Originally published on Facebook 28 August 2015.
For most of us, our heroes reflect our aspirations. Not the other way around. Oh, sure, we are capable of being influenced by iconic figures, …but in many cases, we select those icons by what our aspirations already are – even if they’re not aspirations we’re capable of achieving.
For instance, if you want to be a terrific writer, or even if you only wish you could be, you stock your pantheon with writers who reflect the kind of work you venerate. They remain your heroes even if you do never quite figure out how to put a sentence together.
If you want a life of adventure or wish you could have one, you choose your heroes among mountain climbers, explorers, people who fling challenges at the world.
If you value benevolence above all else, you fill that hall with benefactors.
We all have overlap, of course, because we’re all interested in different things. My heroes include scientists, writers, people who said no to injustice…even an actor or two. But they all reflect that part of me which is capable of being touched by them.
And the negative of all this is that some of us are inspired by assholes, because we want to be assholes.
We all understand this: it is fun to be an asshole.
This is one reason we admire the anarchic spirit of comedy teams like The Three Stooges and the Marx Brothers, when they descend upon some proper civilized place and wreak havoc among those whose worst sin is believing that decorum is a virtue. We only wish we could sow that kind of chaos!
The difference is that, for most of us, such comedy functions as pressure valve. We turn it off and then refrain from demolishing any posh living rooms ourselves.
But some of us have deeper admiration for the malice of people who don’t give a shit about anything. We feel constrained by rules and social niceties and cheer WITHOUT CONTEXT when some guy plumbs the depths of awfulness in his speech and actions.
You want some people to think you a hero? Come up with five absolutely awful things to say. They don’t even have to be wed to a particular ideology; just make sure they’re awful. Here, I’ll posit five. They are not things I think myself, but things I can concoct when trying to come up with awfulness. Every time I see some guy in a wheelchair blocking traffic by struggling out of a van, I think, the son of a bitch shouldn’t be out in public, making life inconvenient for the rest of us. I don’t know about you, but I’ll be happy when all the lions are dead. The secret of a happy marriage is keeping your wife in a constant state of physical terror. Every time I see a sign asking me to bus my own table, I leave the goddamn dishes there, because I paid for my food and you have no business telling me what to do. The best thing to do when you see somebody reading a book is to slap it out their hands.
Okay, five awful things. Now let us say I made them public, in some fashion. Let us say I said them in TV editorials, or on reasonably well-produced YouTube videos
I guarantee you that some people will choose me as hero because I said those awful things, because it is the capacity to not give a reasonable care for the opinions of Mankind that those people find aspirational, and inspirational.
They only wish they could be assholes on that scale.
Assholes with a fan base understand this, which is why they put so much effort in plumbing new sub-basements. They know that their obnoxiousness sells; they also know that it palls. So they find other awful things to say. Some of it they may not even believe in. They may very well occasionally inspire in themselves the reaction of the successful horror writer, who comes up with an appalling detail and cannot quite believe it came out of him; similarly, the iconic asshole may well draw back and wonder, “Do I really want to say this about rape victims?”, before making the conscious decision that yes, he does, because it will make his constituency pump their fists and hoot like gibbons. But even then they fall prey to the Vonnegutian dictum that we better watch out for what we pretend to be, because we will wake up one day and discover that’s it what we are.
As for the folks who venerate assholes, what do we know of them? They feel constrained by rules, by morality, by standards of behavior, by societal standards of courtesy, by the need to occasionally let others have the cookies. They think it’s really cool to be awful to people, to not give a shit about anything, and wish that they themselves could do it more frequently, and with more abandon. So they make heroes of the awful, they choose the awful as road maps to their own behavior, they sneer at any objections anybody else might raise about these objects of their aspiration. For them, the awfulness is not a caveat. It’s a selling point.
Remember that the next time some figure makes you wonder, “Christ, why does that guy have a following?” That guy has a following because he nauseates you. He is admired because there’s a sizable population of folks out there who would like to be offensive in that same manner. He is a hero because he is so talented at being the awful thing that he is. And there are people who want to be him.
Comment By: Gerald Blackwell
August 28th, 2016 at 10:18 am
Wisdom here, there is. [/Yoda]
Comment By: Ann Cohrs
August 28th, 2016 at 4:19 pm
Sad, but true.
Comment By: David Vineyard
August 28th, 2016 at 4:19 pm
I remember Joe Pine who applied that very principle. Knowing he was dying he became a tyrannical talk show host then before he died he revealed how much he loathed those supporting him. While I know many such clowns on the right are sincere they are still playing that game of manipulation. Notice Rush and Glenn Beck watching themselves marginalized by Trump’s candidacy and turning on him trying to preserve some audience in a post Trump debacle is a fine example of rats jumping the ship, of bullies trying to find a boat before the tsunami hits.
Comment By: Heather Collins
August 29th, 2016 at 12:17 am
He Who Must Not Be Named….
Comment By: Karina Guenther
August 29th, 2016 at 12:17 am
Bingo. These are the purple who rail against our society becoming “too pc”. Code for, I hate having to be polite to others who are different from me. I dnt like trying to see things from a different perspective.
Comment By: Adam-Troy Castro
April 27th, 2017 at 10:17 am
Monica Valentinelli and Jim Wright are among those who reacted to the recent eruption.
Comment By: Barb Padgett
April 27th, 2017 at 12:19 pm
Interesting. That’s kind of the same point as this article in yesterday’s WaPo. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2017/04/26/ignore-ann-coulter-shes-a-boring-performance-artist-and-shes-gaming-us-all/?utm_term=.914346550ded
Comment By: Paul Crawford
April 27th, 2017 at 12:19 pm
Somebody got butthurt about this: it’s not loading.
Comment By: Barb Padgett
April 27th, 2017 at 12:19 pm
Really? I just clicked on it and it came right up.
Comment By: Paul Crawford
April 27th, 2017 at 12:19 pm
Let me try later. I keep getting an “unable to reach server” warning.
Comment By: Adam-Troy Castro
April 27th, 2017 at 12:19 pm
Which one? Mine or Barb’s?
Comment By: Paul Crawford
April 27th, 2017 at 12:19 pm
Yours, Adam-Troy.
Comment By: Paul Crawford
April 27th, 2017 at 12:19 pm
And right after I write that, it finally loads.
Comment By: Barb Padgett
April 27th, 2017 at 12:19 pm
Weird.
Comment By: Paul Crawford
April 27th, 2017 at 12:19 pm
And whoo boy, if I didn’t already want to go back to 1998 and beat my previous self to death with a cricket bat before…
Comment By: Laura Resnick
April 27th, 2017 at 12:19 pm
Also not loading for me. “Unable to connect…”
Comment By: Adam-Troy Castro
April 27th, 2017 at 12:19 pm
It may conceivably be that I still had an editing page open. It should work now.
Comment By: Laura Resnick
April 27th, 2017 at 1:17 pm
Yep. The link works now.
Comment By: Tim Lieder
April 27th, 2017 at 1:17 pm
I had to read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance a few years back and damn, that essay has an even greater claim to It’s Ok to be an Asshole than Ayn Rand’s output.
Comment By: James Patrick Parks
April 27th, 2017 at 4:18 pm
I had that when I was younger, seeing bluntness as a virtue. I’m glad I grew out of it.
Courteous is better. And requires only slightly more energy.
Comment By: Pawyigh Lee Montgomery
April 27th, 2017 at 10:21 pm
“Unable to connect” means simply that.