Let us now praise famous men — and, while we are at it, say a few words about jerks, some of whom are famous.
After all, we live in the golden age of jerks and some people seem to love them simply for their jerkdom. But enough about Donald Trump.
Actually, I was thinking more about Steve Jobs, a sometime jerk and sometime good guy who achieved more in his complicated life than certain other famous people currently in the news (see above).
In death, Jobs remains larger than life. He is the Apple of our eye, but, as with real apples, blemishes have a way of appearing on the skin and worms inside the core.
A famous Gary Larson “Far Side” cartoon had the Almighty as a chef cooking up the world and seasoning it with a shaker labeled Jerks, “just to make it interesting.” Irritating and exasperating are other words that might apply. In Jobs’ case, inspiring, too.
The obnoxious genius factor may explain the public’s continuing fascination with Jobs. The trailer for the movie “Steve Jobs,” suggests blemishes and worms aplenty to devour with our popcorn.
This is the latest in a number of movies about Jobs, Apple’s co-founder and world-changing pioneer of personal computers and devices such as the iPhone. Critics have said the new movie does not reflect the reality of the man. No doubt you are shocked that a movie has taken liberties with its subject. For a more serious treatment, I recently got around to reading his authorized biography, “Steve Jobs,” by Walter Isaacson. It was published in 2011, shortly after Jobs died of pancreatic cancer at age 56.
If you are like me — technologically deficient and still suspecting that tiny people live inside computers to do the work, probably for tiny wages — the book’s description of technological breakthroughs is a challenge. The more interesting story for me is the contrarian man.
He was a college dropout who did the hippie thing — every parent’s nightmare — and went off to India. But then he started Apple in his father’s garage with the indispensable help of Steve Wozniak, the computer brains of the operation. Jobs was not an expert engineer or great software writer. Instead, he was a visionary, a creative force, a perfectionist and a rebel.
It seems that his passion made him a perfect pain in the butt. He humiliated colleagues (although some credit him with spurring them to greater performance), he was slow to acknowledge his daughter out of wedlock, he even parked his car in the handicapped space at his office, all of which is classic jerk behavior.
Jobs’ life invites competing emotions: 1) In the light of his towering lifetime achievements, the rest of us are complete failures (well, I suppose I can speak only for myself.) 2) Even a genius can sometimes be a jerk. 3) If he hadn’t been a jerk, he might not have achieved much.
That last point is the most subversive. What are we to teach our children? Be a rebellious jerk, change the world? What are we to say to our bosses, now that intolerable behavior has a justification? I’d say that everybody needs to remember that a genius can be a jerk but being a jerk does not necessarily make you a genius.
I am proof of this. The troll community who monitor this column will confirm that I have written many jerky things and am no brighter for it. In my defense, I have not parked in any handicapped spaces, and I hope that’s not just out of the fear of being chased by someone with a crutch.
Still, I wish the man who created the iPhone had been able to see more i to i with those with whom he personally interacted. As William Shakespeare might have written today, “The evil that men do lives after them on the Internet / the good is oft interred in the cloud.”
Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli came out this year with another bio, “Becoming Steve Jobs,” which is said to take a more sympathetic view of his character. Their book has the blessings of Apple management, which didn’t like the book Jobs commissioned.
That Jobs allowed his official biographer to be entirely frank is very much to his credit. If I ever commission a biography, it will be on the strict understanding that I will be portrayed continually patting puppies while performing humanitarian works.
Steve Jobs was bigger than that, something to remember in the cinema.
Reg Henry is a columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Email: rhenry@post-gazette.com
