The Counterculture Criteria

Simple truths

JUSTIN A. HINKLEY

We seek simple truths as humans. Complexity scares us and the more difficult it is to understand something, the harder it becomes to believe it. That pandemic seems worse in America.

Americans revel in simple truths. Hard facts. Common sense. Romanticism was drained from our common psyche sometime after the California gold rush. That is not to say we are not romantic; no, we have a firm grasp on woo and sway. But romanticism, that ideology of bigger things, grander things, more possibility, the idea that the world might be bigger and better than what we see around us, we lost that with the assimilation of the Oakies into the mainstream cultural fabric.

I don't know what killed it. Perhaps it was World War II, which put a grand sense of nationalism into our brainwaves, creating the modern "American" identity and taking away our urge to stretch our borders. I don't know; I doubt anyone really knows what it was, but now our sense of destiny and dream is gone, not necessarily from the individuals but from the collective American consciousness.

Because of this, we demand simple truths. An action is either right or wrong. A person is either good or evil. We try to find higher callings in religion, but our demand for simple truths is so prevalent that we have turned religion into politics, creating the "Christian right." Forgive me if I am wrong, but when I read the Bible, I always gathered that religion created a moral line that guided our political choices, not governed them. And nowhere in those many pages did I gather that we should make religion a political party.

Boy, did things go weird somewhere. Americans were born romantics, seeking grand and oblique truths. Many of our ancestors were sent here as criminals or outcasts of European society, but we were not bad men. We were wanderers, explorers and seekers, but were not vagrants. The Westward Migration created the outlaw as the mystic, bending the rules here and there to accomplish that greater good of Independence, Prosperity and Acquisition.

But somewhere between the  death of the cowboy and the defeat of the hippie, we lost that generalization of morality. We were not measured by our actions as much as by our association, not by the merit of our conviction as much as by the consequence of our conviction.

The Public, that violent outcry of media talking heads and organization press releases and coffeehouse chatter, is no longer concerned with the finer points of a person's beliefs or actions. The Public is quicker to decide and more fierce with its reply to a moral choice. We are either dopers or clean, we are either Democrats or Republicans, weirdos or the norm.

The one thing I have tried to accomplish above anything else with the Counterculture Criteria is to make people think in broader scopes. Over the last two years, I've covered musicians, dopers, sexual deviants, drunks, Nazis, politicians, political activists, religious zealots and general weirdos. Their stories have been valiant, lame, queer and sometimes vehement. I don't know that I've always captured the true spirit of the thing, but I've always hoped to convey that inside all of those fascinating and frightening epithets burns a natural human spirit, evolved from the same seed that bred all of their rivals. Each person is driven by a passion as strong as their opponent, but steered in a different direction.

That is something most seem to lose in the easy testament of simple truths, which will forever be a fatal error of judgment. There are no simple truths, and that is the chief commandment of the Counterculture Criteria.

The Hawkeyes show the wolverines who's boss

ANDY FITZPATRICK

Tonight, Iowans will get to flock to their caucus locations and help determine who the candidates for president of the United States will be this year. They will cast their secret ballots and stand in their preference groups. They will wield power few others in this country get to experience.

Especially those of us in Michigan.

Only since the 1970s, Iowa and New Hampshire have had what some would say is the most power in deciding the country's presidential candidates. While these two largely rural, mostly Caucasian populations get pandered to by the networks and the 24-hour cable news channels, other states are left with the scraps. Usually, the Iowa caucus determines who drops out of the race. If Ron Paul, for example, finishes last in Iowa, he will likely drop out (or not). There is noise that if Fred Thompson doesn't score at least a third-place finish in Iowa, he'll call it quits.

Admittedly, the winners aren't necessarily always the lucky devils who get the nomination. Bill Clinton came in third in 1992; Michael Dukakis was also a bronze in 1988. On the red side, George H.W. Bush was third behind Bob Dole and Pat Robertson in 1988 while he defeated Ronald Reagan in 1980 (that Reagan kid seemed to do okay for himself in that election). But even a third-place finish in Iowa has a morale-boosting effect for the candidate's supporters in the rest of the U.S. That's probably what Thompson is banking on.

