PARADE WAS REMARKABLE SUCCESS

Sunday evening's downtown Christmas Parade was a remarkable event and one that we hope will become an annual mainstay of our Christmas season here in Cape Girardeau. Anyone who might have expected a half-hearted effort was certainly in for a pleasant surprise from the 57 entries and the hundreds who worked hard to make this parade a huge success.

Downtown Cape was alive with shoppers and sightseers, both before and after Sunday's parade. We arrived early, young nieces and nephews in tow, to take in the window at Hutson's Furniture, another annual tradition. The Hutsons' choo-choo trains went over, BIG, with the toddlers. Many parade goers headed for restaurants afterward.

The brilliantly lighted floats, motorcycles, fire trucks, antique cars and other entries delighted young (especially) as well as old, and left us all looking forward to next year. Many of these were joyously commercial, but no one could forget the holiday's spiritual origins and meaning. These, also, were prominently featured.

The whole event left everyone with a good feeling for the start of the Christmas season. Well done.

* * * * *

Is it an important signpost

for American culture?

A new television commercial for a barbeque sauce may just be an important cultural signpost. It may just be that we can begin to laugh the Politically Correct (PC) totalitarians out of our midst. I've not yet seen the 30-second spot, and so I rely on a recent newspaper article's description of it.

The commercial opens with a cow pictured, grazing serenely on an idyllic hillside. Accompanied by music, the announcer's soothing voice says, "Since before the dawn of history, many humans have regarded cattle as sacred beings, even gods."

Fade to the next scene, which shows a rooster. The same, soothing announcer informs us, "For eons, the beloved rooster has served human society as man's treasured alarm clock."

The third scene shows a lamb playing on the hillside. "The lamb," the announcer relates, "since time immemorial, the very gentlest of God's creatures."

The next scene shows a Weber barbecue grill on the same hillside. The announcer says, "We say, `Eat 'em all!'."

Marketing people for the barbeque sauce company explain that they can afford to offend animal rights fanatics and other PC pests "who will never buy our product anyway."

The same article continues, describing a new cable TV show that carries the provocative title "Politically Incorrect." The format of this show is to invite comedians on who will go out of their way to offend against the tenets of Political Correctness. The TV show's host explains his wickedly irreverent view of animal rights with this example:

"If hooking a monkey's brain up to a battery might save some poor person who'd otherwise die from AIDS, then I have two things to say: Green is positive and red is negative."

* * * * *

If Michigan "doctor" Jack Kevorkian is so enamored with death, I sure hope no one will do anything to interfere with his latest hunger strike. It turns out that the suicide "doctor" is a true-blue, death-worshipping, morbidity-fixated fanatic and a walking nut case. Newsweek magazine's current issue has done an investigative job on "Doctor" Kevorkian. The following USA Today summary is chilling.

Kevorkian once urged fatal tests on inmates

Dr. Jack Kevorkian has had an obsession with death for 40 years, and once advocated experiments on the living that would be fatal, Newsweek says.

The report says Kevorkian:

* Sent a paper to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1958 suggesting convicts be allowed to volunteer for fatal tests.

* Wrote in 1960 that killing inmates without experimenting on them wastes healthy bodies. He said some could be kept alive, but conscious, so -- "if the experiment was not excessively mutilating -- they could "be revived if evidence of innocence was uncovered."

* Wrote two decades later that all people facing imminent death should also be used for experiments.

* Said in 1986 that Nazi experiments on Jews were "not absolutely negative."

* Told the Detroit Free Press magazine in 1991 that "The Jews were gassed. Armenians were killed in every conceivable way. They've (Jews) had a lot of publicity, but they didn't suffer as much."

From USA Today