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Wednesday, April 3, 1974
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN commer Editorials, columns and letters published on this page reflect only the opinions of the writers.
With Good Reason
Last week, I wrote an editorial about abortion which appeared in the Kansan. The day after that editorial appeared I received a telephone call from a person who was upset about the position I had taken.
During our conversation, this caller became increasingly emotional. I pointed out that my editorial dealt in part with the emotionalism that has infected the discussion of the abortion issue and made rational discourse impossible. This remark merely made the caller more angry, and he finally broke off the conversation with a string of obscenities.
What disturbs me most about the conversation is not that the caller disagreed with my request to stand. I expected reason and a way of solving the problem.
If this rejection of rational inquiry were limited to a few people or just one issue, there would be no cause for alarm. Unfortunately, the phenomenon is more widespread. About half a year ago, Time magazine ran a series of essays titled "Scared Thoughts About n't," which discuss various aspects of it and skepticism of rational inquiry. The occult, spiritualism, eastern mysticism and even the fundamentalist Jesus revival are all part of this trend.
This interest in the non-rational could be caused by any number of things. It may be a shock reaction to the dramatic changes produced in our society over the last century by science and technology. On the other hand, it may be the result of a sense of frustration that arises and technology problems solved all of man's problems. Another possible explanation is the Frankenstein syndrome, the fear of science and technology gone wild.
Whatever the cause, this antirationalism is forcing us to re-
examine our belief in the efficacy of reason. This belief has been a powerful force in western society since the Enlightenment. A belief in the fundamental soundness of reason and the reasonableness of man is one of the basic principles of American democracy. Now we are forced to ask what role scientists admit that their techniques cannot solve all problems. Are there not more important things than question?
Reason is nothing more than a technique for solving problems of all sizes. By dispassionately examining as many alternatives as possible, the reasonable man hopes to select the best available method for dealing with a problem. Although the reasonable man is dispassionate, he is also compassionate. Reason can take into account values, beliefs and ideals and provide a method for comparing the relative merits of such beliefs and reconciling differences.
The alternative to reason is dogmatism. One who adheres dogmatically to a given set of ideas is unwilling to explore alternatives. Regardless of what injury or suffering his ideas may cause or no matter how inappropriate they may be to the person in hand, he will not surrender his belief in his ideas. Frequently, the dogmatist is not willing to discuss the matter or, perhaps, even to let others discuss it.
The major drawback of reason is that it does not work like magic. Problems do not disappear when one waves the wand of reason, but through diligent intellectual effort a problem may be ameliorated. Obviously, dogmatism is much more comfortable; it requires no intellectual effort, only blind faith. The problems we face today, however, are too complex to be dealt with blindly, without consideration of the alternatives and the consequences.
John Bender
By ERNEST CONINE The Los Angeles Times
At the height of the verbal flap between Washington and its European allies, many influential Europeans convinced themselves that President Nixon had contrived the whole thing to distract attention from Watergate.
Public Backs Hard Line on Europe
In Britain, the Guardian said European officials thought Nixon made his thinly veiled threat to pull U.S. troops out of Europe "for internal political reasons—playing in front of a sympathetic midterm election," and adding another critical week over Watergate.
In West Germany, the newspaper Die Welt wilt doubten whether, for Nixon, "a certain dramatization of the Atlantic crisis does not arise conveniently in order to afford a diversion from his personal problems demonstrate his foreign policy strength."
In France, Le Monde suggested that Xionxin 'leave the impression by his tone of quietness and humility.'
It is conceivable that these suspicions are correct—that Nixon's "thunderbolt," as Europeans have described it, was nothing more than a jingoistic appeal to nationalism. Only the President knows for sure.
Even if this view of presidential motivation is accepted, however, the Europeans are missing the main point. The people who wouldn't be good politics if many, perhaps most, Americans weren't already convinced that such a president would be mirrored in Congress.
"In the event the Congress gets the idea that we are going to be faced with economic confrontation and hostility from the (Common Market), you will find it almost impossible to address this support for American presence at present levels on the security front."
As Nixon said in his controversial Chicago speech, "I have had great difficulty in getting the Congress to continue to support it," and he cited a level that we need to keep them there.
In September, for the first time since the birth of NATO, the U.S. Senate actually voted to force a substantial cutback in the number of American troops in Europe. The vote was subsequently reversed, but Senate Democratic leader Mike Mansfield, the principal sponsor of withdrawal requests, chose to raise appropriations bills come up this summer. A strong presidential lobbying effort will be required to keep it from passing.
at European political leaders don't realize
truth of those words, they just haven't
been heard.
