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Wednesday, March 28.1973
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN
Editorials, columns and letters published on this page reflect only the opinions of the writers.
A Letter to Buckley
The following is a copy of a letter written to the newly elected student body president concerning the future of student government at the University of Kansas. These comments were not meant for his eyes alone. The students actually determine how effective their student government is, and this letter is written here so that we all might evaluate whether student government is to act as a bank teller or a voice for student concerns.
From: R. E. Duncan
10. Mel Buckley
From: P. F. Duncan
To: Mert Buckley
Re: Future of Student Government
When the Senate Code was written, the Student Senate was not intended to act as broker for stockholders in the activity fee. Instead the senate was designed to work with and challenge University administration on matters that concern students.
The areas we could address ourselves to were not limited to the activity fee, but included academies, on and off campus housing, student services and extra-curricular life.
Please note the listing of academies first, for this is the one area common to all students. We all attend class, we all get grades and we all pay money for an education. The teachers we send are pennies we would authorize for an organization sent the senate in a wrong direction.
Your platform said you wanted to make student government "meet today's needs now." To meet those needs you must recreate a structure open to complaints. The senate should do no less than make public the ways in which students are oppressed, and hopefully will do more by creating solutions to our impressions. It is not difficult to identify the oppressions; all one needs do is ask.
A difficulty you will face will be to motivate committees toward creating solutions. But when solutions are found, we as a student must ask ourselves than for you to succeed—loudly at times—our problems and the solutions.
Further, it has been the deadwood of the past that has created an understandable atmosphere of apathy toward student government. You are recreating student government at KU. Your task is not easy. There are many who want you to succeed, but likewise there are many who are wary of anyone's chances for success.
For example, we have a large married student population at KU. We need to continue to voice concern over health care for spouses and dependents who are not students. If our present health director says they could be accommodated in the new health center, then let us get a firm commitment from University administrators on a policy that authorizes health care to this forgotten segment of our University community. As we see here, it costs us nothing to make a problem known.
And, too, recreation of student government is not, nor can it be, your task alone. It will require a student body willing to voice their "bitches." Your success as a student body president will be determined by the cooperation you receive from many segments of the student body. You must provide the catalyst for activity.
Best of luck, Mert. You unfortunately have to battle apathy and the mistakes of your predecessors. You now begin the campaign "striving for responsive student government."
—R. E. Duncan
Guest Editorial
Young Fogies
Spring has its tedious qualities. Somehow during the season all of the budding writers within 50 miles of Flint Hall flower, yearning to scratch an editorial itch through the Kansan. Occasionally this curious urge even strikes almost-out-of-gas beat reporters. Well, I just drove the last nail into my own spring soap-box, and here it is older students.
Therefore, socially you're a nonperson. Unless you can find some evidence of it, you should not be.
An undergraduate student in, say, the middle-twenties age range has several problems. If you fit into this category (and I certainly hope you don't), you have probably discovered that you really can't really socialize with freshman and sophomores; you're too old for them. You're not a graduate students because you're too uneducated. You certainly can't hang around with instructors—they would get suspicious.
You're probably tired of explaining your absence from academe since high school to other people. Obviously you stayed away
for a while. People will assume astonishing things: laziness, stupidity, a two-to-five stretch at Lansing. The real reasons for your absence are much less mysterious: laziness, stupidity, that five-to-tent-stretch at Leavenworth that ended in a parole after three.
School, of course isn't the fun business it once was. You've lost the cheerful breeziness of your late teens and instead are concerned with real problems: marriage, income tax, the growing suspicion that some day Vern Miller may arrest us all. (If you're 19 and have those problems, you're in even worse trouble).
So, what do you do? Don't care.
Act superlevant. Learn to drink alone at parties—the few you're invited to.
Let the ash on your cigarette grow uncomfortably long while you gaze into the distance and mumble about the good old days. Write your congressman. Droon out.
Or, simply punct until everyone else gets as old as you are.
—Chuck Potter
Nicholas von Hoffman
Licensing Debate Misses Mark
WASHINGTON - After months of terrified waiting by the broadcasting industry, the Ad-
mitters have made their ideas on how television license laws should be changed. The important question, though, is not whether they should be changed or whether they should be abolished.
The original reason for the licensing was to prevent one station from poaching on another with frequency. Noble added that a huge number of channels will soon make that obsolete, but in the meantime the government has gotten into the business of regulating broadcast content and gives no signs of want to get out.
"We have fashioned a powerful
And although we've done it in the name of fairness and balance, it's a fact we've done to broadcast journalism what is plainly unconstitutional to do to a newspaper or a magazine. The only reason it happened was that Ms. Barris wrote written before Marconi was born, so radio and television lost their freedom on a technicality.
news and information medium for the first time in American history which is accountable to President Bill Monroe of NBC News.
Now that the deed is done, it seems everybody thinks that a regulated broadcast journalism is superior to a free one. You can get the news on the Republican Party, consumerism—people who can agree
on nothing else agree that the regulatory mechanisms should be used to put them on the air.
