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Thursday, November 17, 1977
University Daily Kansan
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Comment
Unsigned editorials represent the opinion of the Kansan editorial staff. Signed column represent only the views of the writers.
When Hollywood makes a movie about college football, the rallying cry is something like, "Win this one for the Gipper."
This is good stuff for movie audiences. It's not very realistic, however.
Take, for example, the situation at Kansas State University last week. There, the rallying cry was less utilitarian: "Let's lie about this one for the coach."
The story of the debacles in and around K-State's football program is all but legend now. Ellis Rainsberger, K-State coach, resigned because of pressure from the K-State administration after it was revealed that Rainsberger had to retire to lie about the identity of two K-State players in a junior varsity game.
RAINBERGER'S RUSE was designed to lead newsmen to believe that two young players had not participated in the game. Had Rainberger's plan worked—and it almost did—the players would presumably have been reported as redshirts, or players who do not compete for a season and thus save one year of eligibility.
This certainly was not the first controversy that has tarnished the K-State football program during Rainsberger's years, but it certainly was the most damning.
The details of Rainsberger's subsequent resignation have been hashed over at length, and they are easily digested after the initial shock has subsided.
SOME OTHER lingering doubts about
the general are not so easily
displaced, however
The need to win games, produce top-notch players and make money in college football has silted the game to the point that leaders are willing to invest in a miniscule edge over the competition. If this
is the way to educate college students, we can live without it.
Down the river from K-State, here at the University of Kansas, Coach Bud Moore, suffering through a dismal season like K-State's, lets his frustration drive him onto the practice field one day to rip off one of his player's helmets and engage in fistfights. Up At Ohio State, Coach Woody Hayes, who at least has the advantage of winning most of his games, shaves photographers, throws hats and storms on sideline markers.
What is it about scholastic football that can possibly justify lies and violence? How could Rainberger's actions have benefited those players he tried to lie about if the trick had worked? What would be their impressions of the system they struggle under after their leader spits in its face and comes away all the richer for it?
It is hard to imagine that universities would let any other extracurricular activity grow so ugly and autonomous as college football has become. College football fields are not training grounds for the National Football League, nor showcases for coaches, nor even havens for action-hungry fans. College fields are, first and foremost, for the benefit of college football players and fans. Lying cannot be part of the game plan.
AT THE UNIVERSITY of Missouri, football fans engage in a foul-mouthed campaign to unseat coach Al Onofrio; the campaign spreads as far east as St. Louis, where the attacks on the coach are even more venomous. At the University of Nebraska, rumors circulate that the school may jump conferences because the Big Ten offers more big-money playing dates than the Big Eight.
Gays should fight Anita with logic,not pie pranks
Even the high school football program is susceptible to such misguided zealousness. A Florida high school coach boasts that he has players who can impress his players with his spunk.
There she sat, sobs of cream-fried pie hanging from her face. She was very shy, one thick mound from her nose. Anita Bryant had just been the victim of another of the curious fights at the circus, the pie-throwing assassin.
The pie thrower, Thom Higgins, an avowed homosexual, directed his disgust at Bryant's anti-gay campaign. He scooped cream pie, but his right to do so must be severely questioned.
But unlike former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger who was the victim of a pie-throwing incident, Mr. Bryant Colorado Sen. Gary Hart whose mug was pasted last weekend by a lady pulling a pie out of a shopping bag, Anita Bryant was accused of intent than harmless prank.
SURE, IT WAS funny to the largely unsympathetic Des Moines, Iowa crowd that turned out to see Bryant, and perhaps readers of newspapers and magazines who saw the afterpast photograph. But one might consider whether the attack might have actuallyulty for Bryant and her cause.
In all fairness, it should be noted that Bryant's husband was a Green, later grabbed a pie from one of Higgin's companions and smashed the pie in the companion's face.Equal time, it
Neither attack was justifiable, however. It boils down to fighting moral wars with physical violence instead of using words like "pimp" into Bryant's face and shouting, "Thus always to bigots," Higgins was opening himself and the gay rights movement against the means with which they fight opponents of their lifestyle.
INSTEAD OF getting up on the platform with Bryant and attacking her views logically, Higgins' response was the poure Solely Sales sabotage in the past. The response for Higgins that Gore Vidal said of Norman Mailer after Mailer punched Vidal at a party.
