What an Asshole!

Growing up in my family we were all nuts for George Carlin. In particular, we loved a bit from one of Carlin’s classic comedy albums called “Asshole, Jackoff, Scumbag!,” in which Carlin plays the host of a game show where the contestants try to accurately guess whether the subjects, e.g. a rancher who lives in Texas and works for an oil company or a lawyer who lives on Long Island and is a US Congressman, are each assholes, jackoffs, or scumbags. We quickly realized that these categories were as universal to human beings as introversion and extroversion, and that they could easily be utilized to add a fifth letter to any given Meyers-Briggs results; an ESTJ might become an ESTJA or an ISTP an ISTPJ.

We had a lot of fun playing our own little versions of “Asshole, Jackoff, Scumbag!,” managing our anger towards those who had run afoul of one or another of our little clan by marking them with the appropriate label. But, perhaps wisely, we never labeled each other, utilizing the “present company excluded” clause as a loophole from our assertion that the typology was indeed universal. But I knew full well that the loophole we had exercised was a fraud, and that I too was an asshole, jackoff, or scumbag, my family’s silence on the matter enabling me to engage in some equally fraudulent self-analysis.

So it was that I went around for years thinking of myself as an INFPJ, a real jackoff. Jackoffs, of course, are the least offensive of the three types. They don’t get much done, but this deficit was easily dressed up as “being laid back,” as if I was an old soul transplanted from a series of previous incarnations lived on island time. I mightn’t get out of bed until noon or do my laundry more than once a trimester, but my sloth was restoring balance to The Force in a world where doing always seemed to trump being. (Could Darth Vader have been a misunderstood jackoff?)

I bought into my own BS until two Thanksgivings ago, when word got back to me that my wife had gotten together over turkey, gravy, stuffing, and mashed potatoes with my mom and my big sister and, like Truman, Churchill, and Stalin dividing up Europe after World War II, unanimously and unilaterally assigned me to the asshole side of the “Asshole, Jackoff, Scumbag!” map (which, to extend the metaphor, makes me a lot like France). In doing so, they saved me several years on the analyst’s couch, psychoanalysis being a process described by famed sociologist Peter Berger as “a prolonged rewriting of the patient’s biography – until, finally, he or she ‘gets it right.’” Correctly sensing that I was quite happy to maintain a self serving false consciousness in which I fancied myself a righteous jackoff, the women who love me most got it right on my behalf.

So, I’m an asshole. Not, I would hasten to add, a royal asshole, but an asshole nonetheless, and one who still engages in your garden variety asshole behavior on pretty much a daily basis. Just this morning, as my wife got the kids ready to head out the door with her, leaving me to my own devices for the next blessed six hours, I refused to multitask by plopping a sausage in the toaster oven for my youngest daughter as I watched the scrambled eggs turn yellow in the frying pan. Watching the eggs was all I could handle, or such was my claim as I shouted to my wife to handle the business with the sausage so that I could give my full attention to the egg I was cooking for her. Only a real asshole, of course, would inconvenience his wife under the auspices of being too busy meeting her needs. I followed this up by refusing to make my oldest daughter a cup of tea because I feared that the duration of boiling and brewing might slow down their departure and delay the onset of my me-time, triggering a bout of whining from my oldest that my wife had to extinguish on her way out the door. As I watched her slog through the slush to the van with our children, she had become the embodiment of the old adage that a good deed never goes unpunished.

Between moments like these I do enough so that my wife and children still love me and I can avoid feeling like the world’s biggest asshole, which is a label that no one wants to cop to. In the current edition of ESPN Magazine, Lance Armstrong admits to being just that, but after his interlocutor goes with it and repeats the title that Armstrong has just bestowed upon himself, he hedges: “I’m not sure I was the biggest asshole in the world, but I played one on TV.” Armstrong’s hemming and hawing about being the world’s biggest asshole, which everyone knows he truly was, and which doesn’t have to be that big a deal given that the world is full of world’s biggest assholes, only serves to make him look like more of an asshole.

Being an asshole isn’t really all that different than being a jackoff, or even a scumbag, whom I always considered the worst of the lot. “I may not be the world’s best husband, but I would never cheat on my wife” is, after all, just another way of saying “I may be an asshole, but at least I’m not a scumbag.” But what assholes, jackoffs, and scumbags have in common, i.e. what we all have in common, is a self-centeredness that is as pervasive and as invisible as the air we breathe. Philosopher Mark Johnston, in his brilliant Saving God: Religion After Idolatry, posits that original sin is real and that it consists of our inborn self absorption. Following Johnston, I would say that Freud, who was often accused of being a pansexualist for his tendency to trace everything back to the libido and the Oedipus complex, wasn’t quite on the mark and that the satisfaction of the sex drive is just one instance of the larger human project of, to borrow a line from the old Burger King ads, having it our way.

Victor Frankl famously refuted Freud with his theory that human behavior was spurred not by Freudian drives, but by a search for meaning, which theory provided the title to his classic work Man’s Search for Meaning, a book which I have failed to read despite having had it on my list for over a decade, a failure which, if I may be indulged in some self analysis despite the track record established by my self-identification as a jackoff, is likely a form of resistance to the optimism inherent to Frankl’s theory and his personal history of having survived the Holocaust through his own search for meaning. Instead of reading Man’s Search for Meaning I read Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era, a book with a Terminator motif of super-intelligent machines consigning us to the dustbin of history, and a book I have out from the library right now. Looking through a scanner darkly at the end of the world, I am mesmerized. Frankl, living through the end of the world, was liberated. So perhaps my resistance is nothing but, to borrow a term from Erich Fromm, an escape from freedom.

Regardless, the fact remains that I have read Freud and not Frankl. So in my quest to become a reformed asshole, taking my inspiration from Haleakala, the world’s largest dormant volcano, I turn to Freud’s theory of sublimation, the notion that we can channel our sexual drive into creative endeavors, a process that is likely the very wellspring of civilization. Since I have subsumed Freud’s pansexualism into the idea that we all want what we want and we want it now, I may as well commandeer sublimation while I am at it. And, as a writer, I am perfectly positioned to do so.

In her remarkable Tiger Writing, novelist Gish Jen shares a story from grad school in which she was told by her professor that there was no such thing as a nice writer. As an asshole, then, I would seem to be well suited to the task. Jen goes on to say that she was also told in grad school that all good writing is subversive. And subversiveness could quite possibly be the only way to sublimate this asshole writer’s selfishness, harnessing it towards the greater good.

Finally, my resistance to Frankl may grow out of a fundamental misunderstanding of the subversive project. Somewhere along the way, I picked up the idea that only pessimists can be real subversives, the holy grail of this outlook being Freud’s own Civilization and its Discontents. But what could be more subversive than the idea that even the Holocaust couldn’t annihilate meaning, couldn’t, dare I say it, defeat love? I am left thinking about the Le Tigre song lyrics I heard this morning: “Is it time for me to act mature? The only words I know are more, more, more.”

Is it time for me to grow up and read Victor Frankl?