On Smarm

GAWKER (/)
On Smarm (http://gawker.com/on-smarm-1476594977)
Last month, Isaac Fitzgerald, the newly hired editor of BuzzFeed's newly created books section, made a
remarkable but not entirely surprising announcement: He was not interested in publishing negative book
reviews (http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/228792/buzzfeed-names-isaac-fitzgerald-its-first-
books-editor/). In place of "the scathing takedown rip," Fitzgerald said, he desired to promote a positive
community experience.
A community, even one dedicated to positivity, needs an enemy to define itself against. BuzzFeed's motto, the
attitude that drives its success, is an explicit "No haters." The site is one of the leading voices of the moment,
thriving in the online sharing economy, in which agreeability is popularity, and popularity is value.
(Upworthy, the next iteration, has gone ahead and made its name out of the premise.)
There is more at work here than mere good feelings. "No haters" is a sentiment older and more
wide-reaching than BuzzFeed. There is a consensus, or something that has assumed the tone of a consensus,
that we are living, to our disadvantage, in an age of snarkthat the problem of our times is a thing called
"snark."
The word, as used now, is a fairly recent addition to the language, and it is not always entirely clear what
"snark" may be. But it's an attitude, and a negative attitudea "hostile, knowing, bitter tone of contempt," is
(/)
342,857 191 Tom Scocca (http://tom-scocca.kinja.com)
Filed to: CULTURE (/TAG/CULTURE) 12/05/13 9:30am (http://gawker.com/on-smarm-1476594977
(http://tom-scocca.kinja.com)
On Smarm http://gawker.com/on-smarm-1476594977
1 of 36 5/19/2014 9:26 PM
how Heidi Julavits described it in 2003 (http://www.believermag.com/issues/200303
/?read=article_julavits), while formally bestowing the name of "snark" on it, in the inaugural issue of The
Believer.
In her essay, Julavits was grappling with the question of negative book reviewing: Was it fair or necessary?
Was the meanness displayed in book reviews a symptom of deeper failings in the culture?
The decade that followed did little to clear up the trouble; if anything, the identification of "snark" gave
people a way to avoid thinking very hard about it. Snark is supposed to be self-evidently and
self-explanatorily bad: "nasty," "low," and "snide," to pick a few words from the first page of David Denby's
2009 tract Snark: It's Mean, It's Personal, and It's Ruining Our Conversation. (I bought the Denby book
used for six bucks, to cut him out of the loop on any royalties.)
But why are nastiness and snideness taken to be features of our age? One general point of agreement, in
denunciations of snark, is that snark is reactive. It is a kind of response. Yet to what is it responding? Of
what is it contemptuous?
Stand against snark, and you are standing with everything decent. And who doesn't want to be decent? The
snarkers don't, it seems. Or at least they (let's be honest: we) don't want to be decent on those terms.
Over time, it has become clear that anti-negativity is a worldview of its own, a particular mode of thinking
and argument, no matter how evasively or vapidly it chooses to express itself. For a guiding principle of 21st
century literary criticism, BuzzFeed's Fitzgerald turned to the moral and intellectual teachings of Walt
Disney, in the movie Bambi: "If you can't say something nice, don't say nothing at all."
The line is uttered by Thumper, Bambi's young bunny companion, but its attribution is more complicated
than thatThumper's mother is making him recite a rule handed down by his father, by way of admonishing
her son for unkindness. It is scolding, couched as an appeal to goodness, in the name of an absent authority.
The same maximminus the Disney citation and tidied up to "anything at all"was offered by an
organization called PRConsulting Group recently, in support of its announcement that the third Tuesday in
October would be "Snark-Free Day (http://www.snarkfreeday.com/)." "[I]f we can put the snark away for
just one day," the publicists wrote, "we can all be happier and more productive." Is a world where public-
relations professionals are more productive a more productive world overall? Are the goals of the public-
relations profession the goals of the world in general?
Perhaps they are. Why does a publicist talk like a book reviewer? If you listen to the crusaders against
negativityin literature, in journalism, in politics, in commerceyou begin to hear a recurring set of themes
and attitudes, amounting to an omnipresent, unnamed cultural force. The words flung outward start to
define a sort of unarticulated philosophy, one that has largely avoided being recognized and defined.
Without identifying and comprehending what they have in common, we have a dangerously incomplete
understanding of the conditions we are living under.
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Over the past year or two, on the way to writing this essay, I've accumulated dozens of emails and IM
conversations from friends and colleagues. They send links to articles, essays, Tumblr posts, online
comments, tweetsthe shared attitude transcending any platform or format or subject matter.
What is this defining feature of our times? What is snark reacting to?
It is reacting to smarm.
What is smarm, exactly? Smarm is a kind of performancean assumption of the forms of seriousness, of
virtue, of constructiveness, without the substance. Smarm is concerned with appropriateness and with tone.
Smarm disapproves.
Smarm would rather talk about anything other than smarm. Why, smarm asks, can't everyone just be nicer?
The most significant explicator of the niceness rulethe loudest Thumper of all, the true prophetic voice of
anti-negativityis neither the cartoon rabbit nor the publicists' group nor Julavits, nor even David Denby. It
is The Believer's founder and impresario, Dave Eggers. If there is a defining document of contemporary
literary smarm, it is an interview Eggers did via email with the Harvard Advocate in 2000, in which a
college student had the poor manners to ask the literary celebrity about "selling out
(http://www.armchairnews.com/freelance/eggers.html)."
It is also no accident that David Eggers is full of shit.
In reply to the question, Eggers told the Advocate that yes, he was what people call a sellout, that he had
been paid $12,000 for a single magazine article, that he had taken the chance to hang out with Puffy, and
that he had said yes to all these opportunities because "No is for pussies." His response builds to a frenzied
peroration:
Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic and I wish I could take it all back because it
came from a smelly and ignorant place in me, and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy.
Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made
one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them.
Here we have the major themes or attitudes of smarm: the scolding, the gestures at inclusiveness, the appeal
to virtue and maturity. Eggers used to be a critic, but he has grown out of childish things. Eggers has done
the workthe book publishing, the Hollywood deal-makingthat makes his opinions (unlike those of his
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audience) earned and valid opinions.
It is no accident that he is addressing undergraduates here; he tells the Advocate that before he sent back his
reply to its questions, he had already delivered a version of the text as a speech at Yale. He is explicitly
performing, for an audience of his inferiors. ("The rant is directed to myself, age 20, as much as it is to you,
so remember that if you ever want to take much offense.")
It is also no accident that Eggers is full of shit. He is so passionate, and his passion has such rhetorical
momentum, that it is almost possible to overlook the fact that the literal proposition he's putting forward, in
the name of large-heartedness and honesty, is bogus and insulting. Do not dismiss ... a movie? Unless you
have made one? Any movie? The Internship? The Lone Ranger? Kirk Cameron's Unstoppable? Movie
criticism, Eggers is saying, should be reserved for those wise and discerning souls who have access to a few
tens of millions of dollars of entertainment-industry capital. One or two hundred million, if you wish to have
an opinion about the works of Michael Bay.
And now here is Dave Eggers 13 years later, talking to the New York Times about his new novel, The Circle,
a dystopian warning about the toxic effects of social media and the sinister companies that produce it:
I've never visited any tech campus, and I don't know anything in particular about how any given
company is run. I really didn't want to.
Someone has come a long way from "do not dismiss a book until you have written one." But Eggers was never
laying down rules for himself. He was laying down rules for other people.
A pause, now, for some inevitable responses:
- What did Dave Eggers ever do to you?
- Surprise, a Gawker blogger who's never accomplished anything is jealous of Dave Eggers.
- Dave Eggers has inspired more people and done more good than you could possibly dream of.
That's it. You're getting it. That's smarm.
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But let's get at the deeper substance. What defines smarm, as it functions in our culture? "Smarm" and
"smarmy" go back to the older "smalm," meaning to smooth something down with greaseand by extension
to be unctuous or flattering, or smug. Smarm aspires to smother opposition or criticism, to cover everything
over with an artificial, oily gloss.
Falsity and hypocrisy are important to this, but they are pieces of something larger. Consider the
phenomenon that the philosopher Harry Frankfurt identified, in his 1986 essay and 2005 book*
(http://gawker.com/corrections-and-clarifications-on-bullshit-was-origi-1477140915) On Bullshit, as
bullshit.
Smarm should be understood as a type of bullshit, then. It is a kind of moral and ethical
misdirection.
Bullshit, Frankfurt wrote, was defined by the bullshitter's indifference to truth:
The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides...is that the truth-values of his statements are of no
central interest to him; what we are not to understand is that his intention is neither to report the
truth nor to conceal it.
....
The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he
takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His
only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresents what he is up
to.
Smarm should be understood as a type of bullshit, thenit expresses one agenda, while actually pursuing a
different one. It is a kind of moral and ethical misdirection. Its genuine purposes lie beneath the
greased-over surface.
Take the following example, courtesy of the former Bush administration press secretary Ari Fleischer. You
almost certainly have an opinion about Fleischer, but consider this purely as a matter of technique, how he
frames a complaint as if his partisan credentials have nothing to do with it:
Read more (http://gawker.com/corrections-and-clarications-on-bullshit-was-origi-1477140915)
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Disgusting op-ed in NYT by a truther implying Bush
knew of 9-11/let it happen. NYT decries lack of civility,
then adds to it.