At that point, the rest of the nation is "allowed" to vote for who's left by the people of Iowa and New Hampshire. This cycle, the Democratic National Committee gave permission to Nevada and South Carolina to have their primaries before February 5 in an attempt to appear more diverse. It's a step in the right direction, but it's not enough. 

Then you have the interplay between the two states. Rudy Giuliani has forsaken an Iowa campaign to focus on New Hampshire and the rest of the Super Tuesday (or Super Duper Tuesday, if you prefer) states. The once-thought-to-be-dead John McCain is getting a bit of a boost in Iowa polls, and Giuliani's lack of presence there may be the cause.

What does all of this have to do with us in the Great Lakes state? Michigan had the audacity, the temerity, to suggest that maybe this whole process isn't exactly fair. Or balanced. Or right. So, Governor Jennifer Granholm approved of a move of the state's Democratic primary election, pushing it up to January 15. Florida thought the same thing, and scheduled  a Jan. 29 primary. As a result, the DNC stripped both states of our delegates to the national convention. While our delegates may still get to vote in the convention anyway, the possibility exists that Michigan may be completely left out, our primary votes tossed into the wind like so much garbage.

In a country where people have died to make sure we can vote.

The Republican party shakes out a little differently. The Republican National Committee has taken half of the delegates from states that decided to have earlier contests, including Michigan and New Hampshire (which probably wouldn't have an early primary, but had to in order to stay ahead of us in the great unwashed masses). And while several Democratic front-runners have taken their names off the Michigan ballot to fall in line with their DNC overlords, Republican top dogs have stayed on. They are also campaigning here, unlike John Edwards or Barack Obama, who are staying away from the state. Hillary Clinton remains on the ballot, but has vowed to not campaign here until after the primary.

A political party should be allowed to nominate its candidate in whatever manner it chooses in a free society. However, there is a cost to be payed for doing so in a flawed, biased manner that leaves out too many of us.

Iowa image from here.

No more time in the ditch;No more time for hopelessness

JUSTIN A. HINKLEY

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

— From "The Road Not Taken," by Robert Frost

Counterculturalism had its birth as a highway to optimism. The Counterculture mind is a ramp up into the upper realms of consciousness. The Counterculturalists have always been the ones who looked at things as they are and said there is another way, if not a better way.

The Marquis de Sade, Henry David Thoreau, Doc Holiday, Ernest Hemingway; these are the people we have to thank for the free will, high-thinking, outlaw rambler literates that became the first of the modern Counterculturalists: the hippies.

These people weren't going against the natural flow for the sake of creating a ruckus or managing some sort of revolution. No! They were doing what they thought was right, and damned if they had to do it alone.

But with the death of the 60s came the death of that optimism. No more of that Flower Power balogna. No. Nixon had won, the war went on, the drugs never took us to that high-rolling white castle on top of Xanadu.

Somewhere after that, all the uppers turned into downers and the Counterculture mindset became an ugly word. It was no longer just "fight the man," it had to be "damn the man and his whole family, and may they all go to Hell."

It's had an ugly effect on the roots of our energy. When we devote all our time and strength to tearing things down instead of finding another way around, we create a very negative vibe that feeds lust, hatred and anger.

Our Counterculturalists are no longer thinkers, for the most part, they are sulkers, feeling damned and stupid and injured and deserving of some greater righteousness because they are victims. They don't know who's done such evil to them, only that it's been done, and somebody ought to pay. They cloak themselves in wounds and scream at the world and call themselves different, when really they are all the same as the ignorant dopes before them, the ones who got ripped up on revolution music and heroin and went around calling for anarchy and the death of the Man.

The Man killed my ozone, they say, without offering much hope for how to fix it. The Man killed my right to free speech, they say, and then waste that right by plastering the "F" word on the sides of trains instead of saying, like Thoreau did, that we ought to "aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something."

