36 Colbert did try to riff on Trump’s gay marriage disquisition, in a segment extending the logic to other issues. On the debt ceiling: “It’s bad. Like almond butter. They’re making butter out of every kind of nut these days. What’s wrong with peanut butter? The debt ceiling.” That nailed the Ionesco-like non sequitur of Trump’s remark, but not its weirdly inapt self-reference.
37 In a class of its own is the brilliantly conceived Parking Wars, which tracks the employees of the Philadelphia Parking Authority as they ticket, boot, and tow cars and registers the responses of their owners in a situation that would bring out the asshole in any of us.
38 For that matter, young aspirants to the start-up culture—which includes about three-quarters of my students, as best I can tell—find Zuckerberg a much more compelling career model than Jobs, who for all his personal unconventionality lived out his working life in a traditional corporate context. They’re generally less interested in building the next Apple than in doing a start-up that builds apps for the present one.
39 For real satire, listen to the way Bill Maher likes to send up that “can’t you take a joke?” defense, using “I kid” as if it excused any remark, however abusive: “Hey, birthers, wanna hear my theory? My theory was that Obama was born in America and you were born with the umbilical cord around your neck . . . Oh, I kid the birthers.”
40 The wording of the item was hardly neutral: “Some people think that government officials too often override the facts and common sense in the name of political correctness. Is political correctness a problem in America today?”
41 There are plenty of comparable phenomena on the left, too. Alongside of Regnery’s Politically Incorrect Guide to American History (a “far-right assault on the truth,” as the conservative historian Ron Radosh put it), one could put Howard Zinn’s influential People’s History of the United States—“bad history, albeit gilded with virtuous intentions,” the historian of populism Michael Kazin has called it, which “reduces the past to a Manichean fable.” If there’s a difference here, it’s that left writers like Zinn don’t assholize the right so much as demonize them; they’re too earnest to take the same pleasure in being jerks about it.
42 A 2009 Pew study showed that about 15 percent of adult Internet users have contributed comments on political or social issues, but that proportion increases sharply among younger and better-educated users (among users under thirty and college-educated users it is almost 40 percent). In recent years, though, the Tea Party movement has been drawing a greater number of older conservatives online.
43 Conservatives often point to surveys that show that more Republicans and conservatives report themselves as being happy than Democrats and liberals do, though a lot of the difference vanishes when income, age, health, and religiosity are factored in. A 2008 study by two NYU psychologists suggested that the ability to perceive inequality as inevitable or just rather than unfair accounts for most of the remaining difference. Or as the conservative Dennis Prager put the point, “Utopians will always be less happy than those who know that suffering is inherent to human existence.” He’s probably right.
44 Or unless it’s singled out by the conservative media. Over the last decade the otherwise obscure controversialist Ward Churchill has been mentioned on Fox News four times as often as on all other broadcast and cable channels combined, and ten times as frequently as Noam Chomsky. People who listen only to Fox would be excused for concluding that he’s a much more important figure on the left than Chomsky is. He makes for a more exemplary left-wing asshole, anyway.
45 The exceptions are the affable Mike Huckabee on Fox and Joe Scarborough on MSNBC, though neither is remotely as iconic as Limbaugh, Hannity or O’Heilly—nor, for that matter, are arch-jerks on the left like Keith Olbermann. Jon Stewart plays a wholly different game. He ridicules figures on the right among others, sometimes coming close to acting like an asshole. But his object isn’t to delight his audience at the thought of how much he’s pissing off his targets, which is what defines political assholism. In fact the right gives a lot more thought to what the left thinks of them than the left does with regard to the right.
46 In what had to be the most absurd linguistic overreaction to the Arizona shootings, Democratic congresswoman Chellie Pingree urged House Speaker John Boehner to remove “killing” from the name of what Republicans were calling the “Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Act.” Boehner could have responded that in that context kill doesn’t convey anything more violent than it does when we talk about killing the lights, a bottle of scotch, or a couple of hours between flights. But he dutifully replaced “job killing” with “job destroying” and “job crushing” in his subsequent remarks, thereby rendering the violence of the metaphor nonlethal.
47 Searches on your asshole return a few instances of phrases like your asshole friend, but more than 99 percent of the hits are anatomical.
Copyright © 2012 by Geoffrey Nunberg
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nunberg, Geoffrey, 1945−
The ascent of the A-word : assholism, the first sixty years / Geoffrey Nunberg.
p. cm.
Includes index.
eISBN : 978-1-610-39176-4
1. English language—Obscene words. 2.Words, Obscene. I.Title. PE3724.O3N86 2012
427—dc23
2012017027
Editorial production by Marrathon Production Services. www.marrathon.net
Ascent of the A-Word Page 23