"Once again, words failed him."
Some may charge that Bryant's views are so vituperative that a mere taste of pie is a mild price for her to buy. But she has shot shooting her as some have threatened to do. But does her malice deserve to be met by physical intimidation?
Dave Johnson Editorial Writer
One of the arguments that the gay activists are using against Bryant's crusade is that she is attempting to deny the rights of gay men and to access to health, welfare and the pursuit of economic happiness.
"SIE'S ROBBING us of our freedom of expression," they cry. Shoutting Bryant off the mailing, mailing death threats to her and her family, even throwing a pie at her represent a tyranny an ever greater degree—the tyranny of one group trying to silence the woman; their malevolent intent or lack of rational explanation, of another.
individual who advocates the violent overthrow of government, as long as he confines his address to the realm of verbal communication and not physical violence, should be allowed to freely espouse these ideas.
A common cry of First Amendment enthusiasts is that even a Hitler or a Mussolini could exist in America, popularly known as the free marketplace of ideas. Even the
THE SUCCESS of such a libertarian proposition depends on the inherent rationality of the sphere. If someone even coryn, but in a free society is absolutely vital that the promulgation of ideas, those outside the sphere of public discussion be open to public discussion.
If the gay activists disagree, even resent, the challenge Bryant has issued to their lifestyle, then the activists should also fight. But they should do it in a manner fitting her attack. Dissect her argument—her biblical rationale—in the same open forum that she chooses to attend. If the people use equally sound principles to decide the validity of each argument.
Sign-carriers demonstrated recently at the opening of a motion picture in Kansas City, Mo.
Oh, boy, they missed the point
Young people gathered outside the theater said they had been fascinated by a movie they considered in poor taste and an affront to them.
The film, "Oh, God!," is a gently humorous speculation on what might happen if God appeared on earth today. It is
Lynn Kirkman
Editorial Writer
questionably not a great movie, but it is certainly not in my opinion. I take time to look at movies, he probably not be offended at all.
"Oh, God!" stars John
Denver as a mild-mannered produce manager of a supermarket. He has a wife, two kids and a dog. He is not particularly religious. He is
BECAUSE DENVER is so much like most of us, we can easily understand his confusion when the Almighty singles him out for a special mission. God, I am a Christian, Burns, appears to Denver and orders him to carry a message to the world.
Denver is perplexed. "I'm not a member of any organized religion," he says.
"That's all right," replies the Lord. "Neither am I."
This is not a God of halifae and damnation. He doesn't go in for large-scale miracles and
claps of thunder. The last big miracle he performed was the 1969 New York Mets.
HE IS, INSTEAD, a rather unassuming fellow who believes he created a worthwhile world of intelligent beings who are capable of making their own decisions rationally and keeping things on an even keel in this constant interference.
That may be what the demonstrators in Kansas City found so offensive. There seem to be people who believe that a strong God is basically evil—and that a strong God is needed to keep them in line. Their faith may well be based on fear and suspicion, but harbor a secret hope that God is "up there" keeping a big scorebook of who's bad and who's good. When Judgment will be rewards for so many we'll retribution for the others.
"That's not the message of 'Oh, God!' This is a story of a reasoning, caring God who understands the people of his world and lives in them. All he asks in return is that they return the favor."
"Oh, God!" it is not the off-stage voice of John Huston and the parting of the Red Sea. It's a low-key variance of the basic tale that imperfect humans who work together can achieve perfection. It's not a religious film in the traditional sense, but it carries a more profoundly Christian flavour many of the Bible epics of the past.
Maybe that's what the demonstrators found so hard to accept.
Evil past illustrates present Dark Age
BY AUSTLUCK
N.Y. Times Features
By PAUL FUSSELL
PRINCETON. N.J.-We Americans are an optimistic lot, fond of facing a cheery future. Except for a Bicentennial now and then, we don't care much for retrospection, especially where it is likely to shake us up. Not for us such a fortunate chance, but delight pilgrimage to the bone-house at Verdun or watching the Queen all in black placing her wreath at the Cenotap.
It's hard to imagine now that once everyone observed two minutes of silence at 1 a.m. on the street, and that all traffic stopped.
