There's good news for those who rage at the evening news, shake their heads at Washington's business as usual, or watch as politicians carom from social crises to political crises to economic crises: Dennis Miller is here, and he means to shake the nation by its lapels.

Miller takes no prisoners. Whether the subject is dope-addled baseball players who can no longer swing their bats, do-nothing politicians who devote their careers to creating meaningful sound bites, or the nation's resigned acceptance of violence as a way of American life, these thematically arranged monologues are funny and angry. More significantly, they shatter the conventions of comedy by simultaneously making us laugh, think, and seethe.

When Dennis Miller takes the stage, the audience demands "the rants, the rants, the rants." Here at last is a collection of the invigorating and thought-provoking monologues that showcase his singular point of view.

NOW I DON'T WANT TO GET OFF ON A RANT HERE, but don't these radical religious right leaders scare you a little? I'm not talking about good simple religious folk here. I empathize with you people. I know you're frightened. It looks like the bad guys are winning. And I know you want to do the good Christian thing and save some of the bad guys, but you're probably preaching to the unconvertible. This is a long trail ride, and occasionally a satanic heifer or two is gonna head over the ridge and go off on their own. Let them go. Quit trying to set God up on blind dates with people he has nothing in common with. Well, anyway, you're good people and I got no quarrel with you, Atticus. I'm talking about the overzealous ones. The ones with that bloodless, glazed-over "Prophets of the Caribbean" look. You know, the ones who look like the guys who kept Howard Hughes alive those last three years. Let's run down our roster of modern-day Pharisees:

Jerry Falwell, with his big hillbilly grin concealing his hatred for you and the fun you can have with your nasty little genitals.

Then we've got Pat Robertson, the Dixie charlatan who contends he held counsel with God, saw Jesus, and has it on good authority from the Holy Ghost that "Cuber" has an arsenal of nuke-you-ler weapons aimed at the United States.

And our good friend Ollie North, who quivers with religious fervor while conveniently forgetting he was a belligerent liar who abused the authority of his position. You know I have no doubt that God will forgive Lieutenant Colonel North one day. I just don't our courts should have.

These modern-day Torquemadas can't wait to seize the reins and begin slaughtering the nonbelievers. And if you don't think they'll do it -- if you don't think you'll be on the short list for a public roasting a la Joan of Arc, well, you better stop dancing around the pagan Maypole and think again, Caligula.

Now I am sure to many of those in the Radical Right, I probably appear to be a bitter, cranky pragmatist with the mouth of a stevedore, and the soul of a heretic. But I do, believe it or not, consider myself to be a Christian -- and I'm sorry, you just don't go shooting doctors. If a judgment's to be made, God gets to make it. Not you. Him. You are Barney Fife. Keep your bullet in your shirt pocket. All right?

You know, God is Andy Taylor. If abortion is wrong, and I believe in many cases it is, somewhere down the line God's gonna let you know about it. And believe me, God paybacks are an eternal bitch. Somebody else's abortion is none of your business. And listen, if you really believe that your God is telling you to kill an abortionist in his name, then you've got to crush some tinfoil on your antenna, pal, because you're gettin' some heavy interference.

And you know, while I'm at it, I don't care what arcane passage you pull out of the Old Testament and run through your Jeremiah-begat-Jedediah Decoder Ring, one of the definitive tenets of Christianity is tolerance. Trust me, there's no version of the Bible that says Love thy neighbor unless he's a Peter Allen fan. Any supposedly Christian doctrine must have at the core a belief in the concept of unqualified love for your fellow man. Unless of course he proves himself to be a total asshole. Then you can ditch him. Sure, God understands that, who do you think booked Satan's flight? What he can't understand is turning against someone because you don't happen to agree with their sexual preference. Forget your linear, biblical interpretation that tells you to ostracize gays, and follow your heart. It's like when your driving test instructor would tell you to run the stop sign. And you would, and then he'd flunk you. And you'd say, "But you told me to." And he'd say, "Sorry, but you never run a stop sign." And you never carpet bomb a group of people with hate because they're different from you. Case closed, Tailgunner Joe.