We don't have time for that kind of bull anymore. The Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Eight is a crux of our very civilization, my friends. It is an election year, the Year of the Rat. It is the year where the decisions made in Bali will be implemented. It is the year where cars will have to drive cleaner or just screw the whole thing and let's all move to the moon. The year where we all have to get into better-paying jobs or risk falling down a notch or 12, like Russia before the World Wars.

We don't have time to curse and scream and feel wounded. It is time to get back to our roots, to call out against the Old Guard and the plain ways of thinking and be radically different by challenging the thoughts that put us into this mess. The Republicans were on to something when they said capitalism fails  only when the working men and women don't care to work. Watching Internet porn and listening to heavy metal music is NOT Civil Disobedience. It is foolish to think it is.

Cast out those festering thoughts of hatred and no longer be a monger of the victim's paralysis. Think boldly but wisely, and change the world for the better or at least as an experiment for something better.

If we cannot do this, we deserve whatever fate the Rats cast down on us.

The role of a journalist

JUSTIN A. HINKLEY

This should be an unnecessary little screed, but it isn't. Countless times, after I or my colleagues write a story for the Enquirer, we get calls from angry and ultimately confused and incorrect readers. They want us to do something about the subject we wrote about.

If we reported that the roads didn't get plowed, they want us to plow them. If we report that a school is closing, they want us to keep it open. If a business is moving, they want us to keep it here.

That, as we politely explain, is not the role a journalist plays. We do not interact with our subjects. We don't control the outcomes of our stories. On many occasions, we've never met the subjects we're talking to until the day we interview them. We don't write about things we are involved in; we don't write press releases.

With the exception of columns (which are easily identifiable by our mug shots running alongside them), we don't interject our personal opinions into our stories. We are objective, clear, concise and factual and nothing more.

My editor once told a reader that we are like mirrors, reflecting in print the realities of our community exactly as they happened, no biased editing.

I've also heard us described as sponges: we suck up all of the information out there and regurgitate it into black and white so that you, the reader, can know exactly what happened where you weren't.

But neither of those exactly describes our job. Yes, we are mirrors to the community. Yes, we are sponges. But we are very scientific and precise in our reflection or regurgitation. We can't just go suck up the information and spit it back out, we have to filter out all of the false truths and all of the subjective mess and put out on paper the most accurate story we can.

A mirror can't do that. If you wear a mask and stand in front of a mirror, it shows you the mask. As journalists, it's our responsibility to show you the mask and what's underneath it.

If you use one sponge to soak up a mess of milk, wine and feces and wring it out into a bucket, you'll get a single whitish-brown liquid. As journalists, it's our responsibility to be that one sponge cleaning up all of that refuse and then somehow wringing the milk into the jug, the wine into the bottle and the feces into the toilet.

In doing so, we are as objective as we can possibly be. If it was milk, wine and dung, we don't leave the dung out to make the story sound better.

Many of our readers seem confused on this. They thing we added the crap, our left out the honey, or made the mess ourselves, or in some way had some control over making sure the stuff never got spilled in the first place.

We don't. We hear about the mess through a press release or on the police scanner or through a tip from a reader, we go out to the mess and do our sponge thing, come back and somehow manage to squeeze it out in a way that makes sense.

So the next time you think of calling one of us and telling us to change reality, remember that we can't. But we'll certainly try to get you in touch with someone who can.

The Year of the RatMore doomful predictions from the winding-down era fo the Counterculture Critera

JUSTIN A. HINKLEY

Things are very bright and merry around my house this time of year. The tree is up. The Christmas lights are on. Christmas carols belt nonstop from my stereo, driving my wife crazy. She's ready to choke me with the stereo cord.

But I need an escape at the end of every year before I can even think about looking at the next year. When I try to look ahead, my chronic pessimism — a disease I was diagnosed with when I was 15 — gets my brain swelling. By New Year's Eve, my whole head is covered with massive welts and my forehead is always dripping sweat from my brain's overexertion.

I always see doom when I try to look ahead, so I take time out during Christmas to screw on a little egg nog and think happy thoughts.

