The title of this column comes from a volume that my creative, gift giving sister-in-law bestowed on me in a Lower Manhattan café.
Published in 2012, this book by Kara Hughes has the subtitle: Speaking ill of the Dead.
I had never heard of the book. Even in the age of nasty Trump tweets, I recoil from words like “jerks.”
Still, as I read the book, a legitimate historical question emerged: hostile as such a designation sounds, are there people who deserve the description of “jerks”?
What do they reveal about themselves and our society?
A prompt for discussing Jerks came when I read a New York Times (10/8) “By the Book” profile of author Roz Chast, who stated, “Robert Moses may have been a genius and a visionary, but he was also a horrible jerk.”
Moses was the most prominent person featured by Hughes; the chapter about him concludes the book.
Robert Moses’s name and fame still resonate throughout New York and on Long Island, where he had lasting impact on our topography and suburban customs.
Hughes acknowledges Moses’s smarts (Yale grad, wunderkind power planner) but warns, “The ego that fostered Moses’s work was almost completely unchecked.”
This book contains horror stories about New Yorkers who did harm to our society in many ways, from political corruption (Boss Tweed and Fernando Wood) – to self-styled morality advocates, telling others what was acceptable in sexuality (John Humphrey Noyes and Anthony Comstock, who wanted those he viewed as sinners in jail).
Hughes’s brief book merits a place in America’s celebrated “literature of warning.”
This kind of admonitory writing is a key reason why Jefferson advocated a school curriculum that would replace religion with the study of history.
Jefferson contended that, if we want a better future, it behooves us to learn the dangers of tyrants and sociopaths from the past.
History can be a preventive alert system (though Jefferson also saw the positive aspects of history in providing good role models for citizens and for leadership).
In this volume, however, what we see is a motley crew. Hughes’s book deftly synthesizes the views of many other writers.
In addition to her concluding chapter on Moses, she profiles 14 other New Yorkers and makes the case for the “jerk” designation for each of them.
Might it be historically revelatory that only one person on the list of 15 is female?
Perhaps this book lends evidence to anthropologist Ashley Montagu’s study, “The Natural Superiority of Women.”
Who should be included for an updated, living New York Jerks? If you check the medical definition of “sociopath,” and note even a fraction of the criticisms of the 45th president, many folks are likely to give him a top spot among a new group.
Republican Sen. Bob Corker refers to the White House as “an adult day care center.”
“Why It Pays To Be A Jerk” in The Atlantic (June 2015) can be read as amplifying the case for including the 45th President among top jerks; it provides Aaron James’ definitions and analysis from his book “A—holes.”
Should our current president ever be forgiven for his nonstop, false campaign that the only multiracial person ever to become our president was not born in the U.S.?
There is a chance for redemption when a person acknowledges error and apologizes. This president never apologizes; he never admits mistakes. Does that conduct make him a quintessential jerk?
With his three passports, profligate spending, and huckstering for other nations, Paul Manafort (the president’s campaign manager) warrants inclusion in the pantheon of jerks. His many New York residences include Trump Tower and a mansion on the East End of Long Island, where he spent $650,000 for landscaping.
Steve Bannon succeeded Manafort as key campaign adviser and also merits the “jerk” moniker. He spent prominent years in the high echelons of New York City finance; now his strange and ugly approaches to remaking the Republican Party make even Karl Rove quake.
Closer to our Long Island home, in Nassau County, and on the North Shore, Adam Haber, writing in the Blank Slate papers, denounced the “racist mail from Martins’s campaign.”
The losing Republican candidate for Nassau County Supervisor falsely accused his opponent, Laura Curran, of providing sanctuary for members of the MS13 gang (featured prominently on the campaign literature).
To many voters, when Martins used the same kind of racist appeal as George H. W. Bush had employed in 1988, he achieved jerk status. The New York Times’s lead editorial the day before the election said it all: “Willie Horton, Updated.”
“Willie Horton tactics” once worked; check Newsday’s wrap around cover for January 21, 1989, with a full-page picture of Willie Horton (and the headline that he should be invited to the inauguration because Bush would not be there without that ugly campaign).
For the first time ever, Nassau County has a female county executive. Perhaps the times are a-changin’ – away from “the jerks.”