8:07 AM - 11 Sep 2012
Ari Fleischer
@AriFleischer
Follow
285 RETWEETS 32 FAVORITES
Fleischer is ostensibly remarking on a failure of "civility"a central theme of smarmwhile in fact delivering
a smear against the writer of the op-ed (to which (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/opinion/the-bush-
white-house-was-deaf-to-9-11-warnings.html?ref=opinion) he does not link). What the piece had claimed
was simply that, in addition to the publicly known security brief that had warned George Bush in 2001 of al
Qaeda's intention to attack the United States, there were other, still-classified briefings, that had offered
further warnings.
Fleischer had no interest in engaging with the content of those claims. He was attacking an "implication,"
which he claimed was the work of a "truther." The fairly well-documented fact (http://gawker.com/5942242
/the-new-york-times-juicy-scoop+filled-911-op+ed-is-neither-juicy-nor-full-of-scoops) that the Bush
administration was insufficiently prepared for the September 11 attacks is lumped in with the insane
conspiracies saying that the administration perpetrated the attacks itself.
And Ari Fleischer is disgusted and wounded by it all. To say nothing of disappointed, that the New York
Timesthose hypocritesshould have betrayed the promise of a more civil world.
Notionally crossing the aisle, we find the former Clinton administration chaff-thrower Lanny Davis, who was
the target of this fairly concise and accurate tweet:
(http://gawker.com/5942242/the-new-york-times-juicy-scoop+filled-911-op+ed-
is-neither-juicy-nor-full-of-scoops)
The New York Times' Juicy, Scoop-Filled 9/11 Op-Ed Is Neither Juicy Nor Full of Scoops (http://gawker.com
/5942242/the-new-york-times-juicy-scoop+lled-911-op+ed-is-neither-juicy-nor-full-of-scoops)The New York
Times' Juicy, Scoop-Filled 9/11 Op-Ed Is Neither Juicy Nor Full of Scoops (http://gawker.com/5942242
/the-new-york-times-juicy-scoop+lled-911-op+ed-is-neither-juicy-nor-full-of-scoops)The New York Times'
Juicy, Scoop-F... (http://gawker.com/5942242/the-new-york-times-juicy-scoop+lled-911-op+ed-is-neither-
juicy-nor-full-of-scoops)
Read more (http://gawker.com/5942242/the-new-york-times-juicy-scoop+lled-911-op+ed-is-neither-juicy-nor-full-
of-scoops)
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There is too much wrong with Washington to say "So
and so represents everything that's wrong with
Washington." But it's Lanny Davis.
10:15 PM - 23 May 2012
Jon Lovett
@jonlovett
Follow
24 RETWEETS 12 FAVORITES
And who replied with a condensed smarm tantrum:
Proving my pt, @jonlovett engages in personal attack
w/o subst for cheap joke. Name-calling is juvenile. I
want 2 debate issues. @corybooker
1:33 PM - 24 May 2012
Lanny Davis
@LannyDavis
Follow
Again, there's the woundedness"personal attack," "name-calling." Lanny Davis, cynical mouthpiece for any
crook who'll hire him, insists on the importance of "subst." "I want 2 debate issues," he writes, as the
character limit closes in, sparing him the burden of mentioning any actual issues.
We have popular names now for the rhetorical tools these flacks are deploying: the straw-man attack, the
fake umbrage, the concern-trolling. Why are those tools so familiar? It is because they are essential parts of
the smarmer's tool kit, the grease gun and the rag and the spatula.
Where does the grease go? Smarm hopes to fill the cultural or political or religious void left by the collapse of
authority, undermined by modernity and postmodernity. It's not enough anymore to point to God or the
Western tradition or the civilized consensus for a definitive value judgment. Yet a person can still gesture in
the direction of things that resemble those values, vaguely.
The old systems of prestige are rickety and insecure. Everyone has a publishing platform and no
one has a career.
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That gesture can almost serve as a source of comfort. The old systems of prestigethe literary inner circles,
the top-ranking daily newspapers, the party leadershipare rickety and insecure. Everyone has a publishing
platform and no one has a career.
Smarm offers a quick schema of superiority. The authority that smarm invokes is an ersatz one, but the
appearance of authority is usually enough to get by with. Without that protection, to hold an opinion is to
feel bare and alone, one voice among a cacophony of millions.
In another meditation on the problem of negativity, published on the New Yorker's website in September,
the critic Lee Siegel wrote that he had abandoned hostility in his own work (http://www.newyorker.com
/online/blogs/books/2013/09/burying-the-hatchet-death-of-the-negative-book-review.html), because it is
unsuited to these times:
[U]nlike a positive review, a negative one implies authority, and authority has become something
ambiguous in our age of quick, teeming Internet response, where all the old critical standards and
parameters are in the process of vanishing and being reinvented. Fifty years ago, Dwight
Macdonald's excoriations were sanctioned by a tight-knit community of readers and thinkers. In
our time of dizzying reconfiguring, a Macdonald takedown, so assured in its acerbic judgments,
would not have the resonance it once did. The source of its vituperative authority would not just be
opaque. It would be non-existent.
In theory, this might produce a more humane and rounded criticism. In practice, though, Siegel is describing
a ratchet, one which has already been tightening for a while. Sympathy begets sympathy, to the benefit of
things that don't deserve to be sympathized with. The ascendent forms of cultural power depend on the
esteem of others, on the traffic driven by Facebook, on the nihilistic embrace of being liked and shared.
Julavits, too, addressed the critic's loss of influence in her essay, and acknowledged that snark was not an
irrational response to the prevailing tone of the book industry:
[P]erhaps this is the only sane response to a publishing world prone to over-exaggeration and
generalization of a hysterical sort. ... [N]o matter how or what they write, they are always
"distinctive new voices in fiction," they are always "startling" and "stunning" and "fiercely
original"...If snark is a reaction to this sheer and insulting level of hyperbole, fine.
Fine, but not fine. Here is David Denby:
Snark is the expression of the alienated, of the ambitious, of the dispossessed.
Yet David Denby is against it, or mostly against it. After nine pages of hand-wringing on that theme, he
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decides that he cannot fully dismiss the works of Juvenal, even though Juvenal was a real meanie:
Reading Juvenal convinced me that invective at its utmost pitch of furysustained and unrelenting,
and formally composedcan amount to something great. It may be a lesser form than satire, but,
at its best, it is very far from nothing.
Thanks, Dave. Big of you, there. Juvenal needed it.
Snark is often conflated with cynicism, which is a troublesome misreading. Snark may speak in cynical terms
about a cynical world, but it is not cynicism itself. It is a theory of cynicism.
The practice of cynicism is smarm.
If negativity is understood to be bad (and it must be bad, just look at the name: negativity) then
anti-negativity must be good. The most broadly approved-of thing about Barack Obama, in 2008, was his
announced desire to "change the tone" of politics. Everyone agreed then that our politics needed a change of
tone. The politicians who make speeches, the reporters and commentators who write the articles expressing
the current state of political affairs, the pollsters and poll respondents who ask and answer questions about
politicsin short, the great mass of people who do anything that could conceivably generate something that
could be called a "tone" of politicsall were dissatisfied with the tone.
What carries contemporary American political campaigns along is a thick ow of opaque smarm.
One of the silliest or most misguided notions that David Denby frets about, in denouncing snark, is that "the
lowest, most insinuating and insulting side threatens to win national political campaigns." This is more or
less the opposite of the case. What carries contemporary American political campaigns along is a thick flow
of opaque smarm.
Here is Obama in 2012, wrapping up a presidential debate performance against Mitt Romney:
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I believe that the free enterprise system is the greatest engine of prosperity the world's ever
known. I believe in self-reliance and individual initiative and risk-takers being rewarded. But I
also believe that everybody should have a fair shot and everybody should do their fair share and
everybody should play by the same rules, because that's how our economy is grown. That's how we
built the world's greatest middle class.
The lone identifiable point of ideological distinction between the president and his opponent, in that
passage, is the word "but." Everything else is a generic cross-partisan recitation of the indisputable: Free
enterprise ... prosperity ... self-reliance ... initiative ... a fair shot ... the world's greatest middle class.
Certainly the middle class. Always the middle class. "I will keep America strong," Mitt Romney said in one of
the debates, offering his competing political vision, "and get America's middle class working again." Is a
middle class that's out of work still the middle class? It is if you're running for president. When Obama did
turn his attention below that stratum, he identified the people there as "those who are striving to get in the
middle class."
Everyone (or everyone of good faith) must be assumed to basically be in harmony. In his first inaugural
address, Obama announced that he"we"had "come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false
promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics...[I]n the
words of scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things."
Maybe, as the last five years might suggest, those dogmas weren't really quite worn out. But to openly
disagree with a political foe, let alone to make an openly mean remark, is to invite a smarmy counterattack.
"In the nature of a campaign," Mitt Romney told a debate audience in 2012, "it seems that some campaigns
are focused on attacking a person rather than prescribing their own future and the things they'd like to do."
