Ascent of the A-word
by Geoffrey Nunberg
PublicAffairs
What do Donald Trump, Steve Jobs, Kanye West, Bill O’Reilly, Bill Maher, Dirty Harry’s bosses and intellectual know-it-alls in Woody Allen movies have in common?
They all get mentioned in the new book “Ascent of the A-Word.” And let’s just say they’re not cited as counter-examples.
Author Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguistics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, draws a timeline for America’s favorite term of disparagement, from its colloquial Army barracks origin in the ’40s to the fascination with reality-TV villains and antagonistic political punditry.
In America today, according to Nunberg, we live in the Age of the A-hole.
In entertainment, in politics, in line at the bank. We now root for a-holes, America’s new anti-heroes, as long as they’re battling back against bigger a-holes — those more hypocritical, haughty or loud on their cellphones.
The term, a variant of the British “arsehole,” began as barracks slang in WWII, typically as a label for an overbearing superior. Among other memoirs and novels that followed the war, Nunberg credits Norman Mailer’s 1948 novel “The Naked and the Dead” with exposing the term to a wide audience, with its description of self-important Navy officer Lt. Dove: “ . . . a Cornell man, a Deke, a perfect a – – hole . . .”
The term had more punch than “popinjay, whelp, chuff, coxcomb, bounder, cad or heel.” And as Nunberg defines it, the early archetypal a-hole was defined by entitlement and obtuse arrogance. An a-hole doesn’t know he’s an a-hole, as opposed to, say, a schemer, womanizer or the “phonies” for which Holden Caulfield held the highest disdain.
But it wasn’t until the late ’60s when the term went widespread. That might have had something to do with President Nixon, who in October 1968 was greeted by protesters at Kent State with shouts of that very word.
In 1974, Frank Zappa penned the song “Dickie’s Such an A – – hole.” And in the confused amalgam of spiritual enlightenment and vanity that was the ’70s, a new faction of a-hole was born. The term became an equal-opportunity insult for both the snobbish old-boy network as well as New Agers with their own narcissistic focus on self-actualization. One camp boasted of beach houses on Nantucket, the other of transformative getaways to the astral plane. Both qualified as a-holes.
Then something odd happened — a-hole became heroes.
Thank Dirty Harry. In 1971, Harry Callahan was the embodiment of what Nunberg labels the “anti-a – – hole,” a blunt, scornful a-hole in his own right, but one who’s fighting bigger a-holes, such as his bureaucratic, hypocritical police higher-ups.
“Everything in these films is contrived to make him seem righteous and his adversaries despicable,” Nunberg writes.
That’s led to a series of a-hole heroes — who couldn’t care less if you like them or not — from Bruce Willis in “Die Hard” to Detective Jimmy McNulty on “The Wire.”
But it’s politic punditry and reality television that has really embraced the “a-hole as hero.” Bill O’Reilly on the right and Bill Maher on the left smugly dismiss those who disagree with them as clueless.
Likewise, the a-hole template is at the core of most reality TV programming, and none more so than “The Apprentice,” with Donald Trump, who Nunberg calls a truly “iconic” a-hole.
The show gives viewers the satisfaction of watching a “powerful man acting like an a-hole to his supplicants, dispatching the losing competitor with a brisk, ‘You’re fired!’ ” The trick is that the contestants are first revealed as scheming backstabbers deserving of their comeuppance.
As Nunberg concludes succinctly, it is simply enjoyable “to watch someone be an a – – hole to someone being an a – – hole.”