I have enough sourness to look forward to in 2008, which the Chinese call the Year of the Rat.

The Associated Press reported the other day that the oldest American World War II veteran died in Ohio at the age of 109. Whenever I read stories of WWII vets, I think of the stories they can tell, the stories I've heard, and start to agree with the grand consensus American opinion that says World War II was the last noble battle our bullets were fired in.

Rather unlike the war in Iraq, the American perception at least was that WWII served a grand purpose, our boys overseas were all heroes and The President would never steer us wrong. World War II was just, they said, and it seemed that way to the people back home and it echoes that way through our history books.

But every war since then, including Iraq, is different. Support for both George W. Bush and his "crusade" is hurriedly falling. People are angry and frustrated and impatient and more and more, people are seeing doomsday coming down the pipe.

I am one of those people, but it is not just the incessant death we hear about on CNN. No, there is more: 2008 is an election year, and politics always gets me on edge. I love the game, but I hate the consequences, both for the winners and the losers. Too much blood spilled for so little change.

Well, it's Christmas Eve now and I think I should get this out of my head so that tonight and tomorrow can be simple and easy. These premonitions are heavy on my heart, forcing it to slow to about two beats per minute and sucking all the blood from my brain. I need them out to increase the circulation. Here are my predictions for the coming year:

1.) Hilary Clinton or Barack Obama will cinch up the Democratic nomination early, but will be unable to capture the presidency in November, since they'll be running against a white male Republican. I think Rudy Giuliani or John McCain will be elected. The polarizing effect of people voting either for or against a black man or a woman will have long-lasting effects in political circles and rallies in support or against Obama or Clinton will see violence. Bigotry is not as dead as people would like to think.

2.) Corporate America, especially the auto industry, will see another year of massive layoffs and cutbacks as it struggles to comply with new auto emissions standards developed at the Bali UN Climate Conference. The ends are certainly necessary and justifiable, but the means will be tiresome and hard as manufacturers struggle to meet said standards.

3.) The War in Iraq will continue and our troops will stay, so long as we aren't side-slapped by Iran or North Korea, which would force such terrible atrocities I don't even want to think about it. The next president will be the one faced with the tough decisions necessary to get US troops out of Iraq, and he will face backlash from all sides on how he does it.

4.) Music will get very interesting. These signs were coming heavy in 2007: The Foo Fighters' country-esque breakdown in "The Pretender;" The White Stripes' "Icky Thump;" the growing popularity of bands like Arcade Fire and We Are Scientists. It will not all be good; it's hard to write interesting and unique sounds without really sounding like crap. Movies in 2008 will suck; with 2007 such a a great year, it'll have to be an off year for screenplay writers.

5.) One more tough year for newspapers and journalists. We're struggling with this whole transition from print product focus to what corporate Gannett calls "Web-centric," meaning a strong focus on Internet multimedia, like this blog here. Many journalists will be out of work this year and probably the next, until the Internet boom starts to pay off (as it will) and we ramp ourselves back up to the 1970s-era prestige we had.

God, I can't do any more of this... That's it, for now. We'll check back into this maybe New Year's night.

Signs, signs, everywhere

JUSTIN A. HINKLEY

And the sign said anybody caught trespassing would be shot on sight
So I hopped the fence and yelled at the house, "Hey, what gives you the right?"
To put up a sign to keep me out or keep mother nature in
If God was here, he'd tell it to your face, "Man, you're some kind of sinner."

— "Signs," by The Five Man Electrical Band

 

A lot of hippies got a very special groove on when they heard that song, back in 1970, as their era was winding down. It was a fantastic anthem for rising up against the square, flat face of The Establishment, for crossing boundaries and trying to hold onto the last rattles of pure freedom they were after before JFK, MLK and Bobby all went down.

Now, a lot of Yupers will be clamoring for that rallying tune as environmentalists say the Upper Peninsula's forests are being bought up by corporate interests.

This ran Wednesday on The Associated Press wire:

TRAVERSE CITY — A long-cherished way of life may be changing in the Upper Peninsula as new owners take control over vast forest tracts, environmentalists and university researchers said in a report issued today.

