FROM JENNIFER ANISTON TO MEL BROOKS

EVERYONE'S ON "AMERICAN IDOL"

The smash TV hit "American Idol" is changing the lives of its contestants. But perhaps the culture as well. Somehow people are getting the idea that being popular is the same thing as being good. And so the best singers -- like the best candidates and employees -- often lose out to their more popular rivals.

Nothing Americans love better than someone to love. Talent can actually be a turnoff to voters who like their entertainers and politicians to be better than them, but not too much better. Easier to support someone you can love rather than someone you have to respect. That's often called democracy, and yet our Founding Fathers would never have understood it this way.

Constitutional democracy has always been about the will of the people, yes, but that will marshaled in support of the best or at least the most informed people and principles. Otherwise...well, otherwise we might just as well have cute, lovable Jennifer Aniston as president!

NOT EVERYONE'S ON THE TRAIN

Pilate asked the ultimate question at Jesus' trial: "What is the truth?" Folks have been searching -- and claiming they've found it -- ever since. But where in modern America is truth most likely to be found today?

Constitutions? Research laboratories? Opinion polls? Chances are none of the above, for each of the above are too much a part of the world. Better to stand apart and see the world from a totally out-of-the-box perspective. Which almost immediately conjures up the image of the artist.

Artists -- even the bad ones -- are not of this world. From Emily Dickinson to the Rolling Stones...from Walt Whitman to Walt Disney...from Anton Chekhov to Mel Brooks...these little chugging engines of creativity are always chugging up tracks no one has ever traveled before. Or wanted to.

But these artists -- and all the thousands who have chugged before them -- are God's (or Darwin's) gift to the rest of us. The rest of us who hardly chug at all. Instead we more or less stay in place hoping to find our comfort zone as close by as possible. But these funny few among us somehow need to do more, to be more, to chug more.

Good thing, too. Otherwise we might all stay comfortably -- and stupidly -- in place.