And tolerance should extend to ideas as well. A schoolbook cannot corrupt your child, especially one whose main characters are a Scarecrow, a Tin Man, and a Cowardly Lion. And if you truly think your kid's character depends on prayer, then damn it, pray with your kid -- at home! Stop fobbing off on the public school system your responsibilities as a parent. The school's are there to teach your kids to read, write, and add -- skills they will need if they are going to apply for and wisely invest their unemployment checks one day.

And if you're sold on prayer as a diving board into the day, get up a few minutes early, forgo the trip to the 7-Eleven for a jeroboam of Colombian blend, sit down with your kids you profess to love so much, and lead them in prayer.

Look, I realize this is America -- everybody has the right to organize. The Democratic Party should try it sometime. But you know something, the members of the Radical Religious Right have to get it through their skulls: Separation of Church and State. Separate. Not together. Apart. Like Burt and Loni. One here and one there. The founding fathers set it up like hat because back home in merry old England they witnessed scenes of theocratic horror that would have made even Quentin Tarantino puke.

I can only hope the Radical Right's grab for political power will eventually prove to be their Holy Waterloo.

I know we don't like to vote -- marking your ballot nowadays is like choosing between the 3 A.M. showing on Beastmaster on Showtime and the 3 A.M. showing of Beastmaster 2 on Cinemax.

But the less we involve ourselves in the political process, the more special interest groups and fanatics move in.

So vote, and remember this when you're alone in the booth with just you and your lever. The Radical Right believes the word "Right" does not simply denote their placement on the political spectrum, but also their sanctimoniously smug assertion that "right" is exactly what they are on any and all issues. Amen.

Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.

I'VE HAD IT UP TO HERE WITH THIS "PC" SHIT! Why can't we just laugh at ourselves? Why, when a comedian does a joke on anything even vaguely controversial, do certain people moan like somebody let one rip during an audience with the Pope? I mean, come on, who actually moans at a joke? Who is responsible for that? Well, quite frankly, I'm pinning it on the gays, okay.

Now, now, I know there's some reflexively irate homosexual in the crowd thinking, "How dare you, Miss Thing?" And what I'm saying to you is this: I think so little of the variations in human sexuality that I refuse to treat you like a Faberge egg. You are part of the human collective. Come, join in our reindeer games. You too can be poked fun at. And that goes for the whole spectrum of special interest groups out there wandering the freakazoid Serengeti plain.

Now I don't want to get off on a rant here, but trying to negotiate straits of what's acceptably funny nowadays is like trying to navigate through the Sargasso Sea of plastic toadstools in the middle of a bumper pool table. I understand where political correctness comes from -- a scant forty years ago, we were doing "Amos 'n' Andy" jokes on the airwaves, for chrissakes. We were barbaric louts. But now, suddenly, we find ourselves in a classic overcorrection, where we're all supposed to zip through life like some huge societal squadron of Blue Angels, flying six inches off each other's taste wing, never ever deviating even one angstrom. Well, folks, there are a lot of different aircraft careening through the social stratosphere, and we better start working out some respectfully independent glide paths right now, or it's gonna start getting really messy.

Why don't we start by letting humor serve as our guide? Laughter is one of the great beacons in life because we don't defract it by gunning it through our intellectual prism. What makes us laugh is a mystery -- an involuntary response. If I could explain to you why Jerry Lewis makes me laugh when he's trying to be serious, and why he makes me straight-faced when he's trying to get me to laugh, I'd have the answer. But I don't. But damn it, I'm telling you the key lies somewhere in Lewis! Yeah, Jerry is the "Stargate" on this. And I'm pretty sure, the comedic Rosetta Stone lies somewhere in his "catching the cigarette in the mouth" bit. And I think Charlie Callas will back me up on that.

The point is, people who are threatened by jokes are the same people who tend to refer to actors on the soap operas by their character's name. Listen, there's a real world, and then there's the joke world, okay. The joke world we can get tough -- wear a cup. When I watch Dana Carvey tee up his impression of me and how I run my hand through my hair, it momentarily irks me. But only for a second. Because I realize it's a joke, and I don't want to waste one more moment being angry when I could get back to my true avocation, which is completely idolizing myself.

