One thing about history is certain: there has never been a shortage of assholes.  The past is full of them--some more well known than others.   

Nathan Bedford Forrest (1821-1877), a lieutenant general of the Confederate Army during the Civil War and the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, was an old asshole.

When the time came to rewrite the history of the Civil War and its aftermath, especially by portraying Reconstruction as an insufferable agony imposed upon the white South by blacks, carpetbaggers, and scalawags, D. W. Griffith (1875-1948), the director of The Birth of a Nation, earned a place right alongside Forrest.

Before the groundbreaking appearance of The Birth of a Nation in 1915, Woodrow Wilson, inaugurated as the 28th U.S. President in 1913, wrote that “Negro rule under unscrupulous adventurers had been finally put an end to in the South, and the natural inevitable ascendency of the whites, the responsible class, established [italics mine].”  [1]  For this viewpoint, which Griffith later captured in celluloid, Wilson deserves admission into the circle of  Forrest and Griffith.

On the 1960 track, Original Fables of Faubus, jazz composer and bassist Charles Mingus lampooned Orval Faubus, governor of Arkansas from 1955-1967, who defied the U.S. Supreme Court’s injunction to desegregate public schools by calling in the Arkansas National Guard to block nine African-American students from entering Little Rock’s Central High School in September 1957.  Mingus merely called Faubus “ridiculous,” though he deserved to be called much more.

In the same spirit and by the same deeds as Faubus, there was Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor (1897-1973), the Public Safety Commissioner of Birmingham, Alabama, who gained national and international notoriety for turning fire hoses and German police dogs on Civil Rights protesters in the early 1960s.  He was an old asshole, too.

The 1970s had its share of figures who would have been at home with Connor, Faubus, and the like--most notably, the iconic political trickster Richard Nixon (1913-1994).  But no one should forget former San Francisco city supervisor, homophobe, and assassin Daniel James White (1946-1985), who murdered San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and fellow city supervisor Harvey Milk, in cold blood, on November 27, 1978.  White was one, too.

Constables, jurists, financiers, and stock-jobbers have, for a long time, been assholes, so there is no need to reclassify them as “new.”  Even in the category of the arts, there have been ’holes of the old variety.  How many well-known and unknown egotistic, insufferable artists has the world known?  In no particular order, Jackson Pollock, Ernest Hemingway, Miles Davis, Scoop Billingsgate, and Mel Gibson fill the bill.

In the 1951 film Appointment with Danger, Al Goodard, a U.S. Postal Inspector (played by Alan Ladd), tells Maury Ahearn (played by Dan Riss) that everybody does, indeed, have a pitch, contrary to Ahearn’s belief.  Goddard, disabused of any rose-colored glasses, tells Ahearn that we are all pitch-artists in search of a “better job, a little more dough, [and] a round of applause.”

And, of course, Goddard’s words are relevant because he aptly described the American mindset, both then and now.  Those who actually have, or even seem to have, more money and applause we envy.  We spend our lives with our eyes “ever fixed upon some round of the ladder that is just beyond . . . reach, and all . . . our secret ambitions, all . . . our extraordinary energies, group themselves about the yearning to grasp it.”  [2]

To achieve the countenance of our so-called betters, we overlook their indignities toward others and tolerate their idiocies, not mention their atrocities.  We do so not because they are actually innocent or deserving of our leniency; rather because we are “violently eager to get on,” up the ladder.  [3]  And doing so requires that we sacrifice our “self-respect today in order to gain the hope of destroying the self-respect of other aspirants tomorrow.”  [4]  Simply put, we tolerate rich and powerful assholes because we want what they have.

Social aspiration, not the social network, is what defines the American mind.  The co-founder, President, and CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, by numerous accounts, is or was--which is it really?-- a social aspirant, a species of parvenu, a social climber, even though he was aspiring to climb inside of a world that he felt excluded from, instead of upward through one.

Those who have been closest to Zuckerberg have described him in terms of being or having been--again, which is it?--“backstabbing, conniving, and insensitive”; imperial; a “new caesar”; in favor of honesty, transparency, and “global openness for everyone,” though he himself is “a wary and private person” who does not like to speak to the press or to make public appearances.  [5]

As might be expected, Zuckerberg has been likened to “a robot”--and one that has “been overprogrammed [sic]” to boot.  [6]  Do not expect any sympathy or empathy from the social network czar: “When he’s not  interested in what someone is talking about, he’ll just look away and say, ‘Yeah, yeah.’”  [7]

If the aforementioned does not recommend Zuckerberg for membership in the ilk of new assholes, then neither does the $65 million settlement that Facebook reached with Divya Narendra and the Winklevosses (Cameron and Tyler) vindicate him.  [8]  These three former Harvard classmates of Zuckerberg’s claim that he stole the idea and execution of their Web site, Harvard Connection, during the academic year 2003-04.    [9]  And the litigious drama continues, as Divya, Cameron, and Tyler insist that “Facebook misled them about the value of the stock they would receive.”  [10]

And then there is Nick Denton, the founder and emperor of the “nine-blog empire of barbed news and gossip sites” called Gawker Media, launched in 2002.  [11]  Whereas Zuckerberg is twenty-six and rather private, Denton is forty-four and permeable.  [12]