Investment and real estate companies that have acquired more than 1 million acres of U.P. woodlands in recent years have different priorities than the timber companies that previously owned them, the report said.

The new corporate landowners tend to regard the forests as an investment rather than solely as a timber source. The changing mind-set may bring more uncertainty for logging and tourism, both crucial sectors of the peninsula’s economy, the report said.

It also may reduce public access to forestland — particularly with scenic waterfront vistas — and promote disruption of the landscape by road, buildings and other structures.

“Our research shows that the sprawling forest tracts that have long been part of the U.P.’s allure are already getting smaller and more fragmented,” said Robert Froese of Michigan Tech University’s School of Forest Resources and Environmental Science.

“Land along Great Lakes shoreline and along streams and rivers are increasingly owned by small private interests and therefore less accessible to the public.”

The report makes nearly two dozen suggestions for promoting sustainable ownership and management of woodlands in the Upper Peninsula, where 8.5 million acres — 79 percent of the land base — is covered by forests.

That's right, 79 percent of the land base. Miles and miles of forests, where a man can get lost and find his soul. It is these forests that drew Europeans deep into the interiors of the Northern lands and that fed the American Indians for centuries before the Europeans arrived.

"Wilderness is a necessity. They will see what I mean in time. There must be places for human beings to satisfy their souls. Food and drink is not all. There is the spiritual. In some it is only a germ, of course, but the germ will grow."

That fine bit of wisdom is from John Muir, founder of The Sierra Club. He knew a thing or two about being alone in nature and the healing powers therein. Many of Upper Peninsula residents and visitors are wishing he was there now.

Of course, many others are thinking dollar signs, of the big booming logging industry that still exists up there. Muir had this to say about that:

"Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed... Few that fell trees plant them; nor would planting avail much towards getting back anything like the noble primeval forests."

This is an important issue that needs looking at by educated and pure-hearted people. On almost any given day during any given season, Michigan's wilderness is a beautiful sight. With a failing automotive industry, farming going belly-up and a long ways to go before green energy becomes our mainstay, our wilderness is a cash crop we can't afford to lose to corporate buyers. During the treacherous budget debacle in September and October, state parks was one of the many things facing the guillotine. They survived, but the very fact that they were considered for the ax-man shows how low they rank.

Hunting alone — presumably a tiny fraction of the total outdoorsman industry — generates about $500 million in Michigan. We must protect our wilderness for ourselves and our children, and their children. To answer the Electric Band's question, nothing gives corporations the right to keep mother nature in.

Moving hips for GodOr: What Would Jesus Do, After All?

JUSTIN A. HINKLEY

Today I interviewed John Gafton, a youth minister at Battle Creek Friends Church, about the church's semi-monthly ROCK CHURCH events. The event brings big-name Christian rock artists into the church's sanctuary for concerts, in an attempt to reach out to teenagers and bring them into the Light.

Because I am writing this story, I won't go into many heady details on my personal opinions about the subject, in maintaining my professional objectivity.

I do, however, want to make a quick observation not on the ROCK CHURCH events or Friends Church in particular, but on the nature of the church and rock and roll in general:

Gafton told me that his grandfather was banned from a church in the 1960s for rolling his hands across the keys of a piano. He was playing too much like Jerry Lee Lewis, they said, and they wanted no part of that in their church.

Forty years later, Gafton is bringing some very quick and punky-looking kids into his church's sanctuary, and they are playing very distorted guitars and they are bouncing around their stage like jackrabbits in heat. Jerry Lee Lewis might even be embarrassed by the dancing these kids do today.

There is nothing menacing or demonic about the modern-day Christian rock bands. I have met many and in my experience, their hearts are pure and their intentions cherubic, their sounds are just updated. "Amazing Grace" has lost its effect for the majority of the youth in today's world. Christians who want to minister with music don't want to play the same old boring hymns and kids who want to find God get lost in the somewhat dull melodies of religious standards.

