Chutzpah is their superpower (Dominic Sandbrook edition)

I have a friend who subscribes to Private Eye and every once in awhile he gives me a pile of old ones. They’re pretty much in random order so who knows what will come up. I mostly read it for the book reviews, but the British politics stuff can be fun too. It’s cool that they have a magazine like this in England that will just print stuff without having to be all polite about public figures who lie, cheat, or steal. On the other hand it’s a bummer that the liars, cheaters, and thieves can pretty much go about their business even after being repeatedly exposed.

Anyway, I was amused/horrified by the above story. Apparently this Dominic Sandbrook dude is a respected popular historian! But I guess this doesn’t stop him from writing stupid things for the newspaper.

The more general point, though, is how effective it seems to be for Sandbrook to have this level of chutzpah that he could just flat-out contradict himself without addressing the contradiction at all. For most of us, this would be hard to do: we’d want to resolve the contradiction, or explain it, or deny it, or . . . something.

I’m not saying that chutzpah is all it took for Sandbrook to reach the professional heights that he’s attained. I’m sure that, as is generally the case, quite a bit of talent, hard work, and connections were required. Still, the chutzpah seems to be a key part of the mix.

To return to the title of this post, chutzpah does seem to be a “superpower” in the current sense of the term, meaning a commonplace habit that just about anyone could develop.