This page is dedicated to the proposition that all things being equal, most people are idiots that God gave the right to be happy, the skills to ruin the planet, and the wisdom to not know the difference.

Most true learning, to paraphrase Mark Twain, goes on despite our education. You go bumping around from site to site, from idea to idea, from wise man to dope, looking for a cheap thrill, looking for a little action, and occasionally looking for stimulation and a relief from pure material consumption; not as our academicians and pedants suppose, to "educate" yourself. And you know that this so-called goofing around, this play, is actually healthy and you are learning. I'd like to think of myself as a nice guy who is trying to understand where things stand; how the universe functions, how our very selves come to interact and know. The larger questions of life plague me and I would like to give something back for the trouble. Unfortunately...

I'm not a nice guy.

Now, we could stand around all day and talk about who is weirder and who is cooler and what sort of narrative vision Christianity has provided America with, but everyone knows this is not important. It has all become relative. Relative to what?, you might ask. I think it has all become relative to NICENESS. If you are nice (and a big bonus would be good-looking), you can play off just about anything.

You can play off the idea that perhaps there is a fountain of happiness. You can play off the idea that you don't really have to work hard, you just have to refine this or that technique. You can play off the idea that your rock 'n' hardcore death band is not really a commercial brand of nihilism, but rather an attempt to liberate the youth of the West from their capitalist chains and trendy parents. You can even play off the idea that there is no truth, only a personalized sort of happiness that is defined by how good you feel about yourself at any given moment; the absurdity of which is taken to further and further extremes by each new celebrity book.

The problem is that everyone has become nice. Not 1950s nice, but correct nice in the way that, I find, MTV's the REAL WORLD to display wonderfully. All the roommates are so very diverse yet they all bow down at the alter of tolerance and good fashion sense. Only one roommate, thus far, has been an outspoken lout, and his name has become synonymous with pop-Nazism; Puck.

This "tyranny of niceness" has usurped any and all good sense when it comes to matters of society, religion, politics or just plain-old everyday dialogues. Think about Newt Gingrich. What don't you like about this guy? He's just not nice. That's what it boils down to. He's might be outspoken and he certainly could be questioned on several political fronts, but that is true of just about every other politician. The fact is that he is not contrite about hoisting his opinions by the truckload on the American people. Now this is just plain wrong, isn't it? The only real opinions one should have in this day and age are those opinions that do not offend anyone.

But opinions are offensive in that they give out views of the world that are to be accepted or rejected or chewed on. They are our perceptions of the way the world operates and what is right or wrong about those machinations.

"Don't get me wrong..." has become the proverbial defense and excuse for making any sort of statement these days. This plays out at the corporate level where butt-covering is thought to be a Sun Tzu strategy and at the teen AGE level, where noone wants to caught holding an idea; that could be construed as fascism.

So what's the point?

The point is that the rise in niceness and tolerance brings about a subsequent rise in idiocy. No one questions anything anymore. Everything slides by in huge cultural waves and there is mass acceptance or mass apathy or mass polite refusal, but there is no mass criticism. Check it out at your daily level. I, for one am surrounded by idiots. I see managers who don't want to make decisions. I see teenagers who want to conform in the latest unusual fad while preaching some off-brand of non-conformism. I see parents who don't want to punish loud, obnoxious, selfish children for fear of damaging their psyche. I see educators who have no idea that their very lives depend on reading and writing and critical thought. I see television news programs roll out the latest B-celebrity tragedy in the hopes of gaining another OJ event. I see failed icons and rude grocery clerks and ignorant preachers and egotistical hackers and maniacal cult leaders and minority-pleading bigots and expert-ridden average Joes.

We love them all.