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"  In my idealistic and (mostly) innocent twenties, I worked for a guy who got a deep charge out of having me\u2014his &amp;quot;secretary,&amp;quot; he would say with a titter, despite my title being assistant, and my quavering pleas that he please refer to me as such\u2014place his calls. While he lingered by my cubicle, I&amp;#039;d punch digits. Often, another assistant would pick up, and while the call was being transferred to the intended recipient, my boss would start walking\u2014slowly\u2014back to his desk. The point was to be the last to pick up the line. Once, though, when he had me phone a very famous artist, the man himself answered immediately. And when I told him whose office I was calling from, the artist\u2014approaching 80, with zero patience for such pretentious, time-wasting power plays\u2014said, &amp;quot;That asshole!&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Mmmhmmm,&amp;quot; I replied, letting his word hang between us while my boss, a whelp of 35, swanned down the hall. &amp;quot;And now I&amp;#039;ll put you through to him.&amp;quot; Sadly, that old chicken-fight phone routine seems downright quaint next to today&amp;#039;s state-of-the-art vileness. Behold the spectacular video clip of Silvio Berlusconi thrusting his hips, doggie-style, into the backside of an unsuspecting police-woman. Or consider Lance Armstrong telling Oprah earlier this year that yeah, sure, he called the wife of one of his doping accusers &amp;quot;crazy&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;a bitch&amp;quot;\u2014but never &amp;quot;fat&amp;quot;! Too: Chicago mayor and former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, who&amp;#039;s famous for humiliating staffers with florid outbursts. And then: all the Real Housewives who jabber about their goodwill and generosity\u2014but leap at any chance to backstab a frenemy. What gives with such effortful messing with people we&amp;#039;re supposed to serve, work with, or even love? I&amp;#039;ve veered at times between wanting to scream &amp;quot;WTF, people?&amp;quot; or curl up into a fetal ball. That&amp;#039;s why I was so pleased to find a recent batch of books examining such behavior. They&amp;#039;ve given me a new framework for considering and coping with the problem, wherever it crops up. Linguist Geoffrey Nunberg, a professor at UC Berkeley, does a great public service with his cultural and linguistic survey Ascent of the A-word: Assholism, The First Sixty Years (PublicAffairs). He sheds new perspective on the topic by allowing us to see said behavior as &amp;quot;the outgrowth of attitudes&amp;quot; that took shape decades ago and now &amp;quot;run everywhere through our culture.&amp;quot; After tracing the rise and fall of past eras&amp;#039; terminology\u2014the bounders and cads of Jane Austen&amp;#039;s day, the phonies who drove Holden Caulfield bananas\u2014Nunberg shows how the A-word has become the favorite term of our time (even while we as a society are in many ways &amp;quot;as nice as we ever were&amp;quot;). It first served during World War II as an epithet for an officious, arrogant individual suffering from a &amp;quot;culpable obtuseness&amp;quot; about &amp;quot;one&amp;#039;s own importance, about the needs of others and the way one is perceived by them&amp;quot;\u2014the truly noxious trait that sets them apart from mere bad behavers. But the term&amp;#039;s popularity really exploded in the 1970s\u2014the &amp;quot;Me Decade&amp;quot; when self-centeredness became a given and the term entitlement, tellingly, enjoyed a parallel spike in use. The A-word turned up in Woody Allen movies and Tom Wolfe books and became the instantly understood handle for anybody blithely acting big and holding you back. Women, notably, began using the term to refer to men who treated them badly\u2014boyfriends, dads, husbands, bosses, politicians\u2014around this time. And if you know any women today, you know the pattern has held. Nunberg astutely notes that people who &amp;quot;are regularly paired with the a-hole label&amp;quot; have dominated Barbara Walters&amp;#039; annual list of 10 most fascinating people. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s an intense interest in the phenomenon,&amp;quot; Nunberg says, and somehow celebrity icons who&amp;#039;ve earned the label\u2014Michael Moore and Laura Ingraham are two in his personal pantheon\u2014play &amp;quot;a cathartic role for us,&amp;quot; acting badly &amp;quot;so we don&amp;#039;t have to.