Assholery: How to Distinguish Between a Nitwit, a Jerk, and the Inevitable Asshole
A Philosophical Inquiry
The Hero with One or Two Faces
I like those mornings when it’s just me and the dog.
When I’m shoveling Froot Loops into the pie-hole of a face I call “Me.”
When for a few minutes I don’t feel wrongly made or have to wonder why that dimple girls found so cute is now situated in the general vicinity of my double chin.
I’m at the grocery store with my wife.
They’re out of Froot Loops, but there’s this guy who says he’s found a secret stash.
“It’s somewhere by the prunes,” he says.
His head is shaped like a lightbulb, and his face is so wrinkled it looks like a fingerprint. Still, he fashions himself charming as he eye-gropes my wife’s ass.
I should be mad, but all I can think of is last night, the moon so pregnant I thought it might burst.
The kind of experience that makes you want to shapeshift into one of those undifferentiated, happy creatures found only in cartoons.
To be anywhere but with a wife who’s clearly annoyed by my penchant for blowing things up.
She’s wearing a white halter top, a silk number that a French anthropologist might describe as “autochthonous,” though this oaf is too dumb to make that leap.
The next time I see him is in the checkout line.
He’s holding a box of Froot Loops, which I wrestle from him before getting into some serious hand-to-hand, as my wife heads for the exit—the customers and cashiers frozen like prehistoric creatures on the walls of the Lascaux caves.
Most of the events in this prose poem, of course, never actually happened. If they did and I ended up wrestling with a guy over a box of Fruit Loops, you would be within your rights to stage an intervention and whisk me off in a grey minivan where you could give me a Valium drip while intoning ancient Buddhist chants meant to calm a troubled mind.
And yet the poem was based on a specific fifty-something brute with a watch cap pulled down to his eyelids, who did spend an extraordinary amount of time staring at my wife’s ass. I am even convinced he followed us into the next aisle for further inspection of the whole human being, and that this pattern would have continued if I hadn’t said, “Dude, why don’t you take a picture?”
This event drove home a few things to me.
First, I have to stop confronting people like this or I will get hurt. I’m in good shape for my age but know if I threw a punch, I would miss, dislocate my shoulder, and while I was writhing on the ground in pain, my opponent would kick me in the face five or ten times.
Secondly, I don’t necessarily blame the guy for admiring my 58-year-old wife’s beauty. But when it comes to her ass, or to the ass of any woman, for that matter, the generally accepted rule is that one must only “glance at” and not “fixate on” on a woman’s tush, as if it’s some wonderful undiscovered planet.
Anyone who breaks this rule, I would call a nitwit, not necessarily an asshole.
Here’s another nitwit, who eventually became a jerk, and then further distinguished himself as a first-class asshole.
When I started graduate school, I moved before classes started to a small New Hampshire college town where I got part-time work in the library. I owned nothing of worth back then except for a pair of expensive Polaroid sunglasses I bought to battle the glare when cross-country skiing. I loved those glasses. Imagine my sadness when I misplaced them somewhere in the library. After a few days, I accepted the loss until I ran into a professor, whose course I would be taking in the fall.
As we talked, I noticed he was wearing my sunglasses. How did I know that? The glasses were attached to same sunglass tether strap I had purchased in Buffalo, NY. The dummy hadn’t the sense to know that if you are going to steal someone’s sunglasses (and it was stealing because he could have brought them to the library’s reference desk), you should at least have removed the strap.
What could I do? He was going to be my professor. He would have power over my career, and I knew he would certainly not admit to stealing them. This theft certainly made him a nitwit, and it wasn’t until months later that he officially became a jerk. Over that time span, he showed himself to be a serial predator of students, abusive to his wife at parties, and then, finally, I learned that he had tried to submarine a friend’s application for a fellowship, because he had tried to hit on my friend’s wife, who told him to “fuck off.” This latter offense was what made him a first-class asshole. Why? Because he had established a consistent pattern of asshole behavior.
He had become, in fact, a master of Assholery–a word that deserves to enter the mainstream lexicon of American language, instead of being relegated to the Urban Dictionary.
So what is the difference between a nitwit, a jerk, a dummy (or choose your favorite word) and an asshole? Fortunately, philosopher Aaron James has written a very readable and often funny book on the subject called, quite appropriately: Ass-holes*: A Theory.
James focuses on the narcissistic and self-absorbed qualities of the asshole and his lack of a moral compass. He also makes clear that real assholes feel a sense of entitlement and their bad behavior isn’t a one-off. Their actions display the consistent pattern I described above.
Or as James writes: “Our theory is simply this: a person counts as an asshole when, and only when, he systematically allows himself to enjoy special advantages in interpersonal relations out of an entrenched sense of entitlement that immunizes him against the complaints of others.”