So little do we cotton to such things now that we have shifted the names and dates of national holidays, from domestic convenience, just as we have hoped that we'll hear no more about the Vietnam War or that the Veterans Adm. will quietly clean up the mess.
BUT THE sad truth is that the past is the present. We live in that past, and it does us good to know it. A moment 59 years ago has the same status as a minute ago. A mind out of touch with what happened a minute ago is distorted out of touch with what happened 59 years ago is disoriented by adjusting former national holidays to make convenient three-day weekends.
The present is the past, and not to experience that past imaginatively is to be dead to the comparisons of the contemporary.
Governments and corporations (frequently the same thing) would be happy if we forgot the past. Germany would be delighted if we forgot it if we forgot Suze, the United States if we forget the Bay of Pigs, Chile, Cambodia.
RICHARD NIXON and Spire Agnew and John Mitchell and Marshal Ky hope we will forget. Berhard hone he will forget.
But if we are wise we will never forget. If we are wise we will remember. If we are wiser we will serious national holidays included, which help us remember the folly and dishonor that con- front our lives.
Oskar Morgentern, the great economist of Princeton and New York Universities, told me before he died last July about an article he wanted to write for the New York Times.
This is what he intended to write:
He was going to propose that all international conferences about peace and borders and national ambitions take place in one very specific setting: a bare, uncomfortable frame building in some ill-favored spot, hot in summer, frigid in
winter, furnished with a plain table and straight wooden chairs.
THE HIGH walls of the conference room would be covered with large photomurals depicting memorable scenes that the late 20th century had better not forget. These murals were remarkably leaning toward violent and inhumane behavior. Morgenstern thought -it would be especially helpful for statesmen to negotiate surrounded by blowups of the pitted, smelled battlefields of the Somme and Passchendale, or the Dotmorra and Belleau Wood or dumped into nites near Belleau-Thirry.
He and I agreed that the photo-murals should begin with scenes from the war that ended Nov. 11, 1918, for that is were the eminently modern tradition begins that individual human experience could place to national vanities or abstract political fantasies.
BUT TO emphasize the continuity of the tradition of violence in which we live, the photo-murals should continue to the present. We'd need pictures of the deep-pyed children being kicked around in the Warsaw ghetto and the arrival platform at Auschwitz; the SS hanging boys and girls in rural Poland, using a makeshift gallows with piano-wire nooses and a drop of
one foot; of the dead at Tarawa and Iwo Jima and Okinawa and Dresden and Aschaffenburg; and of the prisoners bayoneted in the soccer stadium during the Indian-Pakistan War.
Other photographs would give us John F. Kennedy's Lincoln drawn up at the hospital emergency entrance, its back seat full of blood and flowers; Robert F. Kennedy spread out on the hotel-kitchen floor; the Vietnamese boy sobbing wildly into a truck; the boys lying in a truck; a boy dying on the Kent State University sidewalk, the black blood flowing out of his head.
SUCH IMAGES would make it hard to forget that we do not have civilized children, civilized age, but rather one stigmatized both by sadistic physical cruelty and a general desire to delight in it or to ignore it.
With its ready recourse to violence and its apparent willingness to resist the Dark Age, and the only way out is to recognize that fact, to embrace a darker view of past and present and their unhappy existence.
For diplomacy to occur amistad these images of human evil would make it hard for it to forget the readiness of men to burden themselves, the diplomacy no less than others'.
Would it be going too far to say that this century is the most barbarians in history? We do have cultural centers and mass leisure and lots of medical resources. We also boat on our three-day weekends. But until these things are conceived by historical memory as a thin veneer papering over an awful reality, we will be slaves to our barbarian mind to blind us to real circumstances.
The words "Lest We Forget" used to apply merely to the nine million people slaughtered in the Great War. Subsequent events have shown us that they did not kill them and those who slight the rituals of memory and expiation impoverish their minds, shrivel their imaginations and desiccate their hearts.
Paul Fussell, professor of English literature at Rutgers, is a wounded infantry veteran of World War II. His book, "The Great War and Modern Memory," won the 1976 National Book Award in arts and letters.
THUS THE need to keep Armistice Day as an annual rite of national sadness and pessimism self-imposed, and to keep it where it hurts, always in the midwinter and inconveniently in midwinter and deprives us of the Stock Exchange and the delivery of mail.
