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Nice People Be Damned
(Are you an original recipe or an extra-crispy?)

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by Jason Roth

I recently spent a week with people afraid of independence. Afraid of controversy. Afraid of thought.

Shit, I'm presumptuous. I'm assuming that people's avoidance of intellectual topics means they've avoided the topics consciously. Maybe the topics never occurred to them.

How many times can you talk about:

• the weather
• the taste of the food
• what your boyfriend/wife/husband said/likes/does
• any random sensation that happens to impinge on your senses

I was recently on a week-long business trip. The better terminology, however, might be "controlled experiment", since it consisted of spending six full days with three of my "nice" coworkers.

I put "nice" in quotes, because the consensus of world opinion is that anyone who fails to offend others is a "nice" person. And "nice" is considered a positive attribute. To me, "niceness" drives me up the fucking wall.

Being around nice people makes me want to slash my wrists in boredom. Or, if I'm staying in an air-conditioned hotel in San Jose, it makes me want to jump out my window. Or sunburn myself to death. Is that possible? If I ever killed myself, it would be in an amusing way, I can tell you that. Imagine the newspaper headline.

TRADE SHOW EXHIBITOR FOUND DEAD NEAR MARRIOTT POOL WITH THIRD-DEGREE BURNS -- STOMACH UNSCATHED THANKS TO HALF-READ COPY OF CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY'S "LITTLE GREEN MEN"

Nice people never say anything controversial. They're so... they're so... well... they're so goddamn nice.

What the hell is actually going on in the mind of a nice person? Anything? Is anything alive in there? Are they really only thinking of "that reminds me of that time when..." or "that's so funny how..." or "wow, look at that..."? Bla, bla, bla. Bla, bla, bla, bla, bla.

(And no, dammit, I won't spell "bla" with an "h". Even if it is the socially accepted spelling.)

Nice people never stop talking about the poor guy or girl who... etc. Or "I can't believe that..." etc. Or "Imagine if..." etc.

Nice people will never say anything that surprises you. Nice people will never say anything that makes you think. Nice people leave you with the overwhelming desire to have your face slapped. Just to remind you that they, and you, are in fact, alive.

Who would you rather talk to? Someone who's "nice", or someone who challenges you, disagrees with you, makes you think, and wakes you out of your stupor that has grown after a day, month, or lifetime of conversing with ten thousand nice people? Please. Give me one person who isn't fucking nice! Even if I dislike them, at least I've been given the opportunity to experience an emotion stronger than "oh, that's nice".

The "nice" personality has two component attributes. The first, alluded to above, is the propensity to walk around with a mindless grin and pleasantly avoid all the "sensitive" topics. The second attribute, however, can be even more annoying. It's the outright rejection of controversial topics.

The degree to which a nice person rejects controversy is what separates the two major varieties of nice people.

Here's the first variety. The truly bland, spineless, soulless, nice people. This variety will sit quietly if a controversial topic happens to arise. Or, they may attempt (politely, of course, since after all, they are "nice") to steer the conversation towards another topic. For example, if the conversation gets way the fuck out of hand and becomes a debate over "religion: good or bad?" (Heaven forbid!), the extra-bland nice person might say something like the following:

• Isn't Tom Cruise a Scientologist?
• I used to live next to a church. I like church bells.
• I have a Jewish friend who was married to an Islamic fundamentalist by a Brooklyn rabbi and a Iranian cleric. It was a beautiful wedding. Everyone had such a nice time, and you should have seen the buffet! I love pigs in a blanket, don't you?

The second variety of nice person, however (let's call them "extra-crispy" rather than "original recipe"), has a tendency to reveal a defensive, nasty side. This brazenly unnice side manifests itself whenever the extra-crispy nice person senses an attack on "traditional values", or encounters an unabashedly pro-absolute stance. Extra-crispy nice people take personal offense to the not-nice. They've spent their lives upholding "the nice", and they'll be damned if anyone assaults their "I'm ok, you're ok" approach to morality.

For example, if you dare to say "religion is a joke", you're casting stones at "good people" who can "believe whatever they want, as long as it helps them". Nice people are relativists (or to put it another way, moral agnostics), and the extra-crispy variety defends the beliefs of unthinking morons precisely because extra-crispies are even more afraid of absolutes than original recipes. (Or because, perhaps, that they're more intelligent and conscious of their particular fear.)

Nice people have a primal fear of independence. They've renounced making difficult choices, and extra-crispies are extra spiteful towards anyone who has the balls to think for himself. Extra-crispies defend the indefensible because it makes them feel like their fantasy world without a necessity for difficult, independent thought is a reality. If the extra-crispy can justify, for example Joe Blow going to church (because Joe and every one of his ancestors was a conforming, non-thinking follower who did what his parents did) then that defense, in turn, supports the extra-crispy's own delusion. Specifically, the delusion that his failure to make difficult choices (in religion or any realm of thought) is also justifiable. Their delusion is a corollary of "I'm ok, you're ok." It's "everybody's ok, so I'm ok".

Original recipes and extra-crispies both fear controversy and independence. The only difference is that original recipes will run in the face of a threat, whereas an extra-crispy bares his teeth.

Personally, I think original recipes and extra-crispies should both be fried in a vat of hot oil.

Oh, and can I have mashed potatoes and cole slaw with that?

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