Romney clambered up to a new higher ground, deploring the divisiveness of dwelling on his
divisiveness.
Romney was responding to the response to the disclosure of his private fundraising remarks dismissing 47
percent of the electorate as unreachable parasites. Romney had been caught in breach of the agreement
never to speak divisivelyand so he clambered up to a new higher ground, deploring the divisiveness of
dwelling on his divisiveness. He had been attacked as a person, the kind of person who would write off 47
percent of the public. How low could the Obama campaign get? What ever happened to changing the tone?
This content-free piety is so deeply expected that when Obama did toss a few barbed lines Romney's way,
Gawker took offense (http://gawker.com/5954125/2008-called-it-wants-to-know-what-happened-
to-barack-obama), describing his use of "Romnesia" as "too juvenile and jokey to be coming from the
president"even if it "usefully carries an important anti-Romney message." Heaven forbid that substance
should come at the expense of tone. A presidency is a serious thing.
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There are no depths that political smarm cannot plumb. In 2000, at the Republican National Convention in
Philadelphia, I witnessed an unforgettable performance: Windy Smith, a 26-year-old with Down syndrome,
was brought out onstage before the cameras to tell the American public that she, personally, wanted George
W. Bush to become the next president. A Bush presidency, she said, "will be a happy time for America."
Was it? Did it turn out to be a happy time for America? Is that a mean or disrespectful question? If it is,
whose fault is that?
The evasion of disputes is a defining tactic of smarm. Smarm, whether political or literary, insists that the
audience accept the priors it has been given. Debate begins where the important parts of the debate have
ended.
Michael Bloomberg is almost incapable of acting out interpersonal niceness, per se, as mayor, but smarm is
at the infuriating core of Bloombergism and all its related forms of "centrism" and technocracy. Bloomberg's
agenda, as perceived by Michael Bloomberg, is to do whatever is practical to improve the city, to make the
city a nice place to live. To oppose his agenda, then, is to reveal oneself as impractical and harmful.
Ian Frazier, writing in the New Yorker about homelessness in New York (http://www.newyorker.com
/reporting/2013/10/28/131028fa_fact_frazier?currentPage=all), exactly captured the Bloomberg mood:
(http://gawker.com/5954125/2008-called-it-wants-to-know-what-happened-to-barack-
obama)
2008 Called. It Wants to Know What Happened to Barack Obama. (http://gawker.com/5954125/2008-called-
it-wants-to-know-what-happened-to-barack-obama)2008 Called. It Wants to Know What Happened to Barack
Obama. (http://gawker.com/5954125/2008-called-it-wants-to-know-what-happened-to-barack-obama)2008
Called. It Wants to Know What Happened to ... (http://gawker.com/5954125/2008-called-it-wants-to-know-
what-happened-to-barack-obama)
Read more (http://gawker.com/5954125/2008-called-it-wants-to-know-what-happened-to-barack-obama)
11 of 36 5/19/2014 9:26 PM
He works for the city for a dollar a year, he gives away his money by the hundreds of millions, and
he manifestly has the city's happiness and well-being at heart. Every rich person should be like
him. His deputies and staffers twinkle with the pleasure of participating in his general beneficence,
as well they should. "You can't make a man mad by giving him money"this rule would seem to be
absolute. And yet sometimes people in the city he has done so much for still get mad at Bloomberg
and criticize him. At the wrong of this, the proper order of things is undone, and the Bloomberg
twinkle turns to ice.
As Frazier writes, the Bloomberg administration, acting under rational technocratic theories, has done
everything it could to disincentivize people from being homelessexcept for providing them with homes, or
promoting the development of affordable housing stock for the poor. Yet the advocates for the homeless keep
harping on the fact there there are more homeless people in the city than ever before.
Through smarm, the "centrists" have cut themselves of from the language of actual dispute. In
smarm is power.
In this, as in so many other parts of contemporary politics, members of the self-identified center are in some
important sense unable to accept opposition. Through smarm, they have cut themselves off from the
language of actual dispute. An entire political agendaprivatization of government services, aggressive
policing, charter schooling, cuts in Social Securityhas been packaged as apolitical, a reasonable consensus
about necessity. Those who oppose the agenda are "interest groups," whose selfish greed makes them unable
to see reason, or "ideologues." Those who promote it are disinterested and nonideological. There is no reason
for the latter to even engage the former. In smarm is power.
The New York Times reported last month that in 2011, the Obama Administration decided not to nominate
Rebecca M. Blank to be the head of the Council of Economic Advisers, because of "something politically
dangerous" she had written in the past: In writing about poverty relief, she had used the word "redistribution
(http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/24/us/dont-dare-call-the-health-law-redistribution.html)."
The Times quoted a passage from the dangerous work, which was written 19 years before Blank was in
position to be treated as a political liability:
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A commitment to economic justice necessarily implies a commitment to the redistribution of
economic resources, so that the poor and the dispossessed are more fully included in the economic
system.
This is, of course, a simpleessentially tautologicalstatement of fact. If one wishes to improve the
condition of the poor, one must arrange for money to be directed toward them. This is true no matter what
one's theory of helping the poor may be, even if the money is to be spent on bus fare to send people to
harangue the poor about reforming their morals and working harder, or it is being paid to police to harass
the poor into orderliness.
But to admit the fact is to imply that someone ought to spend that money, which implies a conflict between
the desires of the people who have the money and the people who do not. Smarm will not allow it. Here is
the ideology of "Don't be a critic" metastasized far beyond any blame or influence of Dave Eggers. Though the
Times did not go further into exactly what Blank had written, the online version of the story did link out to
her paper (http://www.ucc.org/justice/economic-justice/pdfs/DoJustice.pdf). Here are some more examples
of unacceptable political discourse, under our current rules:
God's people are directed to tend to the needs of these most marginalized groups and to be sure that
they receive their just share of the community's resources [Deuteronomy 10:17-18]. There is to be a
regular redistribution of property and the forgiveness of past debts [Leviticus 25:1-55;
Deuteronomy 15:1-11].
Repeatedly, the covenant of the Old Testament focuses on the needs and rights of those who often
are excluded from the community. The rules of God's household demand that the poor (Exodus
23:6, Deuteronomy 15:7-11), the stranger (Exodus 22:21-24), the sojourner (Deuteronomy 10:19),
and the widow and orphan (Exodus 22:22) all be accorded special protection and access to the
livelihood of the household for the sake of God's grace to Israel ("for you were strangers in the land
of Egypt [Exodus 22:21].") The Sabbath and Jubilee Year urge a just ordering for overcoming
exploitation through property redistribution and care of the earth.
At some point, in a piece like this, convention calls for the admission that the complaints against snark are
not entirely without merit. Fine. Some snark is harmful and rotten and stupid. Just as, to various degrees,
some poems and Page-One newspaper stories and sermons and football gambling advice columns are
harmful and rotten and stupid. Like every other mode, snark can sometimes be done badly or to bad
13 of 36 5/19/2014 9:26 PM
purposes.
A civilization that speaks in smarm is a civilization that has lost its ability to talk about purposes
at all.
Smarm, on the other hand, is never a force for good. A civilization that speaks in smarm is a civilization that
has lost its ability to talk about purposes at all. It is a civilization that says "Don't Be Evil," rather than
making sure it does not do evil.
A Fable From the Age of Smarm
Once upon a time, in the high hills of West Virginia, there lived a young man named Jedediah Purdy.
Jedediah was fond of animals and of taking long walks through the woods; he liked to eat fruit that was not
entirely ripe. His parents had gone into the hills to get away from electricity and the corruptions of
civilization, to raise their children apart from "the hollowness of mainstream living," as the New York Times
Magazine put it (http://partners.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/19990905mag-sincere-
culture.html). They built their own home and slaughtered their own pigs.
The New York Times Magazine had discovered Jedediah, in 1999, by way of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., which was
making Jedediah a published author at the age of 24. Jedediah was, for the purposes of the Times Magazine
and Knopf and perhaps his own purposes, a representative or leader of what seemed to be a nascent
movement against what was then being called "the ironic sensibility." (The Believer and Julavits's essay
were still over the horizon, and for lack of the word "snark," people were using "irony.")
Jedediah, accustomed to the simple gracefulness of country life, had been turned against irony by a
traumatic experience on arriving at Harvard College in 1993. The Times Magazine described it:
There is a custom at the university of screening "Love Story" for incoming freshmen, who gleefully
heckle the film. You can guess the gibes: Ali MacGraw's first appearance is met with shouts of,
"You're gonna get cancer!" When she steps into a cab, somebody yells, "To the morgueand step on
it!"
Appalled by such cavalier treatment of a serious illness, Purdy stomped the perimeter of Harvard
Yard, then dashed off a letter to The Crimson. "I felt this was a hideous practice," he says. "Placing
this at the beginning of the orientation seemed an induction of students into a cold, self-satisfied
manner."
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Mocking the use of cancer as a tearjerking movie plot device may not be precisely the same thing as mocking
actual cancer. But Jedediah, or the version of Jedediah in the pages of the Times Magazine, worked in broad
themes. People responded to those broad themes. The piece was a sensation. Perhaps irony was bad. Perhaps
it was sanctimony that was bad. "The glumly virtuous young Purdy could have used a little ironizing
himself," David Denby recalls, in Snark.
