Friday, April 06, 2012

Jerkocracy

Everyone of us, at some point, is going to be a jerk in somebody’s else’s eyes - without exception. If you put a smart person amongst the ignorant, they’re the jerk. What a moron - he thinks the world is round, when obviously it’s flat - any fool can see that. No one escapes being a jerk somewhere.


It’s the people who think they’re never jerks that are the real jerks. If you look at your life, you’ve had half a dozen real friends, some acquaintances and then there’s the vast sea of jerks. You’ve befriended those who try to overcome their jerkitude, rather than deny it. Heaven preserve us from the rigid and judgmental righteous.


We live in the Age Of The Jerk. Modern society is so fragmented, that we don’t have shared values anymore. Many elderly English people remember the Blitz and the bombing of London with nostalgia. Everyone was in the same boat, united by a common purpose of vanquishing the evil Hun. No such shared destiny today.


And it pays to be a jerk - there wouldn‘t be so many if it didn‘t. The boys of Enron probably chuckled when they ordered blackouts for California while stealing their electricity. One or two of them went to jail, the rest went on to bigger and better jobs - there’s always room for jerks in the corporate world. When a regular Joe is caught stealing, he goes to jail. When Goldman Sachs is caught defrauding investors and bringing down the economy, they get a bailout and bigger bonuses on the taxpayer dime.


Donald Trump is a major jerk. In a normal society, he’d be shunned for the vulgarian he is, if only for his hair-do. In reality, he’s a bad businessman who protected himself from having to pay his contractors (the little people) by declaring bankruptcy many times over. And now he’s a big TV star. Maybe being an jerk is not so bad.


The jerky business card of a jerk.

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