More so than Zuckerberg, Denton has been portrayed by close friends and colleagues in uncomplimentary fashion, though Denton himself relishes his reputation as “an upstart thug from nowhere.”  [13]  From the outset, he longed to join the club: first, the banking establishment in London; second, Silicon Valley; next, the media elite in Manhattan.  [14]

Denton has an “image as a kind of digital-sweatshop operator.”  [15]  Though some Gawker Media bloggers reportedly make more than $80K today, years ago, they only made $24K a year.  [16]  Even now, bloggers are paid $12 per post, which is supplemented “with a pool of bonus money paid out according to the number of page views generated.”  [17]

Regardless of how much he pays or does not pay his employees, Denton has been depicted as a “terrible employer,” an “unapologetic liar,” a “villain public person.”  [18]  Respectively, two former writers for Gawker said that Denton is “not a fully human person,” that he is someone to whom “other people’s emotions are alien.”  [19]

John Gapper, a columnist for Financial Times, who was Denton’s editor in London, explained that Denton has “a strong carapace of not really thinking other people’s opinions are that important.”  [20]  This latter virtue as well as the others earned Denton a ranking of #38 on a 2005 list of the “50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers.”  [21]

Between Denton’s sadism and Zuckerberg’s quasi-autism, we are a long way from the tenets of Dale Carnegie.  Moguls of the Denton-Zuckerberg persuasion, have no genuine interest in other people; they are not inclined to smile; they don’t give a damn about your name, unless for the purpose of maligning it; they hear, but do not listen; they are interested in the interests of others if and only if money is to be made; and the feelings of others simply do not count.  [22]

The thing that not only counts, but also is worth tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars is a certain affectation.  In the case of Gawker Media, that affectation consists of “a mix of affected cool, open Schadenfreude, and a surprisingly earnest self-righteousness.”  [23]  In other words, Gawker has bootstrapped itself to the value of $100 million (more or less) by playing the role of one big asshole, or a network of assholes.  [24]

Just like a computer program, this new asshole comes into being when there is no overriding value to preempt it.  He becomes a standard of manners in a land where, say, the headwaiter at a fashionable restaurant does not have better manners than any other man in the place.  [25]  Today, nearly everyone has bad manners, especially the headwaiter (metaphorically speaking).

This new asshole is born out of the nexus of several historical concomitants: 1) the easy creation of dot-com and social media enterprises by means of venture capital; 2) America’s ever-increasing neoteny--ever notice grown men or women who disgracefully retain all the behavior of children?; 3) the meltdown of any distinction between “high” and “low” culture--we live in a “degraded landscape of schlock and kitsch,” writes Fredric Jameson; and 4) the lack of insurmountable caste barriers requires the new, parvenu assholes like Zuckerberg and Denton to be forever fearful that they might slip back down whence they came and lose their imperial place.  [26]

Altogether, the “shameless self-assertion” characteristic of the old-time social aspirants is made worse, in the present, by the total absence of any value that is not itself a gaudy, depthless, or flagrant reflection of social aspiration.  [27]

The new asshole is aided and abetted by a culture whose only reference seems to be other assholes.

Sources:

[1] Woodrow Wilson, Division and Reunion, 1829-1909 (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1910), 273.

[2] H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, The American Credo: A Contribution toward the Interpretation of the National Mind (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1920), accessed October 20, 2010, mybebook.com/.../mencken...henry-louis-1880-1956...american-credoa-contribution-toward...interpretation...national

mind/ebook17476.

[3] Ibid. 

[4] Ibid.

[5] Jose Antonio Vargas, “The Face of Facebook,” New Yorker, September 20, 2010, 54-64.

[6] Ibid, 56.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid, 58.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Michael Idov, “The Demon Blogger of Fleet Street,” New York, September 26, 2010, accessed October 20, 2010, http://nymag.com/news/features/establishments/68506.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ben McGrath, “Search and Destroy,” New Yorker, October 18, 2010, 55-56.

[15] Ibid, 50.

[16] Ibid, 50.

[17] Ibid, 56.

[18] Ibid, 53.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Ibid.

[21] “50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers,” New York Press, April 6, 2005, accessed October 20, 2010, http://www.nypress.com/article-11360-50-most-loathsome-new-yorkers.html.

[22] Dale Carnegie’s advice on “Six Ways To Make People Like You” is actually the opposite of the points listed above.  See Dale Carnegie, How To Win Friends and Influence People (1936; reprint, N.p.: n.p., 1981), accessed October 20, 2010, http://erudition.mohit.tripod.com/_Influence_People.pdf.

[23] Idov, “The Demon Blogger of Fleet Street.” 

[24] Jeff Bercovici, “Huffpo vs. Gawker: Which Is Worth More?, Forbes, October 11, 2010, accessed October 20, 2010, http://blogs.forbes.com/jeffbercovici/2010/10/11/huffpo-vs-gawker-which-is-worth-more.

[25] Mencken and Nathan include the aphorism, “That the head-waiter in a fashionable restaurant has better manners than any other man in the place,” as one of the American credos.  See Mencken and Nathan, The American Credo.

[26] Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991; reprint, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 2.

[27] Mencken and Nathan, The American Credo.