Joe Lieberman! If you would know smarm, look to Joe Lieberman.
Fantastically annoying as Jedediah was in the profile, it is possible, from a distance, to reread it with
sympathy. The young Jedediah is very, very earnest, partly unaware and partly over-aware. The
commodification of his earnestness was a game being played around him.
The Times Magazine writer, Marshall Sella, hit quite directly on one of the rules of the game:
[A] 24-year-old composer of "a defense of love letters" is just the sort of veal that reviewers live to
snack on...
Jed Purdy has shielded himself from this sort of abuse with an unwitting trap. It's simple: if you
rail against Purdy's plea for a better world, you become precisely the lost soul for whom he grieves.
Everyone becomes something. A year later, Jedediah Purdy was in the Times under his own byline
(http://www.nytimes.com/2000/08/09/opinion/the-politics-of-adulthood.html), writing for the opinion
section about the 2000 presidential campaign, arguing that "America wants to grow up"that a country
weary of "the adolescent behavior of the Clinton administration" was looking for ways to embrace maturity.
As evidence, he adduced George W. Bush's invocation of "a responsibility era," (at the convention where
Windy Smith endorsed him) and Al Gore's ultimate gesture toward seriousness:
Mr. Gore seemed to answer Mr. Bush's challenge by naming a running mate who is more
associated with positions of moral responsibility than almost any other politician today. In fact, if
there has been a criticism of Senator Joseph Lieberman this week, it is that he becomes
sanctimonious about higher purposes.
Let's pause here to say: Joe Lieberman.
Joe. Lieberman.
Joe Lieberman! If you would know smarm, look to Joe Lieberman. It is easy to forget, having seen the openly
nasty and vindictive and whiny ending of Lieberman's career, what a hero he was to the right-mindedhow
respectable, how responsible, how devoted to doing what was considered proper. He was the incarnation of
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smarm, in every self-righteous and self-serving detail: an independent statesman whose independence
consisted of breaking with his party whenever the party threatened to be on the wrong side of 51 percent of
public opinion (or at least what the Washington wisdom thought public opinion should be) or on the wrong
side of the money.
To complete the tale, Joe Lieberman got his J.D. from Yale Law School. Jedediah Purdy is now a professor at
Duke Law* (http://gawker.com/corrections-and-clarifications-on-bullshit-was-origi-1477140915) and has
been a visiting professor at Yale Law, the school at which he got his own J.D., after he graduated from
Harvard, after he graduated from Exeter. For this, pigs were butchered. Such are the fruits of renouncing the
mainstream.
"As the Bush administration went on," David Denby writes, "the insufficiencies of snark became mortifyingly
obvious."
LOL.
Irony of course had been killed on 9/11, as everyone recalls. The thing that people were calling "irony," that
is. Obviously the other kind of irony, the kind that left stage blood all over the ancient Greek orchestra floors,
was just getting started. A tsunami of smarm was rolling across the planet: "our freedoms" ... "an axis of evil"
... "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud" ... "enhanced interrogation techniques" ...
"ticking time bombs" ... "the Patriot Act" ... "the Protect America Act" ... "unlawful enemy combatants" ...
"asymmetric warfare."
"Dangerous lies and irresponsible snark were part of the same despairing mood," Denby writes.
Part of the same... mood, you say. Basically organically connected and mutually reinforcing and jointly
culpable. It was snarkthe "impotent nihilism" of Maureen Dowdthat made Gitmo happen, when you get
right down to it.
Maybe the more earnest and deeply committed protesters could have done something about it all, if
Bloomberg hadn't locked them up in advance?
But mostly: ROTFL, motherfucker.
The sin of snark is rudeness, the anti-snarkers say. Snark is mean. And meanness and rudeness are the worst
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misdeeds in the world. So Robert Benmosche, the chief executive of AIG, told the Wall Street Journal that
the hard-working, heavily compensated employees of his disastrously run company were being
persecutedthat the critics of AIG, "with their pitch forks and their hangman nooses (http://blogs.wsj.com
/moneybeat/2013/09/23/aigs-benmosche-and-miller-on-villains-turnarounds-and-those-bonuses/)," were
"sort of like what we did in the Deep South. And I think it was just as bad and just as wrong."
The plutocrats are haunted, as all smarmers are haunted, by a lack of respect. On Twitter, the
only answer to "Do you know who I am?" is "One more person with 140 characters to use."
Ever since the global economy imploded, the people who imploded it have been talking this way. The
plutocrats are hurt that anyone should resent the power of wealth. They spent the past election fretting aloud
about "class warfare," which under the rules of smarm means any mention of the fact that classes exist, and
that some classes have more or less money than others.
Why should it not be pleasing to learn that these people's feelings are so tender? That even as they fly their
helicopters over the broke and frustrated masses at whose expense they have profited, they perceive that they
are despised?
The plutocrats are haunted, as all smarmers are haunted, by the lack of respect. Nothing is stopping
anyoneany nobodyfrom going on a blog or on Twitter and expressing their opinion of you, no matter who
you think you are. New media and social media have an immense and cruel leveling power, for people
accustomed to old systems of status and prestige. On Twitter, the only answer to "Do you know who I am?" is
"One more person with 140 characters to use."
So the smarmers deplore the coarseness of the tone, or try to invoke the old credentials, or both. Niall
Ferguson, the prizewinning Harvard historian now practicing the craft of a tendentious magazine hack, came
unhinged on his blog (http://www.niallferguson.com/blog/krugtron-the-invincible-part-3) after people
pointed out his magazine work had been done sloppily and dishonestly:
What exactly are his credentials? 35,550 tweets? How does he essentially differ from the cranks
who, before the Internet, had to vent their spleen by writing letters in green ink?
(Elsewhere in the same post, he wrote that his critics had breached their duty to "exchange ideas in a
humble and respectful manner.")
To actually say a plain and direct word like "corrupt" is more outlandish, in smarm's outlook, than
even swearing.
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These terrible snarky people even go on television, sometimes. CNBC let Salon's Alex Pareene on the air, and
he dared to describe JPMorgan Chase as "corrupt" (http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000203085)to
the shock and disdain of the hosts, who could not imagine why a bank that was facing at least $11 billion in
fines (later amended to $13 billion) for wide-ranging misbehavior could be characterized that way. (To
actually say a plain and direct word like "corrupt" is more outlandish, in smarm's outlook, than even
swearing. A disagreeable attitude is one thing, but a disagreeable fact is much worse.) "The company
continues to churn out, you know, tens of billions of dollars in earnings and hundreds of billions of dollars in
revenue," Maria Bartiromo said. "How do you criticize that?"
Well, Pareene said, among other things, JPMorgan had given jobs to the children of Chinese officials to curry
favor, as reported in the New York Times"Oh, the New York Times, oh, OK," Bartiromo replied,
incredulous. Oh, that thing.
Talk about something else, smarm says. Talk about anything else. This young man is in possession of secret
official computer files that document the routine lawlessness and boundless intrusiveness of the American
surveillance state. An unaccountable power is monitoring the entire global flow of informationwhich
amounts, in contemporary practice, to monitoring thought itself. Illegally.
Smarm says:
- Edward Snowden broke the law.
- Edward Snowden is a naif, who has already foolishly betrayed his nation's most vital secrets.
- Edward Snowden is an unstable, sensation-seeking narcissist.
- Edward Snowden isn't telling us anything we don't already know.
- Edward Snowden is a traitor.
So what if Snowden is telling the truth? Just look at the way he's telling it.
Obviously there are personal stakes and connections here. I get my paychecks (deposited into an account
with the corrupt JPMorgan Chase megabank) from Gawker Media. Writers criticizing snark and negativity
tend to bring up Gawker as a deplorable case in point.
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And Denby's book on snark does, besides singling out my employer, directly disparage multiple friends or
colleagues of mine. Smarm, which is always on the lookout for bias and ulterior motives, would insist on
noting this. Reading Denby's criticism of the people I like is to some extent irritating emotionally, but mostly
it's irritating because the reason these people are my friends or colleagues is that I have found their outlooks
their workcongenial. They have seen the viscous creeping of smarm, and they have said something about
it.
Denby singles out, as "high-twit nonsense" and "gibberish," this passage by former Gawker editor and Awl
co-founder Choire Sicha:
The American desire for fucking has become, locally, the Brooklyn-based or -bound desire for a
book deal and a brownstone. Men, finding that they cannot really get status or security from the
ownership of women very often, find their very selves disparaged. Like most of us, they get their
status first from consumption, and the way out is to become a maker of consumables; a high-class
published author.
This is, as I read it, a fairly correct account of certain social and cultural dynamics of smarmthe ways that
ideas of "authorship" and "Brooklyn" are being acted out by people, as a bulwark against insecurity. We have
a whole word here at Gawker, "writering," to describe the tribe of writers whose principal writerly concern is
being writerly, and who spend all their time congratulating one another on their writing and promulgating
correct rules for writing. Denby expects his readers to find the passage he quotes self-evidently absurd.
Presumably, his audience holds a different set of assumptions about the world.
