4
Wednesday, March 3, 1976
University Dally Kansan
Diplomacy inconsistent
One would have thought that former President Richard Nixon had already done as much disservice to his country as one man could possibly do. Yet there he was again, back in the back, back in taking his nose where it had no business.
WHY THE CHINESE invited him isn't clear, but Nixon's main purpose for the trip seemed to be to relive the glorious days of his presidency. As a private citizen, he has no official diplomatic function although he has offered to brief the Ford Administration on his talks with Chinese officials.
Nixon never had an accurate conception of who he was or what he was entitled to do as President. He was continually interfering in matters that shouldn't have concerned him and exceeding his authority. Now a shadow of his former face, he greets the ceremonial remnants of his broken power and demonstrates that his San Clemente exile hasn't changed him a bit.
Nixon serves as a kind of archetypal figure for the evils of political and big business corruption. The Securities and Exchange Commission is now investigating 54 companies for bribery, rackets and other misconduct. Already 17 companies have admitted making illegal contributions to help reelect him.
Clearly, heaping scorn on Nixon is something like crying salt tears into the ocean, but his personal stains of corruption are indicative of the larger
blight afflicting big business in its international dealings. Exxon, Gulf, Mobil, United Brands, Northrop and Lockheed have all been involved in massive overseas payoffs. Lockheed, the latest to be hit by the series of scandals, used bribes to influence public officials in foreign countries to buy military goods. Lots of that military hardware was unnecessary and sacrificed desperately needed capitol in underdeveloped countries.
ALTHOUGH THE corporate contributions to the Nixon campaign were illegal, most companies escaped with a light fine. Most of the foreign payoffs were in $ Laws. In fact for many weapons firms, bribes are a standard procedure.
Nixon invoked the same corrupt corporate mentality to make his recent trip to China. That sort of corruption stands in stark contrast to the open diplomatic relations the state department says it is trying to develop with foreign governments. But foreign officials are much more likely to do so than it would privately or online representing American corporations than with Henry Kissinger or some other official representative of the government.
Working for a more honest and open foreign policy in the state department while harboring corruption abroad in the sector is self-defeating diplomacy.
By John Hickey Contributing Writer
Football Wizard triumphs
Saturday night. The college town reels in playful relaxation. Students dance and drink and dance to music, and enjoy the opposite sex. A few study.
But one student does none of the above. He has bigger shrimp to boil. He is the Football Wizard.
HERE HE COMES now,
defy sidepesting drunks as he saunters from bar to bar. His expression is one of dispassionate amusement; his shirt is horizontally striped.
Casually, he enters a bar and drifts his way back towards the tables. A can of Lite in one hand—a Foosball Wizard must be conscious of his figure—he works with his team to work. Poor fools. They really think they're good. The Foosball Wizard lays his quarter face up on the edge of the table and bides his time.
HE DOESN'T have to wait long.
"Whose quarter?" asks the winning team, peering through the smoke and the stupor.
"Mine," replies the Foosball Wizard, stepping out of the crowd.
The winners look puzzled.
Where is the guy's teammate?
"Don't worry," says the
dog. "I don't care."
Foistle shouted.
"I work alone."
THEIR SHRUGS ARE followed closely by the grazing sound of the quarter mating song. This brings birth to 11 dirty white balls.
The ball is dropped. Brak-
barckbrakkkbrrackbrak. The Foosball Wizard scores his first goal.
"Roady."
at least one free game. Oh well, the crowd parts reverently and lets the Football Wizard go in search of another bar.
In his wake he leaves nothing
One of his opponents coughs. It is a soft, quiet cough.
The Wizard nods and the
"Er-yeah," he says.
"Ready?"
By Jim Bates Contributing Writer
second bail is dropped. Brack barkkkbrakgoal.
Brackkkbrakbrakgoal.
PEOPLE ARE already beginning to drift toward the machine. The players at the next table find it harder and harder to concentrate on their game.
The crowd grows. The players at the next table quit to watch.
Brakkbrakgoal. Brackkbrakbrakgoal.
The Foosball Wizard's opponents switch places.
Brackgoal. Brakgoal
they switch back. BRAKBRAKKCOAL
BBAKBR AKAKKGQAL.