I'd like to think that whatever god exists up there would have better things to do than damn a bunch of teenagers for moshing or playing a distorted chord progression and screaming. At least they have passion.

Of course, it's also interesting to note how often the Christian ideals and the once-Counterculture ideals start to merge in modern times. The teens of the 1950s and 60s prided themselves on their strange dress, odd haircuts and freaky music and how all of that separated them from the uptight ways of their parents. Today, a God-fearing teen can bother his or her former-hippie parents with worship music that's louder, faster and harder than the music their parents had.

So Counterculturalists have to get weirder to make a statement. The music has to get angrier, the dress has to get stranger and the attitudes have to delve deeper into a hard-damaged psyche.

Or, maybe the church wins them over, and the Counterculturalist can find a happy median with the church, enjoying the music and dressing the same way he or she always did... After all, it's usually pointless just to fight for the sake of fighting.

'The cool state'... It ain't us

JUSTIN A. HINKLEY

It was Gov. Jennifer Granholm who, back in the early parts of her first term, started the Cool Cities initiative. She urged Michigan cities and towns to come up with plans to make their downtowns hot spots for hip people, and she promised grant dollars for it.

I haven't heard the phrase "Cool Cities" in a couple of years, but I don't think we have much to worry about, anyway.

With the weird bungling over the state budget recently, Lansing managed to get the whole country laughing at us and so many business and working people scared for their pocketbooks that we'd have a hard time attracting the "hip" crowd even if we made coffee free inside state borders and filled the state Senate with old Motown players.

The country was frustrated with us again over the push for presidential primary slots, which, no matter how right or wrong the Dems or GOP may be, created a big and ultimately unnecessary mess for Michigan voters during an already confusing campaign.

Couple this with an embattled manufacturing industry and Michigan comes up on the wrong end of the toilet pipe.

As far as "cool cities," Michigan of today has only a few medium cities to speak of and perhaps only one (Detroit) that anybody outside of the state has ever heard of. The rest of the cities are struggling to survive, along with all of their residents.

I've been covering a lot about small towns in our area (Athens, Bronson, Coldwater, Homer, Charlotte) all fretting to try to at least sustain a population level that can make a city run.

The idea behind Granholm's Cool Cities is to stifle the outward migration of Michigan teens from all of those small towns, thereby keeping all of the money those young people will make in their lives inside the state's borders.

All of the conventional and new wisdom says that towns need to create a vibrant cultural center downtown, with plenty of arts and entertainment so that a safe environment is created for all of the Gen-Xers and younger will sit and drink coffee or beer and feel happy with their hometowns.

But I think we're getting far away from that dream. The state's no help and these cities are left to fend for themselves, trying for federal grant dollars and creating their own endowment funds.

But when a Michigan high school senior picks up the paper or turns on the TV and sees that his state lawmakers are bogged down in infighting and all of the money's going away and taxes are going up and jobs are going out, it won't matter how lively and vibrant his downtown is. He'll want to be somewhere where he can watch a dueling pianos show and still have money left in his wallet.

The fortune-telling taxAnd more for escorts, too

JUSTIN A. HINKLEY

LANSING — In what many are considering a serious blow to the Counterculture way of life, state legislators have  yet to agree on a way to do away with what lackeys are calling "the fortune-telling tax."

On Halloween, as part of a deal to fix a big hole in the Michigan budget that would have caused a government shutdown, lawmakers agreed to extend the 6 percent sales to include many services. They did this to prevent the shutdown, but hoped to rework or repeal the tax as soon as the shutdown was avoided. They have yet to do this, and the budget they passed says it will go into effect Saturday.

Among the services that will be taxed, fortune-telling, palm-reading, party planning and social escort services worry Counterculturalists the most. These are services they revel in and own, and some consider them religious experiences that should be tax-exempt.

Of course, Counterculturalists aren't alone. Moms who want to brass their baby's first shoes and people who like the guy holding the towel in the bathroom are angry, too.