1989: A young black mana movie character, who is played by the film's directorpicks up a trashcan across
the street from a pizza parlor. The entire film has been building to this scene, slights and resentments and
misunderstandings and injustices accumulating on a hot day till the young man's friend is dead outside the
pizza place, in the hands of police, and an angry crowd has gathered. The young man carries the trashcan in
his arms, past the crowd, and heaves it through the pizza-parlor window.
A white man in his mid-50stwo decades older than the filmmaker with the trashcanwatches the movie.
His job is to write film criticism. He sees the trashcan go through the glass, the crowd riot, the pizza place
burn. A pivotal moment in movie history, in pop-culture history, in the history of America's imagining of
race.
Anger is upsetting to smarm. But so is humor and condence.
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The middle-aged white movie critic writes that the filmmaker is "thoroughly mixed up about what he is
saying." He is, the critic writes, "playing with dynamite in an urban playground. The response to the movie
could get away from him."
Someone's response to the movie certainly did get away from someone:
Rather than attacking the police, the rioters attack a symbolic target, and that part of the movie is
hard to justify... The end of the movie is a shambles, and if some audiences go wild, [the filmmaker]
is partly responsible.
That was what David Denby had to say (http://books.google.com/books?id=VucCAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA54&
dq=%22the+rioters+attack+a+symbolic+target%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=s56fUp3TEqjXyAG60ICABw&
ved=0CDEQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=%22the%20rioters%20attack%20a%20symbolic%20target%22&
f=false) about Do the Right Thing: that Spike Lee would be to blame if the movie made black people riot.
There are many, many things that can be noted about this piece of writing (e.g., Denby was more moved by
the loss of Sal's Famous than by the death of Radio Raheem), but one of them is simply that it's not artistic
judgment.
In the moment of crisis, Denby chose to deliver his verdict not on the film as a film, but on whether it
represented responsible and appropriate social behaviorand whether black audiences could be trusted with
it. Keep this in mind when David Denby puts himself forward as an expert on the terms of appropriate and
inappropriate response.
Anger is upsetting to smarmreal anger, not umbrage. But so is humor and confidence. Smarm, with its
fixation on respect and respectability, has trouble handling it when the snarkers start clowning around. Are
you serious? the commenters write. Is this serious? On Twitter, the right-thinking commenters pass the
links around: Seriously?
Seriously??
Are you serious?
Are you? Serious? Seriously?
Well, no.
But yes, yes we are.
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If you can't say something nice, say something anyway. Make it something nice. In the age of rampant
runaway snark, the Newest Media are doing something else entirely. Adam Mordecai, an editor-at-large for
Upworthy, explained to Quora readers what his site's headline-writing philosophy (http://www.quora.com
/Upworthy-1/What-tools-does-Upworthy-employ-to-test-its-headlines) is:
Don't depress people so much that they want to give up on humanity. Negative headlines breeds
negative shares.
Don't curse in your headlines. Moms hate it (and are the biggest sharers on the internet by a
significant margin [...]
Don't make people take positions they might be uncomfortable with. For example, "I Really Hate
All White People" is going to not get shared, whereas, "An Open Letter To Pasty People" is far less
hostile and more likely to get shared.
Don't use terms that overwhelm, polarize or bore people. I never use Social Security, The
Environment, Immigration, Democrats, Republicans, Medicare, Racist, Bigot, etc... You can talk
about issues without giving away what they are.
The result of this approach, the Upworthy house style, is a coy sort of emulation of English, stripped of actual
semantic content: This Man Removed the Specific and the Negative, and What Happened Next Will
Astonish You. Even Upworthy's fellow participants in the ongoing SEO race to the bottom
(http://jimromenesko.com/2013/12/03/gawker-boss-we-got-overtaken-by-buzzfeed-and-smarmy-
upworthy-is-nipping-at-our-heels/) are horrified. But it works, in the sense that people who do not want to
think about actual things or read any information will reliably share Upworthy stories.
When you hear a voice say "Everyone's a critic," listen for the echo: "Everyone's a publicist."
People want to be uplifted, and through social media people want to demonstrate to other people that they
are the kind of people who appreciate being uplifted. Negativity is a bad market niche, according to no less a
figure than Malcolm Gladwell (https://jimromenesko.com/2013/10/01/malcolm-gladwell-i-am-everything-
i-once-despised/)a known expert, in theory and practice, on the marketing power of popularity:
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[T]here's very little negative stuff you can put in a book or an article before you turn most of your
audience away. Negative stuff is interesting the first time, but you'll never re-read a negative
article. You'll re-read a positive one. Part of the reason that my books have had a long shelf life is
that they're optimistic, and optimism permits that kind of longevity.
One curious fact about this long view is that it's quite untrue. I can't recall ever, unless compelled by duty,
rereading a Malcolm Gladwell article. What I have reread is Mencken on the Scopes Trial, Hunter Thompson
on Richard Nixon, and Dorothy Parker on most thingsto say nothing of Orwell on poverty and Du Bois on
racism, or David Foster Wallace on the existential horror of a leisure cruise. This belief that oblivion awaits
the naysayers and the snarkers shouldn't survive a glance at the bookshelf.
When you hear a voice say "Everyone's a critic," listen for the echo: Everyone's a publicist.
Smarm is particularly well-suited, as a rhetorical and emotional register, to outright fraudsJames Frey,
Jonah Lehrer, Mike Daisey, David Sedariswith their appeals to "emotional truth" or humorism or sheer
artistic ambition too large to be contained by mere dumb lowly fact. Their lies and the exposure of their lies
become intellectually interesting, to them; it all becomes terribly revealing about the clods who were lied to,
the poor sad literal-minded clods. Are they not the same people who were loved? Are they not telling the
same stories that were loved? (Sedaris's audience says: Yes, yes, you are, tell us more.)
Or they talk about their children. How bad can you be if you have children?
Whether a work is true or lasting or any good is beside the point; smarm makes sure to put it beside the
point. So we have an entire class of art or entertainment that relies on other art, parasitically, for its
protection or certification. Julia Child, through decades of hard work, became a beloved and admired figure,
so how could Julie & Julia be greeted with anything but love and admiration? "Swan Lake" is essential to the
classical canon, so Black Swan must be taken seriously (and Natalie Portman, having let it be known that
she put herself through ballet training, is essentially a prima ballerina). Where the Wild Things Are is a
supreme masterpiece of children's literature, so your children will certainly be enriched by exposure to Dave
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Eggers' screenplay and YA-novel adaptations of it.
When we detach ourselves from the logic of smarm, it becomes possible instead to read Julie & Julia as a
chilling portrait of sociopathy, and Black Swan as hysterical junk, and Eggers's Wild Things as a false and
creepy enactment of somebody's idea of what childhood ought to be about. (I'm relying on the New Yorker
excerpt on that last one, because God knows I'm not reading or watching the whole thing.)
It is nearly impossible to keep smarm values at bay. Even well-meaning people fall into them.
It's nearly impossible to keep smarm values at bay, though. Even well-meaning people fall into them.
Publish a long, serious article and wait for the discomfiting benedictions to roll in from Longform and
Longreads: Here is a piece of writing that has attained a certain lengtha form that you can read, secure in
the knowledge that someone did a lot of typing, and that you are doing a lot of reading. Everyone recognizes
that there is virtue, or an approximation of virtue, in doing a lot of reading. Share it, this quantity of reading.
If any one thing gave rise to this essay, it was a long-running dispute that I had, on blogs and Twitter, with
an award-winning magazine journalist. This writer, a specialist in features and celebrity profiles, had
published online a piece of advice to young writers, urging them to seek out as their subjects the obscure and
unknown.
Find-the-overlooked-person is an old saw in feature writing. At its bestJimmy Breslin interviewing JFK's
grave diggerit encourages real attention to the subjects, while at its worst it feeds into a messianic
tendency for certain writers, who believe that it's their attention and their prose that gives meaning to the
lives of common folk. In this case, though, it was more or less the opposite of what this award-winning writer
did for a living, and I said as much, in a blog post. The argument escalated from there.
The reason it escalated, I eventually realized, was that we were speaking in completely different terms. He
was giving instruction to aspiring writersas Eggers had given instruction to literary-minded college
studentsthat was itself aspirational, a guide to the feelings that a person ought to have about being a
writer. A writer, the writerer proclaimed, ought to take an interest in ordinary people. I was describing what
he actually did.
He took this to be malice, personal malice. His friends and supporters agreed that I, and the people who
agreed with me, were motivated by envy of his career and his gifts, that we were cynics, snarking from the
sidelines (a powerful recurring metaphor, those sidelines, for this class of writer, who is by implication in the
game). One woman who criticized him (his female critics seemed to have an especially hard time getting
through), he dismissed as "a dabbling writer" and a "graduate student."
Eventually, as a final statementDo you know who I am?he published a list of his clips. Some of the
stories were good; some were bad. As far as I could tell, though, when it came to the original question of a
writer's duty to illuminate the obscure, not one of them was a story about someone who was not famous, or
who had not at least been part of a nationally reported news event.
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The idea of success, or of successfulness, hangs over the whole subject of smarm. It is not true, after all, that
the crisis of postmodernity has left us without any functioning system of shared values. What currently fills
the space left by the waning or absence of traditional authority, for the most part, is the ideology and logic of
the market.
