a vague pity for all those poor souls who live in New York City or California and have a lot of money but no true neighbors and no free time.

  As recent events have demonstrated, both Frank and Brooks underestimated the extent to which antagonisms rooted in disparities of wealth are still simmering in the American forebrain. But that values-based conception of class is still a potent element, not just in political life, but in our everyday social thinking. Frank is right to assume that it emerged in its present form in the late sixties and seventies. But it wasn’t initially the creation of the conservatives who made opportunistic hay of it. It was rooted in the same cultural shifts that reconfigured class distinctions in terms of consumer-based categories like lifestyle, upscale, preppie, and yuppie. As it happens, the frequency of those words increased in lockstep with asshole over the following decades, as Figure 4-2 makes clear.

  This is as it should be. The yuppie was merely a specific form of the asshole: a self-absorbed, superficial creature of fashion, “generally out of touch with, and indeed antithetical to, most of the challenges and concerns of a far less well-off and more parochial Middle America,” as one conservative writer put it, in a reprise of Brooks’ high-school cafeteria conception of class. (A popular joke made the connection explicit: “Why is a BMW like a hemorrhoid?” “Sooner or later every asshole gets one.”) And since the yuppie category is defined by attitudes and lifestyle, it’s one you can opt into or out of. You hear the word pronounced with unbridled scorn by people who would qualify for the label by any objective criteria, but who consider themselves exempted by virtue of their exemplary preferences in beverages and automobiles. Indeed, nobody pronounces the word other than scornfully. That’s another thing that yuppie and asshole have in common: nobody thinks he belongs to either category.

  FIGURE 4-2. Lifestyle v. Trendy v. Assholes v. Upscale v. Yuppie

  Everybody’s Word for It

  Those revised notions of class and authenticity set the stage for asshole to become a fixture of middle-class conversation.26 By the early 1970s, the word was Standard English: virtually everybody knew it and owned the concept it denoted, even if not everybody was willing to say it aloud. That doesn’t mean, of course, that the word is acceptable in all contexts, but then neither are many other eminently Standard English words like hey. But by this time it could appear in the mouths of middle-class characters in the plays and fiction of writers such as John Guare, David Rabe, Terrence McNally, and Neil Simon. Stephen King had middle-class high-school students using the word in Carrie in 1974, and Lanford Wilson put it in the mouth of a middle-class lawyer in his 1970 play, Serenading Louie: Alex: I read a report from the good old government that said we (meaning man) have discovered (meaning America, probably) just about all there is to know . . . How would that asshole address himself to the complexity of the human being?

  In no sense are these characters like the 1920s mucker-posers, who were trying to “emulate the language and manners of the bargee and the longshoreman,” as James Truslow Adams described them. They aren’t trying to sound street. The asshole has become a category in their personal moral inventory, linked to their sense of their own authenticity and humanity.

  For middle-class speakers, as for others, asshole could sometimes be just a nondescript term of abuse. In a 1976 sketch called “The Street Fighters,” Tom Wolfe noted the popularity of asshole in Manhattan’s upmarket vernacular: “Asshole is the going insult this year. Everybody’s an asshole. Immediately! Without a moment’s notice! Never mind the preliminaries.” Wolfe goes on to describe a battle over a cab between two homburg-hatted “Wall Street studs” clutching attache cases:One has his hand on the handle. The other one bellies in. It’s fierce.

  “Listen!” the other one says, “I hailed this cab!”

  “Hey! Watch it! I got here first!”

  “Ohhhhhhh, no! . . . Take your hand off that door, you asshole.”

  “Who are you calling an asshole?”

  “You, you little asshole!”

  “Whuhh—I’ll show you who’s an asshole, asshole!”

  “Asshole!”

  “Asshole!”

  “Asshole!”

  “Asshole!”

  It’s a chorus! A reprise! An opera! A regular Asshole Rigoletto.

  Asshole doesn’t seem to mean much more here than “fuck yourself.” And it probably didn’t convey a great deal more than that for Richard Nixon, who used it the Watergate tapes to refer to among others G. Gordon Liddy, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, and the Canadian premier Pierre Trudeau (“I’ve been called worse things by better people,” Trudeau commented) . The epithet wasn’t wholly devoid of meaning—it probably reflected Nixon’s insecurities about class—but it wouldn’t reward one to linger over the subtleties. For the most part, though, the middle class was using the word as everybody was, to take down someone who seems to be abusing his status or claiming unwarranted privileges.

  But middle-class speakers also extended the word to more refined strains of obnoxiousness, like the pretensions and preciosities of academics, artists, and intellectuals. For a typical example, take the way Martin Gottfried used the word to describe certain New York drama critics in a 1973 article in Theater magazine:Criticism of personal insult and abuse is not only irrelevant and sadistic but is usually witless and masturbatory. It is, in fact more difficult to be kind than cruel, as a simple matter of writing, and the very critics who style themselves acerbic—an asshole’s style, if you ask me—tend when they like something, to be no fresher with compliment than with insult.

  Snarky drama critics aren’t a group that would have figured high on Dirty Harry�
�s list of assholes. And as Gottfried’s prose makes clear, he wasn’t foregoing his own claim to membership in the literary bon ton. But there’s a hint of intellectual Dirty Harryism in the obvious pleasure he took at calling the critics assholes, as a way of pulling moral rank to enlist the values of regular guys who aren’t susceptible to the pretension or self-infatuation that licenses nastiness so long as it’s put cleverly, even as he wasn’t exactly bending over backwards to be kind himself.

  The unrivalled master of this maneuver is Woody Allen. Allen’s characters don’t actually use the word asshole much, but the asshole type is a fixture in his movies, from Annie Hall to Midnight in Paris: the narcissistic intellectuals, manipulative New Age gurus and other assorted phonies who are served up as targets for ridicule by Allen or by one of his movie surrogates like Kenneth Branagh, Anthony Hopkins, Larry David, or Owen Wilson. All of these types show up in Annie Hall to be ridiculed by Allen’s character Alvy. There’s Annie’s actor exboyfriend Jerry (“Acting is like an exploration of the soul . . . a kind of liberating consciousness,” prompting Alvy to say, “I may throw up”). There’s the memorable encounter with a man standing ahead of Alvy and Annie in a movie ticket line who’s pontificating fatuously about Marshall McLuhan, until Alvy produces McLuhan himself from behind a poster to tell the loudmouth he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. And there’s the clutch of academics at a West Side party that Alvy attends in flashback with his ex-wife:ROBIN: There’s Henry Drucker. He has a chair in history at Princeton. Oh, the short man is Herschel Kaminsky. He has a chair in philosophy at Cornell.