fuzzy post-it

(^ this is a link btw; i don’t think my theme makes that very clear)

this is a fabulous article

but it’s long so i cut out some good parts for lazy people

What is smarm, exactly? Smarm is a kind of performance—an 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?

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Here we have the major themes or attitudes of smarm: the scolding, the gestures at inclusiveness, the appeal to virtue and maturity.

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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 grease—and 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.

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Smarm should be understood as a type of bullshit, then—it 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.

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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 politics—in short, the great mass of people who do anything that could conceivably generate something that could be called a “tone” of politics—all were dissatisfied with the tone.

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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 divisively—and 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?

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The sin of snark is rudeness, the anti-snarkers say. Snark is mean. And meanness and rudeness are the worst 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 persecuted—that the critics of AIG, “with their pitch forks and their hangman nooses,” were “sort of like what we did in the Deep South. And I think it was just as bad and just as wrong.”

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.

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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"—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?”

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So what if Snowden is telling the truth? Just look at the way he’s telling it.

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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 best—Jimmy Breslin interviewing JFK’s grave digger—it 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 writers—as Eggers had given instruction to literary-minded college students—that 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 statement—Do 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 actual answer, and his actual fear—the fear that keeps the smarmers tossing on their bullshit-stuffed mattresses on the beds of bullshit they would have us all sleep in—is this: We are exactly the same size as you are. Everybody is.