As a general rule, adults know how to act.
While it's certainly true that nobody's perfect, it's safe to say that the vast majority of us who have survived to adulthood have managed to puzzle out the rules of navigating society, public discourse, relationships, and general civility.
We all know that getting along with others is crucial to maintaining our place in the world. We understand that we can only live in communities of many thousands by adopting an attitude of civility and courtesy around people we don't know, giving the person on the bus next to us the benefit of the doubt.
We all know that it is unseemly to draw attention to ourselves, especially in public, and that people won't think much of us if we do. We realize that the things we say in public must strike a balance between decorum and effective self-presentation - that presenting ourselves indecorously or inauthentically will diminish us in the eyes of others.
We all know that we will win some, and we will lose some. Life is perpetual pendulum between success and failure, victory and defeat. To pretend otherwise is to out ourselves as either pretentious or a braggart. We all respect and admire the accomplished person whose success is attenuated by grace and modesty.
We have all misspoken at one time or another, been mistaken in something we said or did, and found ourselves corrected; none of us enjoys feeling embarrassed, but as adults we understand that the proper thing to do is to own the mistake and accepting correction with humility and good humor.
We all get along pretty well. We can walk the mall and sit in the park and buy our groceries without bloodshed, and even draw polite greetings and smiles and easy deference when we act like adults.
But then there's that other guy.
There's that guy we all know who somehow made it through the gauntlet of youth and life's early lessons without actually absorbing any of the rules of civility or decency. That guy we went to school with or see at the office or have to endure at church or our civic group. That guy who doesn't seem to know, let alone understand, how to function as an adult in the world.
He's boorish and rude, and doesn't seem to care. When he enters the room, he immediately seizes the spotlight, taking control of conversation and steering it toward himself. He is indifferent to the feelings of anyone he might step on in asserting himself this way; the feelings of others, in his purview, don't exist.
He pays no attention to anything anyone else has to say; attention to him is a one-way street, always moving in his direction. To acquire it, he'll say or do anything he must; he is the unchallenged master of the outlandish claim, the unsupported allegation, the ungrounded narrative. No exaggeration is too over-the-top, no lie too big: he knows everything, and he wants everyone to know it. As long as he has the floor, he's capable of saying anything, making shit up out of thin air if it keeps that spotlight fixed on him.
You learned long ago that there's no point in calling him out - he never, ever admits he's wrong, never walks back a mistake, never offers a mea culpa. Every mistake is someone else's fault; what blame might accrue in his wake will be liberally redistributed. He is the king of excuses.
And to fill the vacuousness he works so hard to spin as industry, he'll happily grab the credit for the successes of others with no trace of self-consciousness or shame. Earning the regard of others by way of actual self-investment and painstaking effort has never occurred to him - and would be dismissed immediately if it did.
He's not just an arrogant boor; he is garish, tasteless, completely unschooled in the nuances of social interaction. He cannot read emotional feedback, does not realize how he comes across to others, and wouldn't care if he could. He tramples on the courtesies the rest of us take for granted, and revels instead in the attention that comes his way when his behavior shocks.
His reward for his boorishness is the rabid admiration of a few, that handful of folks among us who honestly cannot tell the difference between a self-important buffoon and a charismatic doyen. Just as the boor is everywhere to be found, so is his entourage, those who are themselves unextraordinary but who bask in the presence of one who emanates the security and self-confidence - however inauthentically - that they themselves cannot muster.
All of us have rolled our eyes at that guy, many times - so often that he's a stereotype, a cliché, an unfunny joke we don't care to hear repeated. All of us groan inside when we hear his voice. All of us still feel a little of our joy trickle away, and a current of dread take its place, any time he intrudes...
And insults someone good and decent...
And says something blatantly dishonest and self-aggrandizing...
And dominates another news cycle...
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