&amp;quot; Yet, in Nunberg&amp;#039;s theory of the category&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;moral logic,&amp;quot; calling anyone else by this epithet is itself an act &amp;quot;suffused with moral certainty&amp;quot; of precisely the sort that the accused exemplify. The general populace, he thinks, has begun aping our partisan leaders, who nowadays get off on lobbing booya shots across the aisle or having their pundit proxies do it for them (like the infuriation specialist Ann Coulter, who recently called President Obama a &amp;quot;retard&amp;quot; and refused to apologize to offended leaders of the Down syndrome community). Meanwhile, we go to Facebook for our daily brag and drop anonymous snipes into websites&amp;#039; comments sections. We give ourselves license to disrespect anybody we think is disrespecting us. To Nunberg, this is what makes such behavior so &amp;quot;corrosive\u2026really just a form of stupidity, a disease of the spirit.&amp;quot; Hoping to rein in my own vigilante zeal, I went right from Ascent to my Facebook page to delete a post in which I&amp;#039;d scorched Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin for rejecting Medicaid funding, which will force 87,000 people to lose their health-care coverage. I do think Walker&amp;#039;s move was stupid and mean. But calling him names? Stupid and futile. Nunberg has helped me see that this is a slippery-slope problem. And yet, turning to a no-nonsense biz-psych classic by Stanford management science prof Robert Sutton, The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn&amp;#039;t (Business Plus)\u2014which is full of sanity-saving strategies for almost any obnoxious-person-plagued area of life\u2014I did feel more hopeful that we can all learn better to abide such offenders, and maybe even nudge them to be a little less offensive. According to Sutton, the worst workplace jerks reliably leave others feeling &amp;quot;demeaned and de-energized.&amp;quot; Some are &amp;quot;great intimidators&amp;quot;\u2014ragers who pitch calculated fits to make sure everyone recognizes their stature atop the pecking order. (One hall of famer: former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, whose verbal atrocities once moved an underling to send Sutton a 3,000-word letter detailing them.) Sutton says straight-out something you may not want to hear: Sometimes superstar a-holes are so destructive\u2014especially when they&amp;#039;re leading an organization and their behavior &amp;quot;contagiously&amp;quot; ripples through the ranks\u2014that you&amp;#039;re better off quitting, for your own mental and even physical health. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s a lot of evidence,&amp;quot; he writes, &amp;quot;that people who quit [jobs with] bad bosses are much happier and more successful.&amp;quot; Short of that, he says, you can learn to detach or fight back. Communicating via e-mail (as much as possible) with solipsistic and power-drunk coworkers denies them the chance to act out face-to-face, which can have a dampening effect, like starving a fire of oxygen. And having a calm &amp;quot;backstage conversation&amp;quot; with a colleague to explain how her behavior upsets you can be eye-opening for a deluded person who regards herself as a pillar of professionalism. Sutton himself was startled when a colleague once gently pointed out that he yelled too much; the conversation made him work harder to keep a lid on his temper. Taking your case to HR can also force an offender to reform\u2014or be fired. &amp;quot;The bullying research essentially shows that if you try to fight by yourself, you usually won&amp;#039;t win. But the more well documented your case is, and the more people you have in your posse, the better off you are&amp;quot;\u2014and women have some advantage over men here, Sutton adds, because women are typically better at &amp;quot;recruiting others to help them and create support systems.