Here's how it looks to me, and I could be wrong:

• Lawmakers saw the giant, gaping hole staring them in the face and the services tax was an obvious part of the solution

• They also saw the increasingly scarce but powerful behemoth that is Michigan businesses glaring at them and threatening to leave if the service tax passed

• Lawmakers formulated a plan to push the tax through to fix the budget and keep their jobs, but promised to rescind the tax as soon as possible to keep businesses in the state

• Of course, if the tax is gone, they'll have the same ugly hole to deal with next year. So they bicker and let the thing get in anyways, and both sides can blame it on the other for refusing to budge

That sounds cynical to some, but to me, that's good politics and sound logic for an easy to get done what needs to be done without having to take the blame for it. The businesses will pass the tax onto the customers and the customers will complain for a few years at most and then it will all be back to normal, except for the dozens of businesses — like Kellogg Co., perhaps — that have up and left the state for warmer, cheaper climates.

Rome ruled the world for hundreds of years until it collapsed under its own weight. Russia was a major player until it stumbled under its own arrogance. The U.S. walked tall until it realized it had to understand why it had such tall stilts in order to keep walking on them.

The high is over now, people, and the hangover's getting heavy.

So these eight white guys walk into an auditorium...

ANDY FITZPATRICK

After watching last night's CNN-sponsored YouTube debate amongst the GOP presidential candidates, I can't tell if I'm filled with optimism or dread. On the one hand, their constant question-dodging and obvious level of discomfort with having to answer questions that have been more or less unfiltered was amusing (no matter how boring my wife thinks it is). On the other hand, though, I realized that it's not a far step down from the Democratic debates, which are filled now with mostly backbiting and sad, cowardly attempts to appear centrist and not the liberal pinko commies they're terrified of being labeled as by those who don't even really know what those words mean.

I didn't watch the entire thing ("South Park" was on, after all; I mean, let's have some perspective). The parts I did watch included a question about the death penalty and what Jesus would do. Governor Mike Huckabee deftly managed to obfuscate this to the point that by the end he was declaring himself against abortion. That was after he talked about how, as governor of Arkansas, he had to make the hardest choice in his life: whether to carry out the death penalty. Jesus? Nary a mention. Thanks, Mike. Well, he did mention Our Savior once, after Anderson Cooper reminded the governor that he completely ignored the question. The answer was nothing short of intellectually bankrupt.

Also, did you know that Rep. Tom Tancredo prays? And that, as president, he will pray? It's true!

Another interesting part was when a rather serious fellow held up a Holy Bible to his Webcam and asked the candidates this:

"Do you believe every word of this book?"

The answers were sort of amazing. Not for the words that they used, or the answers themselves, but the way they answered. I don't know if I've ever seen a group of people more visibly awkward than when trying to answer that question.

These are Republicans! The party of moral order, authority and God Himself. Shouldn't they be able to handle this? And this wasn't some kind of Wolf Blitzer "show of hands" nonsense either; they had the full time allotment to answer.

You may chalk it up to them trying to pick the best words for their base voters. The Christian Right would be watching, and should they take a chance on losing that vote? Mayor Rudy Giuliani, to his credit, managed to answer with some measure of intelligence and nuance. Well, compared to the unhinged, war-mongering answers he's now famous for. Which is good, because I'm sure more literal Bible-readers have some opinions on cross-dressing that America's Mayor may find himself at odds with.

However,the best part of the evening as far as I saw came when Sen. John McCain dressed down Mitt Romney for his ridiculous answer to a question about whether waterboarding was torture or not (the short version of Romney's comments: even talking about it emboldens our enemies!). While Romney responded to McCain by basically reiterating the non-point that he's against torture, but we can't say what torture is, the senator seemed as if he could barely even look at Romney. That's okay, Senator McCain. A lot of us have the same problem.

I likely won't vote for any of these men, but if I have to live in a country run by John McCain...well, at least I know there will be some kind of standards.

Note: Here is the full debate from www.youtube.com. Incidentally, at the very same time CNN was airing this warped dog-and-pony show, ABC was broadcasting "How the Grinch Stole Christmas." There's a joke in there somewhere.

Chuck Jones rocks. You can find out more about him here.