BRKBAKR AKAKKGQAL.
drinker and dranker, men
and women, jocks and twers
all look at one another, stunned.
One of the Foosball Wizard's opponents wipes the hair from his forehead.
but destruction and gossip. the tables stand empty as all the players decide they'd really sit down and drink a
"Last ball," he says, holding it up.
beer. Thier man has been shattered. They'll never try to beat someone out of a parking place again. They already know where the car is, "excuse me" whenever they accidentally touch someone.
THE RUMORS and the gossip fly from booth to booth. He is from Kansas City and is the son of a big Foosball manufacturer. He once went to Mexico where he learned the way of Foosball from an old man he met in the city. He is also trained and is training them secretly at a table in his apartment. He works for the CIA.
Some say he was once deaf
and blind but cured himself through Foosball.
Some say he was just a figment of their imaginations and others sneak out the bar, hoping to pick up his trail.
AND THE FOOSBALL Wizard himself walks toward another bar, a figure of mystery and pride. He is the modern gunslinger, the 1970s gladiator. He is a man and he is self-incident. His wrists are supple and his knees are quick. He has no fear.
He is the epitome of modern civilization and the idol of all right-thinking American youth. He is satisfied.
Readers Respond
To the Editor:
Tasheff's fashion, flowers not important
details and trivial decorating descriptions.
Could you please explain the new Kaisan policy of describing what the student body president is wearing (Feb. 20), and what type of flowers she has on her window sill (Feb. 23)? As we recall, such items were never considered under the administrations of John Beiser or Ed Rollfs.
Stacey Butler
Lemexa junior
Cherly Portsmouth
Portmouth. Va. junior
AS CONCERNED students, in the we would prefer to read about what Tedde Tasheff has to say concerning the issues of an event rather than the Kansan's inaccurate fashion
To the Editor:
Vandals childish
The bicentennial year is here, full of the idealism of the years of our country's youth. With it we have a strong start in government, for openness and clean representation of the people's wishes in the way our founding fathers did, and we have brought us an election year, a
time when the American people have a chance to turn their wishes and desires into action changes they feel are necessary
IT IS A terrible shame that some people aren't capable of understanding the importance of this, instead of reacting with cheap and petty acts of vandalism. We need to tear down the posters and handbills that represent another candidate for President of the United States only shows that these people haven't the their own candidate to allow him to stand on his own merit.
Changing sex taboos hurt familv ties
WASHINGTON — Penny Williamson (name changed) is in her late 30s. A middle-class lady with six children, her formation is that of the school she was a practitioner of the family-centered togetherness that permeated social life in the period, but she was also touched by the post-World War II religious revival. Daily mass readings were very important to her.
A TWEF years ago she did the undoable. She broke up her marriage. Priests and nuns were doing the undoable, but she didn't. She worked many years for more conventional reasons than the
herger were suing for breaking their vows. Her husband had found a pooise.
He was enough of a double- standard man to want to keep a
degree that a pro forma arrangement to satisfy outward properties offered her nothing but the most beautiful way she kicked the old boy out
"marriage de convenance"
going; but, her sense of betrayal aside. Penny had inadvertently broken togetherness of the 50s to the
and, in the course of subsequent months, found out that she was a sexual person with no way to defend herself, and with the rights, wrongs and
THEN SHE met Howard (name changed), a congenial bachelor who was up for her but not for marrying into the surrogate fatherhood of six adolescents. Howard would often come to Penny's house to be the sex in motel. At the same time, Penny's x-lord and master was living with his poo-sie.
social forms she had lived and believed all her life.
Penny was blessed with a pack of observant and not particularly shy children. It didn't take them long to figure out what was up just by watching Penny and Howard together, so that at length they sat Mother down and told her
PENNY AND HOWARD subsequently have gone their separate ways but, while it may be the case that marital sex under the roof as with her chicks worked out well enough, if anyone came down with traumas or diseases, they weren't readily visible.
WOLL KNOW ANGST GIANT CORPORATIONS WORKING AGAINST THE BEST INTERESTS OF THE USA IN ORDER TO MAKE A BUCK. GIVE A NEW VALUE TO THE WORLD TUST TO SELL YOUR PRODUCTS AND HOW YOUR ELECTED REPRESENTATIVES SOLD THEIR SOULS TO SPECIAL
she was being slightly silly. Why didn't she and Howard spend their nights in the bedroom at home?
