That Not-So-Fresh Feeling

I am a child of the 80’s, a bona fide Gen-Xer with an epic chip on my shoulder and a matching Earth-friendly tote bag to carry my judgmental disdain for all things popularized, commercialized, homogenized and franchised. I hate everything, from the latte-swilling Starbucks freak barking at ear-splitting decibels into a phone that has a higher I.Q. than he does, to the emotionally-crippled reality TV junkie who can’t stop obsessing over what Lindsay Lohan and her sketchy BFF of the month snorted behind closed doors before barfing it all up on their newest Prada bags. I am cultural judge, jury and executioner in one. I have to be. It’s my Gen-X duty. Life is soooo hard. But someone has to pitilessly condemn the ill-tempered, ignorant, non-PC, environmentally unconscious and generally retarded people of the world. It can’t all be roses and sunshine.

But lately I’ve had that not-so-fresh feeling, as though my derisive criticism is no longer necessary—or at least heeded. No one seems to care anymore if global conglomerates rape independent businesses wholesale, or that Wal Mart makes its workers piss into a cup for the soul-killing position of capitalist whipping boy. The explosion of the Deepwater Horizon and the subsequent 200-million-gallon oil spill, one of the most mind-boggling cock-ups of the human race, raised collective eyebrows for about five minutes, till we heard there was a sale at Old Navy. Indignation has become passé, gone the way of macramé plant holders and crocheted toilet roll covers. We still sound indignant, sputtering our outrage between sips of Shiraz and nibbles of mache salad in a bistro-café-cocktail-bar-art gallery. But little of it translates into action. Facebook groups like “1,000,000 People Who Want to Plug the BP Oil Spill with Sarah Palin” have supplanted actual demonstrations. If a real-live demonstration does take place, police don’t even have to use water cannons to disperse angry crowds anymore. Happy hour at the local bar does that now. The revolution—if one ever takes place—will not be televised; it will be Tweeted. Instead of doing, we are paying lip service, with all judgment, all debate dovetailing into one yardstick, one expression: “douchebag.” We talk about things in terms of douchebags now, douches, douchebaggery, general douchiness. We’ve revived a term that had its 15 minutes of fame in the 80’s, yet was apparently ahead of its time. Unlike other idioms of yore-- “23 Skiddoo,” “Far out,” “Gag me with a spoon”—that never crawl their way out of the linguistic grave once they have been laid to rest, “douchebag” has experienced not just a resurrection, but a viral second-coming. It embodies the Western Zeitgeist with deft economy, sluicing its way through the current discourse, which, considering its vacuity, is not such a difficult task.

“Douchebag” originally signified the implement used in the process of cleansing the vagina, sometimes after a period, sometimes after sex, sometimes after sex to make sure you have your period, after which you’d have to douche, too. Coined first in 1908, it was an extension of the word “douche,” adopted from the French doucher in 1833, and first used as a verb in English in 1838. The term maintained this connotation until 1967, when it became an American slang term for a “contemptible person,” according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. Although the term centers on cleanliness and health, as opposed to “shitbag” or “dirtbag,” it takes on a negative connotation, much like other terms associated with female genitalia. Not surprising, really.

Though it does not provide the same kind of etymological history as its studious cousin, the Urban Dictionary provides a more contemporary definition: “someone who has surpassed the levels of jerk or asshole, however not yet reached fucker or motherfucker.” The Urban Dictionary defines a jerk as “ an idiot or stupid person,” and asshole as “someone being ignorant, rude, or obnoxious.” Anyone can be a jerk or asshole from time to time. We all have moments of arrogance, idiocy, toddler-like behavior. But we tend to get over it. We tell people, “stop being an asshole,” or “don’t be an ass,” implying that one can escape the state relatively easily. We can recover from being jerks and assholes, and we might, just might, on the odd occasion, even apologize for it.

On the other hand, a fucker, aside from the most obvious biological connotation, can also be defined as “a back stabber,” while a motherfucker is “a formidable or inexorable force,” a “bad guy/terrorist who means to bring Evil to the world or just piss Bruce Willis off.” Interestingly enough, the term also seems to apply to jazz musicians of particularly high skill. But generally “motherfucker” is the worst of epithets one can sling at another, with equivalents in almost every language, though something like “I shit in your father’s beard” is much more offensive. But then again, that is very culture specific, and doesn’t possess the same kind of universality that “motherfucker” does. To be a motherfucker is to lack conscience, a moral compass, to be capable of committing the worst transgressions and break the greatest taboos in order to satisfy one’s whims and desires, to have the ability to sleep with one’s mother, Oedipus without the complex. In truth, the label would apply to a select few: Wall Street bankers and Ponzi Scheme architects, Idi Amin and the like. Sociopaths are motherfuckers. Most others are jerks, assholes or douchebags, with douchebags sucking up a good deal of the oxygen available.