Y'know something, folks, it wouldn't hurt if everybody held their cards a little closer to their vest. Don't let 'em know they've rattled you if it hits close to home. You should be able to take that joke right in the solar plexus, get up, get that two-cycle weed-whacker engine of a brain humming, and give as good as you got. And if you get bested, go home, sharpen your verbal machete, and get ready for the next thicket.

Don't call Gloria Allred. Don't go to court. Don't steal a machine gun and shoot everybody at the party who made fun of your Jiffy Pop rag-hat.

Relax. Relax. The truth is, the human sense of humor tends to be barbaric, and it's been that way all along. I'm sure on the eve of the Nativity, when the "tall" Magi smacked his forehead on the crossbeam while entering the stable, Joseph took a second away from pondering who impregnated his wife and laughed his little carpenter ass off.

You know a sense of humor is exactly that -- a sense. Not a fact, not etched in stone, not an empirical math equation, but just what the word intones -- a sense of what you find funny.

And obviously everybody has a different sense of what's funny. If you need confirmation of that, I would remind you that "Saved by the Bell" recently celebrated the taping of their one-hundredth episode. Oh well, one man's Moliere is another man's Screech, and that's the way it should be. But there are those who feel the need to enlist you in a cult whose core doctrine consists solely of their personal beliefs. Well, I subscribe to the theory of "The Cult of One." The cult of the individual. That way, if I "lemming off the cliff, I'm only following my own nose and not the ass of another lemming. That's what America's all about. A great nation that guarantees you the right to lead whatever sort of existence you want to lead, that guarantees me the right to ridicule it mercilessly.

Come on, am I the only one who absolutely delights in the fact that somewhere out there near the pillars of Hercules there's a crazy old bitch like Marge Schott?

You know something, there's nothing wrong with a culture where everybody has a different idea of what's humorous. The last time I can remember an entire nation being on the same page, it was Germany in the late thirties and it didn't really turn out that funny. Remember: In its time and place, what Hitler said was considered politically correct; and it's that blind adherence to what is situationally palatable that is truly dangerous. We should question it all. Poke fun at it all. Piss off on it all. Rail against it all.

And most important, for chrissakes, laugh at it all. Because the only thing separating holy writ from complete bullshit is your perspective. It's your only weapon. Keep the safety off, don't take yourself too seriously, and remember that at the end of the day, this is just an ant farm with beepers, and it takes zero politically correct assholes to screw in a light bulb, because they are perpetually in the fucking dark.

Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.

HAS ANYBODY ELSE NOTICED THAT CIVILITY IS disappearing faster than a pack of smokes at an AA meeting? And you know it appears as if we've given up on trying to preserve it. Most people seem to accept this disintegration of manners as a fait accompli and have simply lined the borders of their personal space with razor wire.

Now I don't want to get off on a rant here, but we've developed over the last few decades from a Barry Lyndon gentility to a bunch of Thunderdome mooks. Nowadays, thoughtless clods all across this great land of ours do everything from clipping their fingernails in restaurants to checking themselves for polyps in the buffet line. As a matter of fact, you can't go anywhere without suffering incivility.

You go to the mall to pick up a smoky-link Gouda gift set from Hickory Farms. You come out, your car's been keyed and some workforce fringe player has left a flyer on your windshield about how you can get 10 percent off gay porn films at Dick's Porn Film's Video Shaft.

You go into the supermarket and you wind up in the line that is clearly marked TEN ITEMS OR LESS, CASH ONLY, waiting behind a Ninja drifter with no ID, who's attempting to pay for fourteen fucking cartloads of puddin' pops with a personal check from the Bank of Tehran.

People no longer understand the basic rules of courtesy. Rule Number One: You must get out of the way and let people off the elevator before you can get on the elevator, okay? Rule Number Two: When you call someone at three-fifteen in the morning and get the wrong number, don't just say, "Oh, this isn't Charlene?" Click. Say, "I'm very sorry to have pestered you. I am an assface." And Rule Number Three: Turn your goddamn car stereo down -- did you ever think that maybe I didn't want to hear the bass line to "Baby Got Back"? Did that ever enter your assface skull, assface?