He goes on to say that everyone is capable of assholery. We all may sometimes cut in line, or be short with people because we are tired, or not help an old lady across the street because we are in a hurry to pick up our kids. But “what distinguishes the asshole,” James writes, “is the way he acts, the reasons that motivate him to act in an abusive and arrogant way. The asshole acts out of a firm sense that he is special, that the normal rules of conduct do not apply to him.” Put more succinctly, it is natural that we all feel special on our birthdays, but, to the asshole, his “birthday comes every day.”
James also argues, and rightly so, that the majority of assholes are men.
I would go even further than James and argue that Assholery has been on the rise since a whole unruly gang of big-mouth, right-wing politicians have given previously closeted assholes permission to say things previously considered off-limits.
For example, consider this first-class asshole I encountered when I took my 18-year-old son to a college basketball game.
We had decent tickets behind the home team’s backboard. To the left of us were two sections of student seating. The college kids were a rowdy, happy crowd, but polite, the large majority of them very attractive young women—a detail that will become significant later.
Our section was usually comprised of families who were non-season-ticket holders, but that night I thought I was at a sports bar—elbow-to-elbow with big burly guys. Some of them were in shape; others very pumped up but fat around the middle. Too much greasy food and booze, I thought, nibbling on my protein bar. They were fire fighters, I discovered. They were what I called “two-handers.” They always had a full beer in each hand, even when they peed in the toilet. I would watch in amazement as they somehow removed their member and let loose a stream while chugging down a mouthful of brewski. It was almost like performance art.
The group of four guys in front of us seemed pretty much under control except for one guy, a squat white guy with a blond crew cut and bright green eyes that were jumping around in their sockets as if someone had shoved a live wire up his butt. He had a beer in each hand and two cans of Red Bull at his feet, one of which was empty. So he was tag-teaming it, I thought—getting buzzed with the Red Bull, then sedating himself with the beer. He was wild. Hopping around. Swearing. Once putting down a beer and beating on his chest. Another time trying to put his friend in a headlock.
At first, he was amusing, but then he began to lose his balance and bump into us. It wasn’t long before he started eyeing the co-eds and unleashing a torrid of sexual comments, all punctuated with “fucking pussy” and a grotesque wagging of his tongue.
I tapped him on the shoulder. “Can you tone it down a bit,” I said. “I’m with my son.”
He sized me up. Put his face up close to mine, a little bit of drool sliding down his chin. He looked at my son, a quiet gentle kid, who is 250 pounds and a powerlifter. I wondered how far he might be able to throw this guy.
“I’m sure the kid’s heard worse,” the guy said. “I’ve got sons his age. They know how have a good time. What’s the problem?”
“This isn’t a ‘good time,’” I said.
My son put his hand on my thigh. “It’s okay, Dad.”
“Oh, fuck you, old man,” the drunk said.
“That wasn’t necessary,” I replied.
“You’re not necessary,” he said back. And then added, “Pussy.”
All of this would probably have ended poorly but the guy next to him said. “Alan, stop being your usual asshole self. Let the guy and his kid enjoy the game.” Then he looked at me, “Sorry, man. He’s always like this.”
This may be hard to believe, but about ten minutes later the drunk nodded off, while ten thousand fans were rocking the rafters. It was if he had become exhausted by his own Assholery.
Now why was this guy an asshole instead of a jerk or a dumb shit or a whatever?
Let’s return to Aaron James’s description of the asshole.
What did I know about this guy from this brief encounter?
First, he felt entitled to behave as he did with no remorse. To him, I didn’t exist as a person.
Second, he felt it was appropriate to raise his own children in his own asshole image likeness.
Third, even his friends knew he was an asshole.
I could easily extrapolate the rest of his sad life. Cheating on his wife. Cutting people off on the road and shooting them the finger. Getting drunk at a wedding and knocking over chairs, then taking the focus off the bride and groom by jitterbugging to some imaginary manic tune resounding in his head during the traditional father/daughter dance.
And I could go on and on.
In short, that night at the basketball game was not a one-off bad night for old Alan. He was an asshole to the core, and probably his only way out of it would be a frontal lobotomy. But being an asshole, he wouldn’t really want a way “out of it.” He wouldn’t think he had done anything wrong. As James would say, Alan was so special in Alan’s mind that every day was Alan’s birthday, and every event in his life was his own private birthday party, with the focus solely on him.
Certainly, Alan’s portrait should hang prominently in that ever-growing and ignominious Asshole Wall of Shame, along with black-and-white portraits of other assholes we hope to never become.
You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com
His most recent book of prose poems is While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems
His most recent book of fiction is Shot: A Novel in Stories