I hate to break it to you guys, but you're a bunch of assholes.

Look at you - you chow down on the third world, and dump it out all over the fourth world, pausing occasionally to throw a sucker punch into the second.  It's a good thing there aren't fifth and sixth worlds, or things could get *really* ugly.  (And don't you third world assholes get too smug - you'd do the same if you had the POWER to do so.)

"But wait!" you say, "You sound like kind of an asshole yourself."

Indeed!  I couldn't be more of an asshole if I had hemmoroids growing out of my back like sinister, diseased, necrotic pseudopods, pulling passersby into the pungent, scrunchy pink orifice that is my soul.  What of it?

But, from another point of view, the asshole is the most refined, most aristocratic organ - it incarnates the principle of discrimination.  It is the point at which the body definitively expresses disdain - conclusively rejecting that from which it shall not be nourished.  And rejection is the same funciton as acceptance.  So, the asshole is the nexus of discernment, of preference - of that scale of values without which we are no higher than the rocks.  (Which, I suppose, we aren't, but work with me here.)  The asshole, through evaluation, determines the import and purpose of the world, and of our lives within that world.

Still and all, when you get down to it, we're not only assholes in the refined sense above-proposed, but, much more often, in the sense of being good only for the one thing - giving everyone and everything shit.  We have the opportunity to rise to the sublime levels of pyroflatulation, which illuminates, warms, and leaves no trace - but instead we just reach into our diapers, grab a fistful, and smear our names on the walls.  What can be done with such creatures as we are?

Perhaps we should re-examine the aristocratic brown star we were celebrating above.  The principle of discernment - what is it, really?  To say that green is good, but orange is tacky?  To play at the game of God, determining what shall be valued and what rejected?  To impose upon the world a scale of values grounded in our own pathetic instincts, drives, upbringings, fears, neuroses, and endless grasping neediness?  To elevate our selves above the rocks, and above the good, honest night soil we shed so anxiously, and with such hostility?

"Meaning!  I give the world meaning when I insist on the superiority of Coke to Pepsi, of protein to fiber, of Picasso to Popeye, of good to evil!  Without me, it would just be an endless series of meaningless gestures, an endless variety of possibilities being played out, and every part of it equally valueless!  A kaleidoscope of shit!"

Alright, now that you've, eh, vented, riddle me this:  What would be so bad about that?

Thought so - asshole.