Still, Penny had violated a major American middle-class taboo. She had allowed her children to know that Mother Christine can go through a charade of concealment of this self-identified fact from their children. Because their parents go in that direction night, kids have no way of knowing when their parents are sleeping and when they're doing other things. A family convention can grow up that the parents are not there. There are households in which the parents have trained themselves to make love in perfect silence lest their hear what they're doing.
ANCIENT PURITAN religion and modern psychology have combined to inject shame into both believing and nonbelieving parents at the thought their children will still see astrologers have even preached that small babies can be traumatized if they are allowed to see their parents performing amatory awfuls. Other lands and other cultures, where there is less money for separate bedrooms and less privacy, are now about letting the kiddies peek, and now we may have to follow suit.
too complex, expensive and time consuming. The taboo is being broken.
The divorce rates being what they are, people in Penny's predicament are no longer rare. Unmarried mothers and fathers creeping off to the motel or other secret trysting places is
BUT LIFE is so constructed that we solve one problem to create another. For awile, she was able to acknowledge family property, Penny was able to keep her oldest kids' behavior in line with traditional norms by saying, "We don't know what she did. Time has a way of doing away with prohibitions based on that argument, so that she's had to accommodate her own lovers home for the night."
If Penny is no longer the daily mass-goer of the decade of the hoola hoop, John Foster Dulles and the fish-tailed car, she is still essentially a socially conservative, suburban, middle-class woman. She didn't plan to change her home into a museum. The only thing she it, a college dorm, and she neither would have nor could if she had been divorced a generation earlier.
CHANGE ISN'T always progress, however. No matter how liberating some people may think what's happened to Penny is, it is also true that traditional social roles with their sex taboos ensure an domestic life. It isn't hard to anticipate that families will trouble about who is whose mate as open marriage communes have bad.
At the same time, the process that Penny has gone through seems to be an irreversible one. She is a child of her mother, father, daughter, son don't have the authority and obligation they did. Is it any wonder she doesn't appear? Households full of people awakening in the morning to ambiguous and temporary relationships aren't likely to sit down to the flap-abouts or blocucats of the farm breakfast.
Scott Siebels
To these people all I have to say is that if you are not mature enough to comprehend the election process for what it represents, please allow everyone else to freely express their most constitutional right and to make his or her own choice.
Prairie Village junior Co-coordinator, the Douglas County Jimmy Carter Campaign
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Crowd noise
Having seen a screening of the 1831 film version of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," I feel compelled to address myself to the audience because the problem at Woodruff Auditorium—the audience. Whether the majority of the audience realizes it or not, we must see the films to see the film itself rather than laugh, scream and clap.
ADMITTEDLY, some elements of a film like 'Jekyll and Hyde' are dated by today's standards and thus are somewhat obscure, so some can be overlooked in the context of the film as a whole. By concentrating on these weaker aspects, the typical audience member tends to miss such things as the film's superior production values and the direction and Frederic March's fine performance (for which, by the way, he won an Oscar, back
To the Editor:
in the days when the awards were given more for artistic achievement than out of sentimentality.
"Jekyll and Hyde" is not an isolated case. I can think of many examples. The fast motion sequences in "The Most Dangerous Game" were real crowd pleasers. This was a widely used technique at the time the film was made and I'll the first to admit it. But if you put it in perspective and accept it for what it was meant to be, it need not disregard the entire film.
LAST SEMESTER'S showing of the Astaire-Rogers film "Top Hat" seemed to be generally well accepted, and many might have heard that Berlin's classic "Cheek to Cheek" number had not some members of the audience felt compelled to sing along. And if you like something about a film, that's great, but there really no need to clap. I'm sure the film makers would be gratified if they were in attendance, but few of them seem to find their
The noise problem at SUA films will not be solved until everyone in the audience realizes that film is a legitimate participation sport. Give the films a chance. I think you'll find that you will enjoy them more if you concentrate on the positive aspects of these films (and many) rather than the negative.
Walt Burns Wichita senior
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Carl Young
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