To the editor:
Restricted law library use a fair decision
In response to the undergraduate who thinks the law library should be a big study area, he views my views as a law student.
When new Green Hall opened Oct. 17, there was no policy limiting use of the law library. Within a week chaos resulted. Surveys showed more undergraduates than law students competing for tables and chairs, several occasions, undergraduates, undergrads and vacate study carrels assigned to individual law students.
As a result of these problems,
it was decided that the law
library would be reserved for
those using the law materials,
undergraduate included. What
reason is unreasonable about
that?
Law students, professors, practitioners and others with legitimate reasons for using the law library should not have to compromise the quality of a professional facility in order to take legal advice without that anyone can use a public place as he pleases.
Why, the writer asked, could he "be denied the use of a business suit." Because by his own law it is necessary to want use it for a reason not
within its purpose. Can he study in the chancellor's office? In the girls' locker room? How about atop the campanile?
Elitist, effete snobbery? Hardly. Lawyers devote their lives to defending the rights and claims of others. Letting us study in peace might ultimately be in your own best interest.
KANSAN
Insurance axing a club triumph To the editor:
Judson R. Maillie Lawrence law student
The announcement by the University of Kansas of the elimination of the mandatory requirement for foreign students is a triumph for the International Club. This success adds to the national organization that unifies students from many countries
Letters
and that leads efforts to improve University life for foreign students. A million thanks to the International Club for its stand for equal treatment for all students.
African regime unjust to blacks
To the editor:
I read with some amused concern the thoughts of Jeff Smith about the fate of blacks in the country. "What happens to men?" What surprises me is that with daily reports of bannings, arrests and murders of black people there, Smith could still glaringly wrong conclusions.
Shawkat Hammouden
Pakistanian graduate student
Shawkat Hammoudeh
Since June last year, the South African government has arrested more than 15,000 black people. In the Soweto riots last year alone, the South African police brutally murdered more than 300 high school students. Last week 600 people were
detained without a trial. This cannot go on indefinitely.
Africans are well aware and vary of America and her allies in the region. They believe of human rights, justice and equality but develop cold feet when it comes to doing anything to achieve these goals.
These nations are more interested in how their corporations can then make more light on the recent triple tervet at the United Nations by the United States, Britain and France against economic sanctions on South Africa. While Africa does not have to choose between capitalist and communist ideologies, but rather it reserves the right to acquire more credit to fight for justice and freedom.
I do not for a moment doubt whether majority rule will be achieved. About 19 African nations had to struggle against what was essentially independence. What I sometimes wonder about is
whether by dangerously delaying the process this racist and oppressive regime might be creating a situation in which black and white cannot live together again.
]
Apelebiri Willabo Nigeria sophomore
Female might isn't equality To the editor:
The maneuvers were described very lightly. Reading the part about the 'Vietnam locale' was disgusting. You forgot that the 'locale' also included people, people exactly like us. These people in Vietnamese we see as such animals and everything else other than human during the war, and I'm afraid the viewpoint has not changed much.
I have concerns about the article on women in KU's ROFC program (Nov. 2), I felt the importance of something that should not be glamorized. It was glamorizing the military. The "warm games" seem to be seen as games for killing and murdering people.
I also hope that men and women in the Equal Rights Amendment movement do not use this example for showing how equality has progressed with the sexes. I feel that people have gained a greater unequal treatment compared to the military brass who control it. The military tries to do the opposite of what the ERA is
I don't think the "war games" are very authentic, either. In a blatantly sarcastic veil, if the "games" were authentic, they would people from Asia, Africa, South America and elsewhere to pose as the civilian life in the "game setting. Authenticity includes using real bullets too. I sinisterly use such actions do not take place.
striving for. At least with the ERA, efforts in equalizing things gives men and women the freedom to realize their full potential. In doing so creates a potential of dulness, blondness and a hollow shell.
I hope that there will be an article in the near future to balance the material in the article on women in KU's ROTC program. Maybe you could do an article on male nursing students or female medical students in their field placement Medical Center or social work centers in their field placement settings. With these latter options one sees all people as dignified and worthy of respect.
Paul A. Schmidt Wichita junior
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THE UNIVERSITY DAILY
KANSAN
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