&amp;quot; On the one hand, Sutton finds, many corporations have gotten smarter about appropriate workplace behavior and nomenclature. Women who assertively take credit for their accomplishments are not branded as bitches quite as quickly as they used to be. Acting put-upon or blocked in your path by bullies when you&amp;#039;re really not is also becoming recognized as a liability: Much better to demonstrate your ability to get along with everybody, even the bad seeds. And on the other hand, Sutton says, it&amp;#039;s gotten harder in many organizations for bosses to flaunt power (when the Apple lot was full, Steve Jobs famously parked his Mercedes straddling two handicap spots; smarty-pants programmers stuck &amp;quot;park different&amp;quot; notes on his windshield) because, more and more, managers and CEOs like these get sued. Smart, efficiency-minded companies eager to retain employees have also realized that arrogant firebrands, who may temporarily send terrified colleagues into hyperproductivity with judicious blowups, are generally bad for business because\u2014as numerous performance studies have shown\u2014frightening, demeaning behavior tends to crush creativity and productivity quite quickly. Nunberg waxes about &amp;quot;forbearance, the austere satisfaction&amp;quot; of not engaging with the a-holes he encounters in California in Bay Bridge traffic or Berkeley&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;sanctimonious&amp;quot; lefty confines. When I phone him to ask how his own austerity program is going, and whether there really is any pleasure in holding back, he laughs. &amp;quot;Sometimes there is. But I am surprised always at how difficult it is to take satisfaction in forbearance. You should feel like a better person,&amp;quot; yet you always end up &amp;quot;feeling, like, &amp;#039;Aaaah! I let the SOB get away with it!&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s the real rub: Even when you try really hard to sit on your middle finger so it doesn&amp;#039;t fly up and set in motion yet another contagious cycle of self-defeating abusiveness, you get bitten coming and going. In his erudite and streetwise Assholes: A Theory (Doubleday), UC Irvine political philosophy prof Aaron James looks at the consequences of income inequality and reminds us how, for millennia now, philosophers have been grappling with the moral challenges of treating other humans decently. James, an avid surfer, became interested in the subject when he realized that a certain prototypical surfer\u2014Lance, he calls him, rather nicely\u2014can be found on every great swell around the world. Lance has &amp;quot;decided that he should have almost any wave he wants,&amp;quot; and when &amp;quot;people see him paddling for a wave, they should realize that he is the regular, that he&amp;#039;s the better\u2026surfer, and that this wave is therefore his wave.&amp;quot; Even if somebody is already up on it, Lance takes &amp;quot;his&amp;quot; wave. As &amp;quot;other surfers are &amp;#039;burned&amp;#039; in this way&amp;quot;\u2014flicked overboard by Lance bulling ahead\u2014&amp;quot;they complain with some version of &amp;#039;Hey, man, what the f--k?&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; And Lance, if any further pushed back at, explodes: &amp;quot;Don&amp;#039;t you dare f--king f--k with me!&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s funny to feel suspended, as if in a chopper, above Lance and the other surfers. I feel an undeniable dislike for Lance\u2014but I feel sorry for him too, because his weird sense of superiority makes him so obviously dumb to how distasteful and deeply uncool his behavior is. After all, who&amp;#039;s going to want to hang out with him after hanging 10? Contemplating Lance also makes it harder for me to deny my own Lance-like tendencies: I sometimes think I&amp;#039;m the most fascinating person of the year and therefore should be entitled to yammer on about myself. I sometimes abuse those near (and dear) to me with kick-down dirty looks and snide remarks that make their shoulders slump. To realize that obnoxiousness is all around us, and that we are all vulnerable to feeding the echo chamber of royal a-holism, might seem like a downer, but it&amp;#039;s healthy medicine, I think. When I ask James how he&amp;#039;s dealing with Lance types these days, he says that it&amp;#039;s easier, after giving them much thought, to find &amp;quot;choice words in the moment&amp;quot; and, occasionally, to break through. Often, though, he still comes away &amp;quot;fantasizing about saying it better or kicking the person&amp;#039;s ass\u2014and I&amp;#039;m not prone to violence.&amp;quot; But that kind of ruminating, he&amp;#039;s decided, is itself a good thing: &amp;quot;I tell myself, Okay, I know why I&amp;#039;m doing that. That&amp;#039;s just recognizing my right to better treatment and affirming my sense of self-worth. I can have those passing thoughts, then let them go. I can process it naturally. I don&amp;#039;t have to make it as bad as it can be.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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