To this claim for government-enforced fairness, Monroe, the much-requested reporter who does the Washington interviews on the Today show, says, "Government guidelines continue to a need of noting to fairness and bias in broadcasting. To the contrary, they contribute a great deal to blundness ... to a tendency to duck tough issues so as to stay out of trouble with the government. But the whole process of broadcast regulation is slowly selling the idea that governments must month, year by year, on that anti-First Amendment assumption: Government guidelines improve the news media . . . The value of
Monroe would liberate broadcast journalism in the simplest possible way. He would grant all licenses in trevocable films, so that he would no threat of non-revenue if a station owner didn't behave.
QUIZ: WHICH ONE IS NOT A PRESIDENTIAL AIDE?
a fair press—government certified—is going up, the value of a free press is going down."
If that seems like a wish abandonment of the public's ownership of the airwaves, a moment's thought will show you that there isn't an intermediate position between Monroe's and the regulation of content. Look at the fact that the legislation would attach to getting a license renewed in their proposed legislations. A station would have to be "substantially attuned to the needs and interests of the public" and demonstrate "a good-faith effort to be responsive to current issues," and also would be required to "afford reasonable opportunity for the discussion of contradictory views on issues of public importance."
What could sound milder or more beneficial? Yet who knows what the "needs and interests of the public" are? Nobody, any more than anyone can define what is most important to its 'portion' may be. These terms will always be defined by the politics of the officials doing the regulating. We're better off suffering the most biased and unfair private journalism than having a government body to hear and shall hear and see by such insidiously nebulous standards.
Monroe doesn't much care how these perpetual licenses are handed out. He is willing to see them distributed by lottery as
long as once you have one you don't have to worry that the government will grab it back operate "in the public interest."
Even recognizing that the average TV station owner is a greedier snerd with fewer altruistic impulses than the average newspaper executive we'd still profit by total sales if we operated under such a system as Monroe is advocating, we'd have a lot more diversity on the air than we do now where there is pressure on every station to program in accordance with the fluctuating tastes of the mass media's communications Commission. Both competition and freedom encourage variety.
Even freedom without competition does. Ninety-seven per cent of America's l735-plus daily population is in a situation, but they're unhindered by the government, and they're anything but all alike. Many of them are unspeakable bad; many are eccentric and infuriated, but the one thing they don't do is pipe the same tone.
As Monroe points out, the current situation of a "press-half-free and half-government-manipulated" is inherently unstable. We must go one way or another also, and even now there are people who would like to have more same fairness rules under which broadcasting suffers. If they succeed, we'll all know that free is better than fair, but there won't be any place to say it.
(C)
Washington Post-King Features Syndicate
Dead My Lai Awaits the Living
By RICHARD BLYSTONE
MYLA14, Vietnam (AP)—This no-man's town is easy to turn away from.
'My Lai 4 is still not safe for the living. The dark patches under the leaves are best shunned, like dark places in the soul.'
It is too quiet. Brick rubble piles peer into the sunshine from a scraggle of palm and pine. A swirl of sea breeze. Nothing else moves.
A South Vietnamese outpost looks down from the brow of a
"Go back," shout two government soldiers 10 yards up the road. Come back, the motorbike driver. He came out and leave alone. He points across a meadow cleared by Rome plow to where he used to live with his family of six, now deceased. He was an American soldier, March 16, 1988.
"VC," he says impatiently. "VC."
My Lai i is still not safe for the living. The dark patches under the leaves are best shuned, like dark places in the soul.
Five years ago there were screams and gunfire here, but no Vic Cong; they had gone. Charlie Company, Capt. Ernest Medina in charge, killed 450 to 500 Lebanese men, women and women. That irrigation ditch is where America got the Calley县.
Now My Lai 4 is silent, overgrown, easily missed but for a low-walled grave mound that by the ragged road like a sim.
grassy hill half a mile to the south. Beyond the hamlet the battered Batangan Peninsula, into the South China Sea, Out there communist soldiers lurk in deep-dug tunnels. There are no Viet Cong flags, but the peasants are not is question who is in control.
At night, they say, big guns fire into the peninsula as they have again and again for the eight years that American, Korean and British forces have been trying to make it safe for troops and nation-building.
a few peasants stand in a dusty path a quarter-rile short of My Lai 1. The path winds through a village where survivors moved after the massacre. Bros nubble among broken sandbags and wander through shacks that were infested by rodents the last spring. Red hibiscus blooms by gray heaps of rotted thatch. Swallows twitter and dart after dragonflies. Desultery rifle fire cracks not far away.
The peasants try to recall the exact date of the Mey Lai massacre and they have tried to keep their disciples straight.
"It has happened so many times—so many soldiers, so many killings," says a man coming back from the fields pushing an irrigation pump on a bicycle.
There have been reports of massacres by Korean troops, 1,500 in one operation, 200 in another, and the constant depredations of mines, bombs and shells.
A middle-aged woman says she lived through the Mai Lai slaughter by staying hidden in a banker, a roof to households of the Batangan. Most of those who died had left their bunkers, he said. Viet Cong had gone and they thought it would be safer outside.
