Nietzsche once said that every higher civilization is based upon cruelty. Which leads me to believe that the big N used to spend a lot of time in singles bars, an experience which has made many of us throw up our hands and cry, “Oh the humanity!” But cruelty is certainly rampant in our culture.

It should be noted first that some lesser known synonyms for cruelty are: idiocy, irony, ridiculousness, banality. Nietzsche failed to note this in his rambling treatise on whatever on earth he was talking about. Okay, I never actually read that quote. I just heard about it somewhere, but it sounded reliable.

But observe that the tobacco industry recently suffered a major judicial blow in an infamous Florida lawsuit. It is estimated that compensatory damages sought by the 500,000 “victims” could reach $300 billion.

This kind of thing could bankrupt the tobacco guys involved and lead to the end of cigarettes. The very prospect of this makes me gasp in asphyxiation. Or gasp anyway. Can anyone really survive in a world without Winstons?

Incidentally, I think I feel some cancer in there somewhere. I mean, how much cancer do you really need anyway for a good lawsuit? Will I need to lose a lung?

All of which leads me to my point about cruelty. How am I gonna survive without cigarettes?

I know what you’re thinking, those cause cancer. That’s years from now, and when I do get cancer I want there to be someone around for me to sue the daylights out of.

In short, my plan was to smoke two packs a day for twenty years, get lung cancer and consequently get rich. This is essentially what the plaintiffs in this case did.

And they now seek to rob all of us would be cancer victims and potential millionaires from our rightful dues.

Just think, each tumor you get could be worth millions per ounce. That cancer is suddenly valuable. This is cruelty on a scale that Nietzsche would not have dreamed of. Schopenhauer may have considered it of course, and Thomas Hobbes no doubt cackled in glee at the prospect of such bizarre turnings in our social structure.

In local news of cruelty, Veishea is once again alcohol-free this year. Gestapo tactics will once again be strongly in evidence as alcohol-sniffing brown shirts roam the streets, putting an end to all fun and happiness. I am not concerned with this, however, because not even the Gestapo can stop me from drinking. As we all know, it’s the, ha ha, principle of the matter and not the actual facts or anything.

It is nothing short of our civic duty to go out and get hammered when the government seeks to legislate morality on so grandiose and pedantic a scale.

All of this stop-smoking and stop-drinking mentality, is well in line with Americans rampant, overzealous puritan ethos.

And pithily sarcastic columnists can hardly strive to dent this well established thickheadedness.

And it could even be argued that these super-dense moralists are really doing what’s best for me anyway.

Yet how cruel has a civilization become when it denies the rights of its own citizens to pursue their own petty and ridiculous, let us even say, cruel enjoyments?

And anyway, it’s not like I’m spending a lot of time listening to the overly buoyant Briteny Spears or watching reruns of Columbo. Why can’t there be laws about those things? Or money garnered for damages to my aesthetic sensibility?

More cruel still is the anti-trust case against Microsoft. Nothing could be more unjust than the desire to penalize this goliath monopoly for righteously squashing competitors.

Cruelty is in evidence in professional sports as well. Tiger Woods was cruelly denied yet another victory when some other guy unexpectedly played a lot better then he did.

There are also the more serious instances of cruelty with the sports heroes who will only accept millions upon billions of dollars for chasing little balls around.

How about giving some of that money to the cancer victims, huh? Spread the wealth, I say.

At times it seems a plague of troglodytes has taken over our society and is ripping it asunder from whatever it was previously attached to. Cruelty is proliferating faster than belly button rings and butterfly tattoos. Everywhere you turn people are knocking each others heads together and belching in public.

My solution is to get everyone drinking and smoking again. Get some bad habits to keep you busy. Of course, throwing stones at people will keep you occupied too. So do whatever.

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Dan Johnson is graduate student in English from Davenport.