Don't be fooled by tyranny of the nice (tyrannyofthenice) 12.14.01

Since Council Bluffs was just ranked no. 5 on St. Martin's Press's Most Polite Cities List, I would like to take this opportunity, if you please, to talk about politeness, good manners and the tyranny of nice people.
I am not a nice man. I have never claimed to be nice nor have I aspired to "niceness" at any time in my life. I come from a long line of frontiersmen and not nice outdoor types and should I ever get the chance to breed, I am sure my offspring will not be nice either.
I do not lament this fact. I see "niceness" as a plastic veneer of false pleasantry that can just as easily be covering something truly dark or truly vacant.
Some of the most horrible people I have ever met in my life were quite nice. "Nothing personal," they would say and "have a nice day" as you gasped for your last breath. You never saw it coming due to all that niceness.
Nice people can screw you over just as fast as anyone and being nice is just evolutionary camoflage they use to fool you long enough to get in under your radar and sink a knife between your ribs.
I worked with one of the nicest racists I have ever met in my life while at college. She was so sweet you just wanted to dip her in your coffee like a candy cane. She sang in her church choir and didn't engage in naughty banter. She had a smile for everyone and truly believe in niceness as a way of life. She could laugh right when she was expected to whether she got a joke or not.
She was terribly nice one day when I was ordering Chinese for the office and asked her if she might like some crab rangoon or anything.
No thanks, I don't eat Chinese, she said.
Why, I queried, too sweet?
No, I just think those people are dirty, she countered sweetly like Donna Reed goosestepping in jackboots. They don't have the same standards of cleanliness as us.
Wow, I thought quietly to myself, this chick is seriously messed up as I backed away slowly smiling nicely so as not to draw attention from the demon that was obviously living inside of her.
Not one of the greatest people I have ever known personally or admired from far off were nice. Mark Twain, in spite of the Disneyfied version most Americans get of him and his work, was not a nice man. He smoked and drank and made frightfully witty putdowns of people he felt were worthy of ridicule. He was fond of making off color jokes and remarks in polite society just for fun, but he wrote against slavery and hated true evil. He just knew the difference between what is truly wicked and what is just a wicked good time.
My grandmother is not a nice person, but she could kill chickens all day long and give half of them away. With a bloody knife in her right hand and a bloody Camel in her mouth - kill, kill, kill, give, give give. And she never got salmonella. Why? Because salmonella was too scared of her.
It's like Batman. He shows us it is quite possible to be good without being nice or polite. The mistake many of us make is to assume nice and good are the same thing.
Truth is, the easiest thing to fake is being nice and polite. They say even the devil can quote Scripture to suit his needs, well I say he can act polite without bursting into flames too.
I've said my piece in defense of Council Bluffs. But I've been around a bit and we rank as one of the top most polite cities in the United States is baffling to me. We're OK, but no. 5?
These lists are so arbitrary that their results are meaningless, but somehow, it just isn't NICE to say so. Well, at least it is honest.
The cities on this list were chosen by travelers who, for some reason, just felt like calling and nominating a city for being polite? That's nice, but what is the standard? How dow we know where they come from isn't just so much worse than us that we look good in comparison.
Every time I have traveled, I fully expected the cities I was visiting to be rude and they all surprised me. I thought Washington, D.C. was more polite than any other because a convenience store clerk got all chatty with me about being from Iowa and a woman in a restaurant asked me to open her bottled water for her and then thanked me. That's it. That's all I have to go on and I am still impressed. If I lived there, perhaps I would see the real D.C.
Common decency is necessary for any society to move along smoothly, but niceness and politeness are not. Decency is doing the right thing and politeness is just being nice when you do whatever it is you were going to do anyway.
Nothing wrong with saying "please," "thank you" and "do you mind if I don't?" once in a while, but let's not pretend that's all we need to make a decent society because the truth is, it is a lot harder than that.
-Greg Jerrett is a Daily Nonpareil staff writer. He may be contacted at 328-1811 ext. 279 or by e-mail at gjerrett@nonpareilonline.com.