moron famous — 47 names i stand behind

i made a list of famous morons and stand behind every entry. the criteria was simple: did they do something publicly indefensible and refuse to apologize. that gave me 47 names. then i added myself in pencil at the bottom, in case i did anything before friday.

11:03am, wednesday. writing from a chair the building lets me use for unrelated reasons. carla is two floors up at a vendor walkthrough she has dreaded since the invite arrived. the floor is empty enough to risk a tab.

let’s be honest about what this is. moron famous is not a textbook category. it’s one i invented this morning between two emails i won’t open and a slack notification i muted on principle. the project: name the public figures who qualify by my private filter, and stand by the list with the calm a man brings to a slightly bent fork he intends to use anyway.

moron famous: an informal label, applied here, for well-known public figures who have done something publicly indefensible and refused, on the record, to apologize for it. the list is unverified, mildly insulting, not legally actionable, and includes the writer of this post in pencil at the bottom for reasons explored throughout.

FORTY. SEVEN. NAMES. PLUS. ME. IN. PENCIL.

moron famous, what we are even doing here

the moron famous list, in its current form, is a text file on this laptop, indented with em-dashes. the inspiration came from the longer entry on the qualifying word, where i make my full case for taking the title. that piece established i wear the word willingly. this piece extends the courtesy outward.

the criteria, again, is two filters. one: a publicly indefensible act, in writing or on camera, no charitable reading available. two: refusal to apologize, formally, after being given the chance. an apology — even a poorly written one — disqualifies a name. the list is not a list of mistakes. the list is a list of held positions.

i also excluded anyone whose indefensible act was private and leaked. the filter requires intent, not accident. that knocked out twelve entries. the list is short enough without a methodology for stolen group chats.

the inventors who broke things first

the first column of the moron famous list, when sorted by occupation, is inventors. by inventors i mean the people who made a thing, on purpose, that did not work, and then stood next to the thing on stage and refused to call it a problem. i am, in this respect, a small civilian member of their fraternity. my contribution is a microwave count i’d rather not discuss in writing on company hardware.

there is a long tradition of inventors doubling down on a launch the room had questions about. somewhere in a workshop in the 1700s a man, i’m certain, lit a candle made from the wrong fat and told a paying audience the smell was a feature. that man is, by my filter, the original entry. his name is lost. fame is not the only criteria. the entry is.

i didn’t include the names from the entry where i unpacked what the word historically meant, because most of the historically catalogued morons were not, in the modern sense, famous. they were filed by men in waistcoats who are also not famous. the list i’m building today has different bouncers at the door.

the artists with the bad takes

the second column is artists. i’d say musicians and actors and the occasional novelist, but the lines blur at the edges and the column is, in spirit, anyone whose job is to be looked at. artists, when they say something publicly indefensible, do so with better lighting than the rest of us. that lighting does not change the verdict. the verdict still stands.

the documented pattern in this column is the late-career interview. a long career, a magazine cover, a glass of water on the table, a question that should not have been answered, and a sentence that the artist, three weeks later when invited to clarify, will not walk back. that sentence becomes the entry. the album from that year sometimes survives. the sentence always does.

my private folder, the one where i keep my own version of the long-misread word i wrote about earlier in this cluster, has fourteen screenshots of artists in this exact column. several carry the watermark of a website i can’t remember opening. the wall does not require provenance. the wall just requires the entry.

the executives whose ideas were on fire, briefly

the third column is executives. by which i mean the people whose name appears under a job title with the word “chief” in it, who give a presentation in a windowless room, and whose presentation contains a slide that, in retrospect, should have been deleted. the slide goes out anyway. the presentation gets recorded. the recording leaks. the executive is given the chance to clarify. the executive declines. the entry is open.

this column is denser because indefensibility, at the executive level, arrives bundled with documentation. paper survives. tweets survive. the keynote is on a streaming platform with closed captions. no lost evidence here. only refused apologies.

credit cards are a personality trait, i said to a man at the corner two months ago, between a nodding bartender and the radiator, and the man, predictably, called me a moron in his reply text two days later. the screenshot is on the wall. that’s the hot take i’m leaning on for this whole post — the executives in column three are, on average, men whose ledger is a personality trait, and the trait is what gets them on the list.

the moron famous list i printed for the digital fridge

i printed the moron famous list, by which i mean i copied it into the same file where i keep the wall of insults. the file is a folder of screenshots and saved messages used against me by, at last count, sixty-six different senders. an hour ago it was sixty-five. an email from a stranger this morning bumped it.

i ran an audit of the wall this week. it pulled fourteen instances of public figures using the word, on camera or in writing, against each other. some landed in the famous column. most moved out — the speaker walked it back. the famous column, as established, does not accept walk-backs.

the printed version of the list, the one in the digital fridge folder, is stapled, metaphorically, next to a screenshot of a man at a podium calling another man at a podium the qualifying word. the staple is metaphorical. the fridge is metaphorical. the only real piece is the file path, and that’s a step too literal to share here.

i should mention the entry where i complained about how the word is said, because the way it leaves the mouth, soft on the back syllable, is part of why the famous list is, by my read, possible. the word is too gentle to feel like an indictment when applied to someone with a publicist. that gentleness is the engine of the column.

closing pulpit, the famous are us, slightly luckier

the vendor walkthrough ran ten minutes past its window. carla is back. she set down her badge with the thunk of a person who has just survived a slide deck animated by procurement. the row is undisturbed. the tab will, by the time she pivots her chair, be a spreadsheet.

and for the cinephiles, the matter of the 1994 film “dumb and dumber”, in which two adult men named harry and lloyd commit, across one hundred and seven minutes, an unbroken sequence of publicly indefensible acts and decline, scene after scene, to apologize for any of them. the film does not, technically, file them under the moron famous label. it does not have to. the entries are locked in. their pencil entries became ink somewhere around the gas station scene.

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