Even when I try to escape the cold, rude world, and isolate myself in a darkened movie theater for two hours of unencumbered escapism, I get stuck behind some idiot faux-Truffaut with my Anna Nicole Smith-sized box of Milk Duds.

But you know the fountainhead of all this bad behavior has got to be the daytime talk shows. What an intergalactic fucking freak show these are. You tell me, what Rusty the Bailiff Fan Club meeting do they go to to harvest these losers? Ricki Lake? Richard Bey? Jerry Springer? These people shouldn't be allowed to own a TV, for chrissake, much less be on it.

And you know their guest not only aren't ashamed of their asinine antics, they positively revel in their own grand mal shitheadedness: Screaming in people's faces, screaming at the audience, the audience screaming back . . .

I just want to say fuck this culture, pack up some jerky, and go time-share with Jeremiah Johnson.

Look, I'm not some tie-dyed karma maitre d' trying to seat everybody in the no-conflict section. Day-to-day life, to say the least, can be combative. As far as I'm concerned, the New Age goal of perpetual, smiling bliss is a far worse hell than anything imagined by Quentin Tarantino on windowpane.

I don't want some vacant-headed, defanged Quaker land. That's not civility, that's banality. And I'm not talking Amy Vanderbilt civility either, where there's nine goddamn forks arranged around your dinner plate like some cutlery Stonehenge and if you choose the wrong one you're sent away to become Edwin Newman's personal sex-toy.

But you know, I am saying that when civility breaks down, the fall of civilization is close behind. It is surprising to anyone that the least rude of all countries has 222 million guns? It's gotten so weird out there that we've all turned inward and in the process we seem to have forgotten there are other human beings schlepping in this pebble. That's where civility comes in.

Civility is acknowledging that we don't live in a solipsistic universe. We do share this planet with each other, and we should strive to coexist in some sort of civilized, respectful manner. And so to all of you out there who don't cover your mouth, who don't have the money ready when you get to the tollbooth, and who do burp so loudly in public that others wonder where the epicenter was, to all of you dwelling out there on the grassy knoll, if you don't want to join in this noble pursuit of good manners we are all cordially invited to, please . . . go fuck yourself.

Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.

WHY DID JOHNNY FAIL IN SCHOOL? WHY DID Johnny start hanging out with heroin addicts? Why did Johnny get caught boosting stereo equipment? Why did he go to the big house? And why was he released two years later and then apprehended with a Mannlicher Carcano in a hotel room overlooking the President's motorcade route?

Well, Johnny will tell you, in this week's People magazine, that his problems are all about the fact that when he was five years old he was in the school play, and get this, Mummy arrived ten minutes late. You see, Mummy disempowered him. Mummy ruined Johnny's life.

Now I don't want to get off on a rant here, but thanks to the notion of the dysfunctional family, every zipperhead in this country can now tap themselves with the Freudian wand and in a flash go from failed frog to misunderstood prince. Tad tubby? Mummy mistakenly thought food was love. You say you're angry. Must have been your brother's midnight wedgie raids. Huh?

Or maybe you haven't fulfilled your sappy little junior high daydream about being the greatest person on earth, hailed by all, from the lowliest bootlick to the richest barons of the industry -- And you just know it would have happened if only your selfish parents hadn't totally ruined your self-esteem by obsessing on paying the bills instead of obsessing on paying attention to you and your silly, talentless antics on the diving board at the public pool.

Listen -- folks, we all have dashed hopes, mere figments of futures crushed by graduations, jobs, marriages -- reality. Sure, it's tough waking up from a deep REM delirium starring you as the focal point of the universe to an Eraserhead reality in which you're the condiment guy at Der Wienerschnitzel. But you know something, that shouldn't give rise to this shrieking cacophony of blame.

Every day we get a new escape hatch from the psychiatric community: Co-dependency, addictive personalities, inherited personality disorder, multiple personality learning disorder, no personality whatsoever disorder, fetal membrane subcutaneous infectious submissive sexuality dislocator, Epstein Roseanne Barr . . . for Christ's sake, we are going over a Niagara of psychobabble in a barrel full of holes.

We have become a community of ragged recidivists dedicated to the proposition that all parents are created equally bad and the progeny/progenitor dynamic should be the landfill for all our personal shortcomings.