Market reasoning is deeply, essentially smarmy. We live, it insists, in a world that is optimized by the
invisible hand. The conditions under which we live have been created by rational needs and preferences,
producing an economicist Panglossianism: What thrives deserves to thrive, be it Nike or sprawl or the
finance industry or Upworthy; what fails deserves to have failed.
Immense fortunes have bloomed in Silicon Valley on the most ephemeral and stupid windborne
seeds of concepts. What's wrong with you, that you didn't get a piece of it?
We all live our lives, we're told, on these terms. If people really wanted a better worldwhat you might
foolishly regard as a better worldthey would have it already. So what if you signed up to use Facebook as a
social network, and Facebook changed the terms of service to reverse your privacy settings and mine your
data? So what if you would rather see poor people housed than billionaires' investment apartments blotting
out the sun? Some people have gone ahead and made the reality they wanted. Immense fortunes have
bloomed in Silicon Valley on the most ephemeral and stupid windborne seeds of concepts, friends funding
friends, apps copying apps, and the winners proclaiming themselves the elite of the newest of meritocracies.
What's was wrong with you, that you didn't get a piece of it?
Of course this is tyrannical. Of course this is false. Everyone is aware that market judgments are foolish and
unfair. But what can you do about it?
Three years before Dave Eggers wrote back to the Harvard Advocate, another manifesto spelled out a related
ethos for the age. Its purpose was more lowbrow and more openly ruthless than Eggers's defense of artistic
ambition, but it struck remarkably similar notes:
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The good newsand it is largely good newsis that everyone has a chance to stand out. Everyone
has a chance to learn, improve, and build up their skills...
Forget your job description, Ask yourself: What do I do that I am most proud of? Most of all, forget
about the standard rungs of progression you've climbed in your career up to now. Burn that
damnable "ladder" and ask yourself: What have I accomplished that I can unabashedly brag
about?...
Most importantly, remember that power is largely a matter of perception. If you want people to see
you as a powerful brand, act like a credible leader. When you're thinking like brand You, you don't
need org-chart authority to be a leader. The fact is you are a leader. You're leading you!
The key to making it in the new era, Tom Peters explained to the readers of Fast Company in "The Brand
Called You (http://www.fastcompany.com/28905/brand-called-you)," was to manage impressions, just like
commercial brands do"don't sell the steak, sell the sizzle." It was the dawn of a new credentialism, on the
authority of the self and the money that the self could hustle, ready to inspire the meritocrats of the Valley.
Recall that what set Eggers off, in his exchange with the Advocate, was the letter writer's impolite reference
to "selling out." Him? Dave Eggers? He was getting the money he neededdeservedto pursue the brave
and thrilling projects he picked out for himself (Tom Peters: "A project-based world is ideal for growing your
brand... Today you have to think, breathe, act, and work in projects"). He was giving money away to
charities. How dare some snotty college kid cast aspersions on the success he had made?
Why, the whole idea of selling out was a terrible, bitter lie, told by "wimps" to justify their wimpiness. That
was a peculiar position to take if you had just lived through the '90s, as Eggers had, a decade that saw Disney
eat Miramax and Creed sell more copies of its first two albums than Nirvana had sold of Bleach and
Nevermind. But again, Eggers wasn't making a point. He was taking an attitude. He was naming an enemy.
The criticsthe snarkersare haters, smarm says. The snarkers are driven by "their resentment," Denby
writes. Their resentment. ("It's Personal," his subtitle says.) They are "pipsqueaks" and "brats." Young.
Malcolm Gladwell, another target for the haters, has a conversion narrative interchangeable with Eggers', if
more quizzical in tone:
I am everything I once despised. When I was 25, I used to write these incredibly snotty, hostile
articles attacking big-name, nonfiction journalists. Now I read them and I'm like, "Oh my God,
they're doing a me on me!"
Above (or beneath) it all, they are little. Eggers writes of his former critical self, "I was a complete, weaselly
little prick." He asks: "What kind of small-hearted person wants an artist to adhere to a set of rules, to stay
forever within a narrow envelope which we've created for them?" He answers, and answers, and answers:
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191 362 Reply
"the lazy and small ... small and embittered ... narrow-hearted ... the tiny voices of tiny people."
The actual answer, and his actual fearthe fear that keeps the smarmers tossing on their bullshit-stuffed
mattresses on the beds of bullshit they would have us all sleep inis this: We are exactly the same size as
you are. Everybody is.
[Illustration by Jim Cooke]
17k Like Like
Tom Scoccas Discussions (http://gawker.com/on-smarm-1476594977) All replies (http://gawker.com/on-smarm-1476594977/all)
12/05/13 10:06am Freddie DeBoer started this thread
Freddie DeBoer (http://freddiedeboer.kinja.com) Tom Scocca
12/05/13 10:06am (http://gawker.com/i-am-not-someone-who-could-easily-be-mistaken-for-being-1477098802)
(http://freddiedeboer.kinja.com)
I am not someone who could easily be mistaken for being too positive. I have argued many times that
arguments of the type "there is too much irony in the world" are misidentifying both the problem and the
cure. The broader cultural problems, to my mind, are not irony or snark but the cult of the trivial and the
worship of cleverness, both of which produce the simultaneous self-worship and self-hatred that are the
dominant feature of contemporary cultural life.
But the question of snark in reviews and criticism is a little bit different. You're perfectly right that the
reverse side of criticism these days tends to be the pose of the publicist. But when people complain that
there's a lot of empty, bullshit, preening, self-fellating negative criticism, they're right, too. A lot of people
have identified the current problem with media criticism as a binary between extreme praise and extreme
criticism. That's true, but inadequate. It's not just really good or really bad. It's criticism that is either
dismissive or worshipful. Either a movie or album or book is so bad that the reviewer feels no obligation to
take it seriously at all it's beneath them or it is a sublime work that transcends art and carries them into
rapture it's above all of us. Both preserve the self-worship of the person doing the reviewing. "Anything
that is not a masterpiece is beneath me" is the critical ethic of a narcissist.
The problem is not negativity, but that the negativity about others and what they produce is not matched
with an outward negativity about the self. I can deal with a very negative critic so long as that critic is equally
willing to indict him or herself, to be clear that the critic is as much of a failure as the artist. I mean, look:
this website was once a good example of the perils of descending into a blank, cynical negativity. Not because
it was too mean, or because its targets didn't deserve it, or because we should all be publicists. But because it
was boring. It was boring to read some shit-eating 25 year olds who had come directly from Bowdoin to
Brooklyn put on some affected pose of critical exhaustion. The Gawker of a few years ago was a website with
a lot of writers who had never experienced anything and yet felt free to comment on everything. And fuck
that, dude. Not because it's mean, but because it was unearned, and cheap, and so, so flattering to the
sensibility of the tiny demographic slice that dominates our media.
26 of 36 5/19/2014 9:26 PM
51 Reply
Anybody wants to be a critic, that's cool. Just recognize that so much of our criticism and the reaction to it is
a way for people to trade regard for each other. It's not the snark. It's the painfully explicit system of mutual
self-regard, the transactional, obligatory boosterism within the chattering class that functions as an implicit
agreement you treat me like I'm a big deal, and I'll treat you like you're a big deal, too.
12/05/13 9:47am imeldasnarkos started this thread
imeldasnarkos (http://imeldasnarkos.kinja.com) Tom Scocca
12/05/13 9:47am (http://gawker.com/what-i-have-reread-is-mencken-on-the-scopes-trial-hunt-1477086997)
(http://imeldasnarkos.kinja.com)
47 Reply
19 Reply
9 Reply
6 Reply
Show 31 more replies in this thread (http://gawker.com/i-am-not-someone-who-could-easily-be-mistaken-for-being-1477098802)
Tom Scocca (http://tom-scocca.kinja.com), Host Freddie DeBoer
12/05/13 10:16am (http://gawker.com/unearned-is-on-the-smarm-bingo-card-1477104842)
"Unearned" is on the Smarm Bingo card.
Freddie DeBoer (http://freddiedeboer.kinja.com) Tom Scocca
12/05/13 10:20am (http://gawker.com/that-is-not-an-argument-1477107648)
That is not an argument.
PlotSezsSpot (http://parapooper.kinja.com)
12/05/13 10:29am (
(http://parapooper.kinja.com)
all.
Unearned, my lord.
Freddie DeBoer (
12/05/13 10:30am (
Freddie DeBoer
http://gawker.com/self-worship-is-a-problem-on-both-sides-of-the-aisle-a-1477113337)
Self-worship is a problem on both sides of the aisle, at least the snarky can have a sense of humor about it
http://freddiedeboer.kinja.com) PlotSezsSpot
http://gawker.com/this-website-is-subsidized-by-smarm-do-you-read-what-n-1477114139)
This website is subsidized by smarm. Do you read what Neetzan Zimmerman posts? Every other post of his is
"this will restore your faith in humanity." And he's by far their most successful writer.
