Review
WENDY GEORGE
Ascent of
the A-Word:
Assholism, The
First Sixty Years
By Geoffrey
Nunberg
PublicAffairs
272 pages
August 14, 2012
Stuart Whatley
HUFFINGTON
09.23.12
can moral life.” Which is to say,
we know it when we see it.
Fair enough, but it must be
said, his book dedicates much
ink to bolstering the word’s
distinctions. “When you hear
someone proudly declaring himself an asshole, it’s a fair conclusion that he’s not an asshole
at all, he’s just a dick,” he later
writes. A dick knows what he is
and how people perceive him.
But according to Nunberg, an
asshole is a singly different species. Plagued by “obtuseness,”
he “… imagines that his role or
status gives him privileges that
aren’t really his to claim.”
Nunberg cites a man barging to the front of the line in a
crowded car rental agency on
9/11 to demand, “Where’s the Hertz Gold Card line?” This
is the vague, yet precise, definition he establishes before
moving on to his larger beast: “assholism,” a form of public
behavior whereby, “The more of an asshole you can make
your adversaries seem, the more of an asshole you can permit yourself to appear, so as to bond with your fellows with
provocative gestures of insensitivity…”
As one example, Nunberg mentions Ann Coulter’s Muslimbashing, which he suspects she does for the sole purpose of
rallying her fans and enraging “the libs.” He lists others, left
and right, from Paul Krugman to Donald Trump, but it’s worth
noting that here we’ve already replaced his earlier meaning
with something else. If assholism is the witting provocation of
one’s adversaries, then its defining characteristic is not ob-