Thus, we begin to see that a douchebag is not just any kind of contemptible person, but a pervasively contemptible one, an idiot with a yeasty residue that can’t be washed off. If we wanted to categorize the three types of people using Douglas Adams’ principles of Bistromathics, we might think in terms of pizza. The jerk or asshole snatches the last piece of pizza from the box when they see you reaching for it. But they at least paid for their share of the pizza. A motherfucker would simply take the entire pizza and kick you in the crotch. But a douchebag will “share” the pizza with you, take the last slice, then riffle through their wallet when the bill comes and exclaim surprise at their lack of cash. “I’ll run a tab at the bar and get the first round,” the douchebag says, but then gets a cab and goes home. You get stiffed on the pizza and the consolation cocktail. And the douchebag never feels a need to apologize or later make up for their actions, because they are assholes with a sense of entitlement who never stop being assholes, as it is their natural, God-given right.

Douchebags, regardless of ethnicity, income or religious affiliation, be it hipster jerkoff or Eurowanker, all share one fundamental characteristic: a sense of entitlement at the cellular level, so inherent that they have no idea that the world neither does nor should revolve around them. Any other situation for them would be akin to believing that Hitler just needed a good hug. Douchebags not only believe that the world owes them something, but they also calculate interest. They are selfish by nature, not due to the misguided belief that all other people are jerks that have to be beaten to the finish line, but because of the misguided belief that the rest of the human race simply does not exist except as instruments for their own pleasure and amusement. They are not the center of the universe; they are the universe. And, like the universe, they take themselves for granted, because there is nothing else. Consequently, the douchebag’s selfishness and entitlement is an organic factor that can only be changed with Herculean effort, or death. And these people surround us like the Russians did the Germans at Stalingrad.

We are so much enveloped by douchebags that we have turned our attention to them in full. Books have begun appearing on shelves in your independent and chain bookstores with titles like Angels, Vampires and Douchebags, The Quotable Douchebag, Hot Chicks With Douchebags and Memoir of a Douchebag. Websites devoted to douchebags populate the virtual waves, providing you with “The Top 10 Biggest Movie Douchebags,” the Douchebag Museum on bigdouchebag.com, “69 Ways to Tell if You’re A Douchebag,” the YouTube video “We Are Douchebags,” and, naturally, a Wikipedia reference. The Urban Dictionary logs 44 different variations on the term, from “douchebaguette” to “douchebag index to “douché,” touché, when addressing a douche. A grindcore, hardcore punk company called Douchebag Records finds its home in Lille, Nord-pas-de Calais in France. Kanye West has proposed a “toast for the douchebags” in his latest single “Runaway,” while a band called Jump Smokers has a single called “Don’t Be A Douchebag,” lambasting men and women alike for consistent idiocy and selfishness. A major motion picture also recently debuted, called, simply enough, Douchebag. A low-budget television satire called Douchebag Beach seems to have gone viral. Jon Stewart uses the term on The Daily Show liberally, sprinkling it appropriately over the politicians and public figures who have gone above and beyond the call of duty in earning the title. And when a term like “douchebag” reaches cable TV, we know it has gone mainstream.

We now have a love-hate relationship with douchebags, lamenting their presence, but lost without them. Douchebags are the new ‘them’ against our ‘us.’ We have divided the world into two categories, the have and the have-nots, the entitled and the exploited, right-wing and left-wing, and anyone stuck in the middle is either a pussy or a wannabe. We condemn people for being douchebags, criticize them for being too liberal or too conservative, yet stroke out when someone refuses to take a side. We are like a teenage girl with her first boyfriend, as clear about what she wants from him as broken glass dipped in mud. We have no clue what we want anymore, but we can identify a douchebag in a crowd of thousands. The tell-tale signs—hair gelled to the max, sunglasses worn indoors at night, retro Miami Vice polo shirt collars turned up in Dracula fashion, biceps the size of Detroit, tits as fake as Jennifer Aniston’s smile, and a sense of entitlement that would blow away Camilla Parker-Bowles—are easy to spot, textbook easy, and easy to judge. We seek out douchebags, enjoy pointing them out, text each other when we spot one, with the abbreviation “D” or “DB.” It’s the Punch-Buggy of the 21^st century.

As much as we hate douchebags, we like them enough to pay them attention and money. Like monkeys in a zoo, we visit them on a regular basis to see what feces they’ll throw out the cage this time. With the re-invention of reality TV, we stopped laughing at innocent practical jokes and started laughing at idiotic, self-absorbed morons with the emotional maturity of amoeba—and that’s insulting the amoeba—as they made their way through “everyday” situations, such as working a normal job, going grocery shopping, and speaking to adults. Much like hockey and NASCAR, we stay tuned not so much for the outcome as for the knock-down, drag-out fights and wrecks that are their natural by-products. We expect these people to act like douches, from Puck on The Real World, to Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino, to Tiffany “New York” Pollard, to Anna Nicole Smith, to Jon and Kate Gosselin—who all have their own Wikis, by the way. We want these people to act like douches. It’s not enough anymore to know that someone is poorer than you, worse off than you. We don’t even show those kinds of people on TV anymore. We show the douchebag who spends his disposable income on sunglasses studded with rhinestones and the shirt he wears before he puts on the shirt he wears to go out, the dumbass who drunkenly picks a fight with an end table because it’s in his way. We relish their wastefulness, stupidity, and capacity for violence.

