From a piece on assholes in Slate:
One need only turn on the television to find oneself subject to the spectacle of an asshole condemning or defending another asshole, while yet a third asshole provides commentary on the assholishness of the previous two—a veritable Möbius strip of assholism.
I can’t tell if it’s because of my great love of the theorization of assholes, or because writing and thinking about assholes is inherently interesting (to everyone), but: the quality of prose, philosophy, and comedy regarding assholes truly does set it apart from the quality of those three things as they apply to every other topic in the universe.
Was it someone as recent as Harry Frankfurt who habituated us to the use of profanity in philosophical discourse? Personally, I prefer my body parts in the context of biology rather than scatology, but then again, I prefer the New Yorker as it was in the age of Shawn.