Thought #1 (from here):
Every snob feels merely shy.Thought #2: (from here):
A person can be awful, corrosive, and exasperating, but there is genuine evil in the world, so anyone who wouldn't dream of going out of their way to do deliberate harm is a “5” at worst.I'm honestly unsure how that second one originally landed with readers. Is this obvious for everyone but me? Am I revealing my uniquely frightful (and, it goes without saying, hypocritical) intolerance for suboptimal behavior?
A person can be nasty, selfish, derelict, uncompromising, unreasonable, willfully ignorant, and astoundingly unpleasant without scratching a nanometer toward actual evil. They can inadvertently ruin lives and knock over every worthy thing without being evil. The end result of their actions may be indistinguishable from that of genuine evil, but intentions do matter!
All non-evil people are on our team. Awful people are the worst of the best, not the worst of the worst. They are the bottom rung of acceptability, not the bottom rung of humanity by a very long shot.
Sure enough, I have to confess that I run screaming from "5"s. I shun "6"s, avoid "7"s, enjoy "8"s only in careful moderation, and, when it comes to "9"s and "10"s, well, they rarely stick around because, quite frankly, I'm not so hot, myself.
I am, to put it mildly, not proud of this about me. And, yikes, sure enough, I do feel shy. Very shy. So I guess I'm a snob. A bad one. I didn't used to be. I think it creeped up on me.
But I'll tie in a third (conveniently exculpatory) strand. I wrote once that
George W Bush once seemed like a malevolent boob for many of us who presently view him as a flawed-but-menschy statesman now that we find ourselves balls deep in the Donald Trump Experience. Yet, as I recently wrote, Trump himself is perfectly typical of the sort of vulgar, vain, shallow, narcissistic, ignorant, racist men who’ve run most every institution in the world for thousands of years. He only strikes us as appalling because we've compressed the extremes. We've lost perspective.Obviously, Putin's way lower now.
In fact, GWB was a “7” (I'd give Obama an "8.5"), Trump’s a “5.5”, and if we ever landed ourselves a “4”, let alone a "1" or "2" or "3" (Kim's a "3"; Putin's a "4.5", with Caligula, Pol Pot, Hitler, and perhaps Mayor De Blasio swirling around the bottom of the bowl in the "1"s and "2"s), Trump would seem as mild as freezer burnt toast (and GWB would be compared to Lincoln, ‘cuz we’d be compressing the other end) - at least for a moment, while the difference was shoved in our faces.
So what's the conclusion? "We're all snobs regarding presidents"? "Jim treats social acquaintances like most people treat presidents"?
No. The essential truth here is that it all compresses. Once we grow accustomed to a given portion of a spectrum, we can't descend more than a notch or two without discomfort. Even if in doing so we've still got it awfully good. Once you've rested your eyes in a dimly-lit room, a person turning on a perfectly mild desk lamp seems to be perpetrating violence. We spoil easily!
At least I do!
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