Douchebag of the Week (July 18-24)
Up until Friday, your editors here had pretty much thought that Deadspin had already made a pretty convincing argument that nobody had a rougher week than the folks at ESPN—with two highly douchebag-worthy offenses there, no less.
But lo and behold Friday when the term douchebag seemed to be the only logical way to respond when shadeofgrey asked, “This guy CAN’T be for real, right?”
I really can’t tell. It would be pretty funny if it was all a big joke, but if he is serious, oh Lord, what a douchebag. He’d be the DEFINITION of douchebag. There is no douchier-bag than this guy.
This article about him seems to indicate that he is, in fact, real?
Nope, not a joke and if it is, still, he’s an insufferable douchebag.
Yeah, not exactly a tough call this week, folks. Hell, even the author of the feature about the man actually concludes “it was possible to see Arthur Kade for everything he is — an unmitigated douchebag, to be sure, the poster boy for all that reeks about contemporary society and culture (the former businessman turned aspiring celebutard, forging a burr-hole through the cacophony that is the Internet), but a character at the same time entirely familiar, one wholly American, a modern-day Tom Joad setting out, sanguine to a fault, westward.”
We don’t really know what else we can add here that isn’t already laughable on its own, but that “Kade Scale” certainly left us in remarkable disbelief at what a pompus ass this guy is. Better yet was reading how this man actually justified this “scale” and his wildly warped view of himself and others with claims of “reverse discrimination“—not to mention invoking a “Sex and the City” character Wikipedia describes as a “nymphomaniac narricist.”
But to us, the real goods came from early June, when the disgraced best-selling author James Frey met with Arthur Kade for Gawker (the site describes Kade as “a character so committed to perfectly attaining the state of ‘douchebag’ (as originally defined) that some suspect he’s a performance-art hoax”). On his own blog, Kade actually wrote (emphasis ours):
I am not sure why I am surprised at these things happening anymore considering how big I am now, but it’s still weird to have celebrities want to meet you. I think that when this is all said and done, and I have accomplished the level of success that I will, I believe that books will be written about me, and I will be in the pantheon of names like Bogart, DeNiro, Nicholson, etc., and I want to sit down with a great author like James and maybe write my memoirs for the world to learn from.
In all honesty, that scenario couldn’t be more fitting: Kade sitting down with the same man David Carr had once described Oprah Winfrey as using publicly “to mop up the floor and clean up her reputation at the same time” after it was discovered that a number of details in his memoir were fabricated.
Perhaps with Frey’s assistance, Kade can effectively gather up “A Million Little Pieces” from his own diary of delusion to release what could only be titled, “One Giant Douchebag.”