And if you're deep enough in denial to actually think that you did have a happy childhood, then your shrink will tell you, you must be forgetting something.

"Think back, think back, way back . . . would some drugs help you remember? . . . Maybe a subtle question or two will help jog your memory, like . . . did your auntie Hortense ever make you take a bath with her? Did your own father ever put his mouth on your stomach and blow? And what for, if not to humiliate you? Sure, there you go, there's a good reason why your friends make more money than you.

"Hey, Jinky, you shouldn't feel bad about flunking out of school and getting fired from the trampoline center. It's not your fault. It all goes back to when you were an embryo.

"Don't you feel better knowing that all your problems were laid on you, man? All right, we have to stop now, Mr. Jinkelstein. That'll be a hundred and eighty bucks. And now that we know you have more personal baggage than Joan Collins on safari, I think you should start coming in twice a day for the next four Olympics or so because I need to pay off my Lamborghini."

Look, I'm not insensitive to the real victims of abuse, the human casualties of alcoholic neglect. There are people out there who have been dealt absolutely fucking brutal cards, and it breaks your heart.

But you cannot join that club solely through intellectual ledgerdemain. Let's be honest; too many unhappy, unfulfilled, people see the bulletproof excuse of dysfunction lying there and pick it up like a cudgel to ward off any personal responsibility for their lives. And as long as we continue to allow people to make the easy turn and casually claim that they're victims, they will never even make the effort to Fitzcarraldo the boat over the mountain and achieve true personal victory.

Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.

NOW I DON'T WANT TO GET OFF ON A RANT HERE, but that's the problem with America. You can't tease anybody. I read now that gay people don't even want to be called gay anymore. They now wish to be referred to as Asian.

"Hey, what's Dennis saying there, man? Is Dennis saying all Asians are gay? Is Dennis saying all gays are Asian?" You know what I'm saying . . . all Asians are gay.

Now somewhere out there, there's an Asian person talking pen to paper in protest. And I want you to hear me out . . . put the pen down, it was a joke. Walk away from it. Let it go. It never happened. It was a comment on how pathetically neurotic we've all become over our own little piece of turf. Obviously, you know don't believe that all Asians are gay. For Christ's sake there's a billion of you, I know somebody's fucking out there, okay?

And yet this is what it's come to.This is what it's come to in contemporary America. Everybody's broken off into these petulant little Travis Bickle tribes. Everybody walks the perimeter of their own damaged esteem ever-vigilant against an incursion by They, Them. The Other Guys. Everybody's touchy and everybody's encouraged to be touchy, everybody that is . . . except me: the White Anglo-Saxon male. I'm everybody's asshole. Black people think I'm oppressive and physically deficient. Women think I'm oafish and horny. Gay people think I'm overly macho and latently homosexual. And Asians think I'm lazy and stupid. Hey, you think you've got an ax to grind? I'm fuckin' Paul Bunyan over here, okay, folks?

And if I'm expected to be genial, there's a principle of reciprocity here, I expect you to do the same. Why are we so hung up on the name calling? We are all such overgrown babies. As it turns out adult life is just a tall grade school: "You suck," "With your mouth," "Hi, my mouth," "Hi, me." It's embarrassing. I can't believe it, the playground is way back there in the mist. We've got to let it go and get on with it. Why do you think we get hung up on all the little bullshit?

I have a theory: I think we're far less evolved ourselves. I know we consider ourselves to be very nineties creatures, we take it all in, we deal with it . . . we put it back out. We are just the hippest little creatures, but you know something? I think in a deep gut level we're scared shitless. We live in a madhouse and it's brought into our living rooms on a day-to-day level via CNN. And we see things that we probably aren't equipped to even vaguely get our head around. Children in Somalia . . . the atrocities in Bosnia -- Cal-a-frag-a-listic-ex-pee-al-a-docious. I think all this shit comes down and we think, "Christ, it really is out of control."

So what we do is we take all the little bullshit things, we trump it up into something bigger than it actually is, something we can mold and handle, and in some vague pathetic way keep our feet tethered to the planet.

And that's why this entire country has turned into Gladys Kravitz from "Bewitched."

Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.