27 of 36 5/19/2014 9:26 PM
31 Reply
What I have reread is Mencken on the Scopes Trial, Hunter Thompson on Richard Nixon, and
Dorothy Parker on most thingsto say nothing of Orwell on poverty and Du Bois on racism, or
David Foster Wallace on the existential horror of a leisure cruise.
Don't forget this glorious treasure of the critical arts (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/dining/reviews
/restaurant-review-guys-american-kitchen-bar-in-times-square.html?_r=0).
Scocca, I love you so much right now.
6 Reply
26 Reply
2 Reply
Freddie DeBoer (http://freddiedeboer.kinja.com) imeldasnarkos
12/05/13 10:22am (http://gawker.com/serious-question-isnt-this-comment-smarm-if-its-not-1477109052)
Serious question: isn't this comment smarm? If it's not, why not? I mean, "I love you so much right now"
sounds like the definition of smarm to me.
Ugarles (http://ugarles.kinja.com) Freddie DeBoer
12/05/13 10:36am (http://gawker.com/no-because-it-is-earnest-it-says-exactly-what-it-mean-1477117991)
(http://ugarles.kinja.com)
No, because it is earnest. It says exactly what it means. "This article speaks to me. I appreciate that you have
written it." The word you are looking for is "hyperbole" not smarm.
Misty Berkowitz (http://mistyberkowitz.kinja.com) imeldasnarkos
12/05/13 10:39am (http://gawker.com/i-am-a-fan-of-snark-myself-although-its-best-in-moder-1477120107)
(http://mistyberkowitz.kinja.com)
I am a fan of snark, myself, although it's best in moderate amounts. Maybe it's just about being honest.
Saying I really hated this movie/book/restaurant and here's why seems reasonable. Saying I love you right
now seems reasonable too, if that's an honest reaction.
As for classic snark, I particularly enjoyed this takedown:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archi... (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/07
/a-readers-manifesto/302270/)
imeldasnarkos (http://imeldasnarkos.kinja.com) Freddie DeBoer
12/05/13 10:41am (http://gawker.com/well-i-dont-think-im-a-great-person-to-try-to-determin-1477121152)
(http://imeldasnarkos.kinja.com)
Well, I don't think I'm a great person to try to determine whether or not I'm being smarmy obviously, if I
thought it would come off as smarmy, I wouldn't have said it. But that said, I don't think enthusiasm, even
28 of 36 5/19/2014 9:26 PM
1 Reply
Show 27 more replies in this thread (http://gawker.com/what-i-have-reread-is-mencken-on-the-scopes-trial-hunt-1477086997)
ass-kissy enthusiasm, is automatically smarm; I think it requires a certain rejection of other people's
criticisms, and especially other people's right to criticize.
29 of 36 5/19/2014 9:26 PM
12/05/13 11:09am Tom Scocca started this thread
9 Reply
Tom Scocca (http://tom-scocca.kinja.com), Host Tom Scocca
12/05/13 11:09am (http://gawker.com/corrections-and-clarications-on-bullshit-was-origi-1477140915)
CORRECTIONS AND CLARIFICATIONS:
On Bullshit was originally published in 1986, as an essay in Raritan Quarterly Review, and was
republished in book form in 2005.
This originally said that Jedediah Purdy now is a professor at Yale Law School; he has been a visiting
professor at Yale, but he is on the faculty at Duke.
12/06/13 4:32pm Jef Bercovici started this thread
Jef Bercovici (http://jefbercovici.kinja.com) Tom Scocca
12/06/13 4:32pm (http://gawker.com/as-a-writer-who-has-written-his-share-of-takedowns-i-h-1478207579)
(http://jefbercovici.kinja.com)
1 Reply
2 Reply
Reply
KorbenDallasBathroomPass (http://corbindallasmp.kinja.com) Tom Scocca
12/05/13 2:06pm (http://gawker.com/of-topic-im-curious-does-gm-have-any-policy-style-gu-1477296930)
(http://corbindallasmp.kinja.com)
Off topic, I'm curious, does GM have any policy/style guide for corrections for writers? Most major
news/media outlets would attach this to the article rather than drop it in the comments. I realize that the
comments are perhaps a more meaningful place for information to get exchanged on GM sites than other
ones, but it is still somewhat non traditional to do this.
Tom Scocca (http://tom-scocca.kinja.com)
12/05/13 3:47pm (
KorbenDallasBathroomPass (
12/05/13 3:57pm (
(http://corbindallasmp.kinja.com)
Thanks for responding.
, Host KorbenDallasBathroomPass
http://gawker.com/we-do-it-diferent-ways-depending-on-the-piece-and-the-1477389292)
We do it different ways depending on the piece and the nature of the correction. For this one, it seemed to
make sense to put an asterisk on the passage and link that and the relevant words to corrections down here.
http://corbindallasmp.kinja.com) Tom Scocca
http://gawker.com/thanks-for-responding-i-did-not-notice-the-hyperlinks-1477398485)
I did not notice the hyperlinks in the article until you pointed them out. That is useful.
Are you speaking for gawker.com or all GM? (jez, deadspin, etc).
30 of 36 5/19/2014 9:26 PM
10 Reply
As a writer who has written his share of takedowns, I have a particular problem with smarm. Editors are
always coaching younger writers not to punch down, because picking on targets of inferior status brings no
glory. This is excellent advice, as punching down just makes you look like a bully with nothing better to do. I
haven't always embraced this maxim, but when I've strayed from it, I've felt gross afterward.
But here's what happens when you train your guns upward, on CEOs, billionaires and bestselling authors:
You get accused of acting out of envy. (Or of even baser motivations. Michael Wolff, that sweetheart, once
told an interviewer (http://www.mediaite.com/online/interview-michael-wolff-talks-adweeks-revamp-
the-irrelevance-of-media-reporters/) that I'd written about him unfavorably because he "neglected to hire"
me, a claim he made up out of thin air. When I called him out on it, he first obfuscated, then claimed he'd
been misquoted.)
This has happened to me plenty of times over the years, and I don't even think it's necessarily insincere. I
think a lot of these people are legitimately so in love with themselves and so lacking in imagination when it
comes to the interior lives of others that "He's just jealous" is the only explanation that makes sense to them.
12/05/13 11:01am Ken Wheaton started this thread
1 Reply
Reply
Reply
benjaminallover (http://benjaminallover.kinja.com) Jef Bercovici
12/07/13 12:04pm (http://gawker.com/take-downs-can-be-a-very-high-form-of-argument-if-one-1478597833)
(http://benjaminallover.kinja.com)
Take-downs can be a very high form of argument, if one is surgically precise, fair-minded, and right. I think
that Mark Twain is the ultimate in this genre.
Monarda (http://monarda.kinja.com) benjaminallover
1/18/14 10:22pm (http://gawker.com/his-takedowns-are-fantastic-trouble-is-with-all-their-1504391093)
(http://monarda.kinja.com)
His takedowns are fantastic. Trouble is, with all their faults, Cooper and Scott can be are wonderful
writers. I am sure Twain read them with great delight, and I am glad I did before coming on Twain's
takedown.
benjaminallover (http://benjaminallover.kinja.com) Monarda
1/19/14 3:02am (http://gawker.com/maybe-like-the-modern-comedy-roasts-the-take-downs-are-1504464001)
Maybe like the modern comedy roasts, the take-downs are extolment via butchery. I think some of Twain's
very best writing is based in his best reading, which is sometimes hate-reading. HIGHLY ATTENTIVE
HATE-READING. But the weight of his contempt is based in a respect, or a kind of attention at least, that
compelled him to spend as much thinking on the things he ridiculed as the men who made them, and of
course never without joie de vivre and winking self expression in the whole bitchy process.
31 of 36 5/19/2014 9:26 PM
10 Reply
Ken Wheaton (http://ken_wheaton.kinja.com) Tom Scocca
12/05/13 11:01am (http://gawker.com/sort-of-hard-to-believe-mark-twain-doesnt-come-up-in-th-1477135553)
(http://ken_wheaton.kinja.com)
Sort of hard to believe Mark Twain doesn't come up in these discussions. Sort of America's first snark-master.
Aside from his personal letters, scathing attacks on politics, hilarious rewriting of genesis, there's what he
did to James Fenimore Cooper. http://twain.lib.virginia.edu/projects/risse... (http://twain.lib.virginia.edu
/projects/rissetto/offense.html)
11 Reply
5 Reply
Reply
Cherith McCutestory (http://mcwhadden.kinja.com) Ken Wheaton
12/05/13 11:17am (http://gawker.com/hilarious-rewriting-of-genesis-at-his-best-he-could-b-1477147063)
(http://mcwhadden.kinja.com)
hilarious rewriting of genesis
At his best, he could be snarky and sweet in the same breath.
"Wherever she was, there was Eden."
There is no right way to be. Snarky when it suits you. Sincere and nice when it suits you. Just be a person.
there's what he did to James Fenimore Cooper
One of the best takedowns of all time. He also was pretty snarky about Jane Austen and there I pretty
strongly disagree with him. I think they were far far more similar than he realized. But see? He can be snarky
about a person while revealing a valid criticism. I can disagree with him in that one instance. And the world
goes on. I don't have to dismiss his very use of snark to do so.
spockjones (http://spockjones.kinja.com) Ken Wheaton
12/05/13 2:42pm (http://gawker.com/this-makes-me-wonder-what-twain-wouldve-thought-of-jona-1477330523)
(http://spockjones.kinja.com)
This makes me wonder what Twain would've thought of Jonathan Safran Frazen Chabon- Eggers.
benjaminallover (http://benjaminallover.kinja.com) Ken Wheaton
12/07/13 11:56am (http://gawker.com/wow-that-was-surgically-precise-and-brutal-1478594738)
Wow. That was surgically precise and brutal.
