Review
Stuart Whatley
HUFFINGTON
09.23.12
tuseness so much as the effective opposite: intentionality.
Let’s agree that the man with the Hertz Gold Card is
probably an asshole (here the word has a kind of verisimilitude, or as Nunberg puts it, it’s just the “shoe that fits”);
but if that’s assholism, it isn’t the same thing as what so
many politicians, media personalities and their followers do. Aren’t they just engaging in plain old partisan dogwhistling, central in any democracy?
Nunberg asserts that the nature of our politics, the media and the Internet have “created a host of new occasions
for acting like assholes and new ways of performing assholism,” which constitutes a new age. But he is at pains to
distinguish assholism from that tired old saw, “incivility,”
which he admits is nothing new. He says it’s assholism because of its tone and method of delivery — because we’re
uncivil in new ways. But isn’t this the same light source
merely refracting through a newer medium?
Nunberg also argues that this is the Age of the Asshole
because we now “find the phenomenon and its practitioners
so interesting.” But a cursory glance at past literature shows
plenty of compelling and “compellingly repugnant” characters who fit Nunberg’s asshole, from Homer’s Agamemnon to
Melville’s Ahab to Chekhov’s smug, fatuous huntsman, Yegor
Vlasych. Nunberg himself invokes Shakespeare’s Malvolio.
Why are characters such as these so compelling, then as
now? It’s a valid question, but the phenomenon itself isn’t
new. For the Greeks and Melville these characters served
a didactic purpose to warn against hubris. Perhaps we enjoy watching assholes tempt their fate, or even overturn
it. Perhaps we all have an asshole id in need of succor. Or
maybe assholes behaving badly aren’t what’s compelling at
all. There are plenty of assholes, boring as a doorknob, who
get no more attention than anyone else.
Nunberg’s diagnosis of public life seems unnecessary. The
book is far more interesting as a linguistic study. Its middle