But we don’t just like it; we reward it, awarding people TV contracts, modeling jobs, recording deals, magazine covers and internet renown. We pay people to behave badly for us, pay them a lot. But we don’t want them to simply behave badly. We demand dramatic stupidity, Jackass-like disregard for other people’s safety and feelings as well as their own. We demand they spray on their tans, sleep with their in-laws, snort various powders and wake up in jail. Otherwise, we’re not interested. We’ll prick up our ears at the neo-con’s daughter getting an abortion, but we’d be much happier if we could hear that he was the one responsible for her condition. “The Situation” makes $50,000 per episode on Jersey Shore and $5 million a year in endorsements. Someone is funding his douchy habit, and we can’t say that it’s someone else. As a friend of mine said, "Rome had the Coliseum. We have cable."

We seem to appreciate the douchebag’s ability to shirk responsibility, to avoid ever claiming ownership of their shitty decision-making. We live in the age of the beta test. As a student recently reminded me, G-mail was a beta version for years, never saying officially that it was open for business, that the bugs had been worked out and it was ready for public use. We constantly receive “updates” from software companies because everything is forever “in progress.” If everything is constantly being adjusted, it means that nothing is actually ever broken, or faulty, or inherently flawed. It’s hard to criticize a plan that’s always being changed. Just look at the housing market. Even sexually, the notion of personal accountability has disappeared. “Wham, bam, thank you ma’am,” became “hit it and quit it,” and has now devolved into “toot it and boot it.” “Hit it and quit it,” though coarser and nearer violence than its predecessor, is still milder than “toot it and boot it,” a phrase that removes any gratitude or sense of attachment to the issue. Tooting something and then putting your foot to it to remove it from your sight is a far cry from expressing a minimum of gratitude for the privilege of casual sex. Now, it seems that’s simply taken for granted, which is douchebaggery.

Perhaps we envy the douchebag’s moronic status. Maybe we wish we could be rich and famous and completely devoid of taste, scruples, and a work-ethic. I have to admit, it wouldn’t be bad, not giving a shit what anyone thought of me, buying the trashiest clothes I can find and having the balls to wear them out in public. I’d like to be free of the worry of how many gallons of water I consume in a day, in comparison to people in Somalia, for just five minutes. I’d like my super ego to shut up about gas mileage for once and let my Id drive a fucking Porsche. I want to get things made by children in third-world sweatshops and not bat an eyelid in the face of the truth. I want to not know who Banksy is and have never heard of Yo Yo Ma, so I don’t feel inadequate for not being intimately familiar with their work. I want to be an idiot who thinks the world revolves around me, dizzy from the centrifugal force of my awesomeness.

Self-absorption, it seems, is now sexier than power, as evidenced by the customize-me ethos, the ludicrous amount of “personalization” we engage in and tolerate. From the double-decaf-mocha-latte-with-two-and-a-half-pump-vanilla drinker to the student who sends her professor an email asking if she “really” has to buy the textbook required for the course, we are all about ourselves, what we want, right now, and how we feel. I am going to tell you how I feel, but I don’t care how you feel, because I am too busy listening to my music on my iPhone that has a customized cover, ringtone, keychain and personal mascot.

But I can’t go all the way, I can’t go full douchebag, because a part of me still feels bad, still has a conscience, still feels guilt. I can’t be truly mean to anyone, at least, not on a daily basis. I do have my moments of bitchiness, when I can’t restrain myself, but for the most part, I’m too fucking polite to act the way I’d like to. I’d like to run roughshod over all the people who kill my buzz, infringe on my space, force me to overhear their banal conversations because they’re so damn loud. I smile whenever I think of the expression, “shoot ‘em all, and let God sort ‘em out.”

But I never will. Unfortunately, my inner douche will never truly dominate me. That’s why I need “The Situation,” Paris Hilton, Octomom, Ashton Kutcher, and my next door neighbor, whom I can call a douche whenever I want to, in the privacy of my own home, or out and about with friends. “Douchebag” is like a Sham-Wow: it soaks everything up. The little bit of optimism left over in the 90’s has been replaced by a clueless apathy. Everyone is a douchebag, in some way or another. What used to smell like Teen Spirit has been shat upon from a height and rinsed off with vinegar. The irony of the 90’s has given way to the over-the-top Massengill cheesiness that makes a mountain out of a pimple, a crisis out of a cuticle, that finds a mani/pedi an absolute necessity, instead of sending the money to a charity, any charity, for god’s sake, on the planet. We sold out, and then put even that up for sale.

If you’re calling me unjustifiably judgmental, polemic, stupid, bitchy, classist, elitist, racist, or pseudo-intellectual, I only have one thing to say to you:

Don’t be such a douche.

Thanks to Lucia L.