Singedrac (http://singedrac.kinja.com) Ken Wheaton
12/08/13 5:29am (http://gawker.com/mark-twain-also-also-wrote-essays-about-the-irritation-1478964398)
32 of 36 5/19/2014 9:26 PM
12/05/13 9:48am Gawddawn started this thread
22 Reply
Gawddawn (http://gawddawn.kinja.com) Tom Scocca
12/05/13 9:48am (http://gawker.com/nally-someone-has-called-out-eggers-and-upworthy-ju-1477088027)
(http://gawddawn.kinja.com)
Finally! Someone has called out Eggers and Upworthy. Just, thank you.
And I want to note that the two best articles of the year on this site have appeared in the last 30 something
hours, and they've both been by this man. Bravo!
1 Reply
Show 3 more replies in this thread (http://gawker.com/sort-of-hard-to-believe-mark-twain-doesnt-come-up-in-th-1477135553)
(http://singedrac.kinja.com)
Mark Twain also also wrote essays about the irritation of being in the same room with someone talking
loudly on their phone, and showed off photographs of his cats. He would fit in very well in the 21st century.
13 Reply
7 Reply
1 Reply
1 Reply
Freddie DeBoer (http://freddiedeboer.kinja.com) Gawddawn
12/05/13 10:18am (http://gawker.com/are-you-under-the-impression-that-criticism-of-dave-egg-1477106223)
Are you under the impression that criticism of Dave Eggers and Upworthy are rare?
Gawddawn (http://gawddawn.kinja.com) Freddie DeBoer
12/05/13 10:39am (http://gawker.com/i-dont-read-a-lot-of-blogs-but-i-dont-recall-anything-1477119824)
(http://gawddawn.kinja.com)
I don't read a lot of blogs, but I don't recall anything negative about Upworthy or Dave Eggers in The New
Yorker or the Times.
But I do remember reading Heartbreaking Work and thinking "wow, this is great - but this guy is such a
fucking asshole!" And Upworthy...ugh.
PrayForDenton (http://prayfordenton.kinja.com) Gawddawn
12/05/13 4:44pm (http://gawker.com/i-want-upworthy-to-listen-to-the-cure-and-kill-itself-s-1477439784)
(http://prayfordenton.kinja.com)
I want Upworthy to listen to The Cure and kill itself so bad.
DennyCrane (http://dennycrane.kinja.com) Freddie DeBoer
12/05/13 9:38pm (http://gawker.com/ive-never-seen-anyone-criticize-upworthy-until-this-pos-1477652325)
(http://dennycrane.kinja.com)
I've never seen anyone criticize Upworthy until this post. I'm absolutely serious about this.
33 of 36 5/19/2014 9:26 PM
12/08/13 1:54pm Will Shetterly started this thread
1 Reply
Will Shetterly (http://willshetterly.kinja.com) Tom Scocca
12/08/13 1:54pm (http://gawker.com/if-civility-is-smarm-malcolm-x-was-smarmy-he-said-b-1479093768)
(http://willshetterly.kinja.com)
If civility is smarm, Malcolm X was smarmy. He said, "Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect
everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery." I tend to think he was right: if
someone hasn't put a hand on you, be respectful.
As for people who say to focus on the positive, they're not saying you have to like everything. Ignore what you
don't like. But if you can't find enough good things to promote as a reviewer, you're not trying to find good
work that hasn't gotten the attention it deserves.
7 Reply
Reply
Reply
Tom Scocca (http://tom-scocca.kinja.com), Host Will Shetterly
12/08/13 4:10pm (http://gawker.com/malcolm-x-was-telling-the-people-on-his-side-to-be-civi-1479155288)
Malcolm X was telling the people on HIS side to be civil. He wasn't complaining that the problem with the
other side was that they were uncivil. Because he had a lot of substantive complaints instead.
Will Shetterly (http://willshetterly.kinja.com) Tom Scocca
12/08/13 11:14pm (http://gawker.com/sure-he-was-telling-his-people-to-be-better-than-their-1479342869)
Sure, he was telling his people to be better than their opponents. Respect and substance are very compatible,
for all that people who prefer to rage will defend their rage.
sheldring (http://sheldring.kinja.com) Will Shetterly
12/09/13 3:08pm (http://gawker.com/civility-is-not-smarm-politeness-is-not-smarm-respe-1479776569)
(http://sheldring.kinja.com)
Civility is not smarm. Politeness is not smarm. Respectfulness is not smarm. Nothing in Scocca's piece
suggests as much.
Insisting that nothing in discourse is more significant than civility, or politeness, or respectfulness (or, more
properly put, the appearance of those things)that's smarm.
Insisting that civility etc. make rage out of bounds, with no concern for when and how rage might be
necessary or appropriate or even prophylactic: also smarm.
Not really so difficult.
Will Shetterly (http://willshetterly.kinja.com) sheldring
34 of 36 5/19/2014 9:26 PM
12/05/13 10:52am Justin Charity started this thread
2 Reply
Justin Charity (http://sweetbrothernumpsa.kinja.com) Tom Scocca
12/05/13 10:52am (http://gawker.com/while-i-understand-the-authors-concerns-here-honestly-1477129420)
(http://sweetbrothernumpsa.kinja.com)
While I understand the author's concerns here, honestly, I just think it'd be more encouraging and
productive for us, just as Americans, to maybe take a step back and calm down and embra[SIGNAL
LOSTSTATICSTATICSTATIC]
1/10/14 2:37am Zack started this thread
3 Reply
Zack (http://kilgoretrout321.kinja.com) Tom Scocca
1/10/14 2:37am (http://gawker.com/wtf-this-article-is-bullshit-no-one-is-asking-you-to-l-1498493105)
(http://kilgoretrout321.kinja.com)
wtf this article is bullshit. No one is asking you to listen to someone you don't want to listen to. You are not
handcuffed to an idea. Just walk away!
Reply
Show 2 more replies in this thread (http://gawker.com/if-civility-is-smarm-malcolm-x-was-smarmy-he-said-b-1479093768)
12/10/13 10:12pm (http://gawker.com/who-said-nothing-is-more-important-than-civility-names-1480847042)
Who said nothing is more important than civility? Names, please.
And if there's a time when rage is necessary, I guess Malcolm X and St. Paul both missed it. (St. Paul also
said to respect everyone, but since my pacifism isn't as strong as it might be, I'm more fond of Malcolm X's
version.)
3 Reply
Reply
Tom Scocca (http://tom-scocca.kinja.com), Host Zack
1/10/14 9:37am (http://gawker.com/nobody-made-you-read-this-article-either-though-huh-1498586597)
Nobody made you read this article, either, though, huh.
Although you probably should read it again, given this: http://deadspin.com/okay-you-idiot...
(http://deadspin.com/okay-you-idiot-if-you-cant-see-why-you-might-be-culpa-1493335421)
Zack (http://kilgoretrout321.kinja.com) Tom Scocca
1/10/14 11:46pm (http://gawker.com/i-dont-see-the-correlation-p-1499153357)
(http://kilgoretrout321.kinja.com)
I don't see the correlation :p
35 of 36 5/19/2014 9:26 PM
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12/12/13 2:31pm corndog started this thread
Reply
corndog (http://corinnewilson1979001.kinja.com) Tom Scocca
12/12/13 2:31pm (http://gawker.com/i-read-the-part-about-david-eggers-what-was-the-rest-o-1482086460
(http://corinnewilson1979001.kinja.com)
I read the part about David Eggers. What was the rest of it about?
Reply
This.Is.The.Carver (http://bestofthebestofthebest.kinja.com) Zack
1/23/14 4:51pm (http://gawker.com/surprisingly-it-does-correlate-reread-the-last-senten-1507676447)
(http://bestofthebestofthebest.kinja.com)
Surprisingly, it does correlate. Reread the last sentence of the comment (yours) that Tom links to.
I only say this because I think you're smart, but your deluge of opinions has rendered you unable to
remember any of them.
5 Reply
Reply
Tom Scocca (http://tom-scocca.kinja.com), Host corndog
12/12/13 3:35pm (http://gawker.com/halfway-down-there-was-a-number-to-call-to-collect-a-1482138701)
Halfway down, there was a number to call to collect a $15,000 prize but we gave them all away already.
corndog (http://corinnewilson1979001.kinja.com) Tom Scocca
12/12/13 5:17pm (http://gawker.com/im-sorry-tom-i-was-just-being-snarky-ill-read-the-re-1482227672)
(http://corinnewilson1979001.kinja.com)
I'm sorry, Tom. I was just being snarky.
Thanks for the great article, I'll read the rest when I'm not at work. (Sincere, not smarm.)
36 of 36 5/19/2014 9:26 PM

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