Supreme Court Justice Of Assholedom - Tim Kreider

Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi has convened a Supreme Court of Assholedom.

The justices include: Mara Schmid, Drew Magary, Tim Kreider, David Sirota, David Rees, Jenny Boylan, Jessica Kourkounis, Adam Whitmer.

The court will be hearing asshole cases shortly. But you can meet Supreme Court Justice Tim Kreider this Friday, when he comes to Atomic to read from, discuss and sign copies of his new book, Twilight of the Assholes.

According to Kreider, "All children eventually have to learn, however grudgingly, that they are not the only person in the world, nor are they even its center… All assholes have in common this obliviousness or indifference to other people’s subjective reality. By this definition we are all assholes inside, of course; the crucial distinction between the true Asshole and other people is in how hard we try not to act like one."

Great quotes from other prospective Justices in the Taibbi piece include:

There was the software engineer who wrote in about his experiences living with his Filipino wife in the state of Arizona. “My wife is often… complimented on her English. She has no accent,” he writes. He added (incoherently I think but I loved it) that “I do not believe in libertarianism, because it is evil in a shiny coat and a neckbeard.”

There was the reader from Syracuse University, a student who incidentally was the only applicant who took seriously my appeal for strong drug connections. He focused his pitch on a sensitivity to the new forms of assholedom unique to the next, i.e. his generation. “Think of all the innovative ways that my generation has thought of to piss people off,” he writes. “Take this as an example: a kid is ordering coffee at a Starbucks (an asshole move in and of itself). The barista asks the kid a question. The kid has to finish up an email before answering, which not only takes up the barista's time, but also the time of everyone else on line.

“Even though it's true that these people always existed,” he went on, “what makes people of the current adolescence bigger assholes is the fact that we actually get pissed off when the barista asks the question again. Why? Because we were doing something EXTREMELY IMPORTANT on our cellphones that she prevented us from completing. You couldn’t do that 50 years ago.”
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Another candidate, a reality-show producer from Los Angeles whom I had to cut from the final group with great reluctance (as you might guess, he had outstanding experience in the field), summed this idea up I thought quite well. An asshole, he noted, has “… an entirely self-centered worldview – nothing that happens outside of an asshole's personal sphere actually matters. This is totally wide-ranging: assholes use this mindset in traffic, in business, in personal relationships. Everyone else is a side character in the asshole's epic life story. (A side note: should an outside event pierce the asshole's bubble, it immediately becomes the most IMPORTANT CRISIS EVER).”