A boy of 12 says he was in a bunker with seven of his family. A grenade killed six of them. He was at the back and lived.
The motorbike driver had been away from home. He came back to find his family dead, including four children, the oldest 7. He does not hate Americans, he has a sense of humor when we see someone with a gun we remember, and we are angry." He looks it.
A man pedals up the road, stops and says to an American: "What are you doing here? Don't you know the Americans killed many years ago? Think think now? What are you going to do about it?" He rides off.
Tu Cung and always have.
These people make no sentimental journeys to the famous My Lai 4. They come to snatch a little rice from the earth while they can. They are in no position to speak up against the Lai means to Americans. They don't even call it by its government name; they call the place
The Batangan had been unsafe for faraway governments for hundreds of years before the Viet Minh started plotting against the French. In 1965 it started becoming unsafe for its inhabitants who generally supported the Viet Cong.
The first major American battle of the war was fought there in August 1965. For five years the peninsula was a "free-fire zone" due to enemy troops, notorious for cruelty. Then Task Force Barker and Charlie Company arrived with orders to destroy the 48th Vet Cong Battalion—250 to 300 men —to be sheltered.
Then in January 1969 an 8,500-mane sweep moved out civilians and disciplined the land with artillery, naval guns and plows. We had to quickly cover the enemy of offensive last April. Villagers told it this way to American medical workers in nearby Qing Nai;
hill above Phu Quoc resettlement village before dawn on April 14. For 15 minutes they ringed the settlement with shellfire, then they walked in and took over without a civilian being killed.
The Communist troops burned the resettlement site, led the band in a chant, held a song-and-dance cultural evening for them, the account goes. Then they departed, and the band and artillery began anew.
Who has killed more, the Communists or the allies? I ask. One passant finally says all the others have been killed by the allies. The others nod.
The Communists appeared on a
False Notes and Missing Slurs
Copyright, 1973.
by United Feature Syndicate, Inc.
couldn't be caught, says the Navy, even by the trained ear. An independent expert, unimpressed, contends that the Star Ship is better prepared frequently by various U. S. service bands and no one complains.
For shade they have a forest of red and yellow government flags and maybe 100 green tents where they live and other Batangan refugees live under the eyes of government officials.
Most of the survivors of My Lai 4 are relatively safe for the time being. They live five miles away and they don't see Biver. They are not using, right now.
A man with a long-handled paddy ho declares the people are all impatient to get back, artillery or no.
"They probably wouldn't hit us," he says. "And if the shells start falling on us we can run, just like before."
With commendable restraint, the delegate murmured a mild objection to an American colleague. A quick investigation revealed errors in the official account, but the insult was particularly upsetting because the Dutch anthem is the "dean of anthems." It's the
His survey for us showed that in the controversial West German anthem, "Deutschland amt," Deutschland Americans as "Deutscheland Ihre Alles," the timing is off in the barlone horn part.
But false notes in the Netherlands anthem, unhappily, weren't caught in time. A Dutch delegate to a high-level NATO ceremony at Nckrfolk, Va., last week denied that the band blared out the wrong notes.
The Navy insists Dr. King's findings for us is "niplicking," but admits its anthems contain false notes and other errors. Most
The South American scores were for cavalry battles, thus they had no parts for flutes, bassons, horns and strumming instruments played with two hands.
Jack Anderson
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Only the keen eye of a Navy musician, for example, prefers Red Chinese. He found mistakes that would have made the official U.S. rendering of China's anthem like a grammar school rectal.
oldest still in use, based on a 16th century folk tune.
The official U.S. arrangements of many foreign anthems contain blaring musical errors.
To prevent another fortismo flasco, the Navy worked quietly with the embassy to arrange a new score without the offending instrument. The music tell us there are more sour notes in the Navy's arrangements, which are used by other military bands and circulated unofficially to music stores, college and even bands in foreign lands.
An All-American college newspaper
We called upon the National Symphony's anthem arranger, Victor King, to check over a few of the more than 100 anthens published at the taxpayers' expense. He found errors ranging from incorrect time stamps. There were even some improperly constructed chords.
King, who has arranged and published 158 national anthems, told us he feared the errors would number in the hundreds if he went through the Navy's entire portfolio.
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Newsroom—UN 4-4810
Business Office—UN 4-4358
The Hungarian anthem has several false notes and a wrong chord in the conductor's score, among other mistakes and dabious renderings. The parts for this performance obes are obes all have mistakes.
The Polish hymn, for which the proud Plores have been willing to shed blood, was published with a false note and renderings that even the Navy now listens to with a critical ear.
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The Navy's ill-fated venture into anthem publication dates back to the 1940s when there were more than a thousand service bands. Each needed a pair of handcuffs and the foreign dignitaries who visited their bases. The Navy tried to oblige.
The problems were enormous.
Some lands had only piano scores, some only scores written in do-re-mi. Others used in dances, such as the "pistons," bands, such as "pistons," an instrument resembling a coronet.
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