Ask A Genius 1036: Authenticity, Narcissism, and Politics
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/07/28
Rick Rosner, American Comedy Writer, www.rickrosner.org
Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Independent Journalist, www.in-sightpublishing.com
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Authenticity versus narcissism. What does that trigger for you? That dichotomy?
Rick Rosner: I’m looking at everything regarding the election, and that’s a good point of reflection for those two concepts. Trump is highly narcissistic. His base doesn’t mind. Hillary Clinton got much shit for not being authentic.
They’re trying to do the same thing with Harris. Kamala Harris laughs a lot, and somebody put together a set of clips attacking her, showing her laughing in many situations. It worked for Hillary Clinton because people didn’t trust or believe her laugh. At least the Republicans wanted people to feel that way, and that stuff stuck on her. With Harris, it won’t be because she seems to be naturally smiley and laughy, and she seems more charismatic than Hillary Clinton did.
She’ll still get hit with all these criticisms. We talked about it yesterday. She’s never given birth to a child, so how can she be president? Which, of course, is super stupid since there has never been a US president who’s given birth. But there are a lot of dumb criticisms. I prefer those to legitimate criticism. But she seems reasonably authentic. They haven’t made an issue out of her height. She’s 5’2″ and wears giant heels. I’m sure it’ll pop up at some point from the Republicans, but in general terms, narcissism versus authenticity, since we live in social media times, and everybody has to have a brand and an online personality, means you do have to cultivate your narcissism kind of to share yourself with other people. JD Vance has been ridiculed because in his autobiography, “Hillbilly Elegy,” he talks about when he was a kid, he’d jerk off by putting a rubber glove between the seat cushions of his family’s couch, and he’d fuck the glove tucked between the crack.
You have to share details like that. If you’re going to write your autobiography, that’s shit that people might want to know. It’s interesting. But then, if you go into politics, people will make fun of you for it. We live in narcissistic times. We do. We’re not the greatest generation. Social media contributes to making us selfish. The greatest generation went off to war, the men and some of the women, and faced a chance of getting killed or maimed. And all the rugged, individualistic MAGA motherfuckers would have a problem, along with everybody else, in going off to war by the millions. Do you think we’re the worst generation? Or somewhere in the middle?
I haven’t thought about it. In terms of validity, yes. We might be the worst.
Jacobsen: What do you mean by that?
Rosner: Ghosting is a thing now. That’s where you either tacitly or explicitly agree to be with somebody, meet up, or do something, and you don’t. It’s fairly acceptable. That lack of reliability goes a long way to making this the worst generation. It’s also the social structure. When everybody does something, then it’s not necessarily everybody’s fault. We’ve talked about this in regards to everybody in America being fat. It’s not that everybody suddenly became a fat fucking pig. It’s that food became delicious and inexpensive. If ghosting has become a thing that’s widely practiced, it’s because technology plus society has somehow put pressure in the direction of doing that. But you could still make the argument that this is the worst fucking generation. If we drift into full fascist assholery, you could make the argument that the generation— like, half a generation before the greatest generation— the generation that got us into World War I and then into a depression and then into worldwide fascism, that had to be a pretty fucking shitty generation. You could argue that it was maybe facilitated by the 1918 flu, making everybody’s brain a little bit shittier, which we might be in the middle of now with COVID.
But COVID is back big time. We’re at the highest levels in over a year, but this is the 9th major spike as we’re four and a half years into COVID-19. Many people have been infected multiple times, and the damage, according to people who may or may not know but are trying to find out, may be cumulative. So, if everybody’s brain has been made a little extra shitty, that adds a little bit of weight to the argument that, yes, we are the shittiest generation.
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