As for Watergate, the real question the Europeans should be making themselves is whether they want to avoid it.
Nixon has a right to feel, in this context, that he has been getting precious little help from the Europeans. The French, in particular, have long insisted on the tires of U.S. isolationism.
would have the clout to stop Congress from doing what millions of Americans plainly say.
It is true, as the Europeans say, that Nixon and Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger don't always practice what they preach about the virtue of consultation with foreigners.
It is also true that the Europeans already are contributing far more toward their own
defense than Congress and Americans realize.
rummy, it is true, as the French say, that the presence of American troops in Europe isn't an act of charity. They are there because they want to help Europe would challenge U.S. security.
But it is also true that a strong American role in NATO is even more vital to Europe.
Americans weren't amused when French Foreign Minister Michel Jobert said that although he would like to see U.S. forces engage in a war with Iraq, American troops in Europe is not of fun.
damental importance for us at all, but that it is for the United States."
Washington knows that this silly statement didn't really reflect the views of the French government, much less those of the German government. Gaulistan posturing fully in keeping with the French refusal even to sanction the use of "partnership" in alliance documents.
The Nixon administration, however, has grown weary of such antics and of the reluctance of the other allies to challenge them publically.
Obviously, the strains in the alliance have deep roots. There are divergent economic interests. There are generational changes of attitude on both sides. And there is the frustration at the slow pace of European integration to find scapegoats for the lack of progress.
It appears that the Europeans' fear of Soviet military aggression has faded—but not enough for them to bear the thought of the U.S. security blanket being withdrawn. It may be that, instead of fighting a rearguard action against pressures for withdrawal of U.S. forces, Washington and other allied capitals should be talking about how the nuclear weapons of the European nuclear deterent or looking for means of keeping the U.S. deterrent credible without any sizable presence of American troops in Europe.
The Europeans may as well realize, however, that as long as they consider the continued presence of U.S. forces essential to their security, they can't afford the luxury of allowing French Gaullists to speak for Europe.
Nonnuclear Disarmament Needed
By DON COOK The Washington Post
GENEVIA-Carved in the marble fresco over the entrance to the council chamber of the Palais Des Nations, and embellished in gold leaf which must be touched up every five years or so, are the borders of one of the Lions of the League of Nations, Lord Robert Cecil;
"There is a great work for peace in which all can participate. The nations of the world are involved."
How many thousands of diplomats have passed beneath that fresco since the 1930s, and how many countless hours and millions of words have been solemnly pronounced in the council chamber on disarmament? But unhappy, as noble as Lord Cecil's gold-leaf sentiments might be, they are more pathetic than prophetic.
The nations of the world have neither disarmed nor perished. Ever since the first
pious Hindu must be offended, every凡or fanatic can count on somebody to come to his support, and if one country isn't ready to do so, a lot of the people will happily do business on easy terms.
At the end of all this, disarmament has to be looked upon as a pattern, a process, a state of mind—rather than a realistic one. The latter is true among groups of nations. It wasn't the Helsinki and Vienna negotiations that produced the first SALT agreement—but a much broader and deeper fundamental change was needed. Moscow that there had to be an agreement.
Hague conference in 1899, when the machine gun was still a military novelty, nations have regularly swung between talking disarmament and then going to war.
The SALT-II talks in Geneva, the MBF
talks in Vienna and the 25-nation United
Nations Disarmament Commission are
obvious no better than the will of the
willing.
In Geneva, the 25-member United Nations Disarmament Commission has been debating what actions to take against matters about five or six months out of every year. In its 14th year the commission has had to start skipping meetings in order to keep up with hisnothing to say or wants to speak.
The reason, of course, is that the focus of disarmament has shifted almost entirely from the United Nations framework to the United States and Russia.
City Civilizing Street-Sign Jungle
The Washington Post
By WOLF VON ECKARDT
WASHINGTON—City streets are overgrowth with a dense thickness of traffic lights, street lights, poles, posts, standards, parking meters, police call boxes, fire alarm boxes, mail boxes, mail deposit boxes, fire exit boxes, bus stop signs, trash trash.
You can count as many as 20 pieces of the clutter on the average corner of the urban jungle. But no one looks. The maze puts you in a daze.
So countless different departments of city government have designed bigger, flasher and flashing signs, signals and gadgets to help them. They don't. They irritate and confuse even more.
The result is a steel triple pole, which accommodates any combination of signs and street equipment. Cincinnati is putting them up in its 12-block downtown renewal area, and 40 or the 300 needed structures already are in operation.
'Street Furniture' Is Designed to Cut Clutter
What at least can be said 30 years after World War II is that the will of governments has been sufficient to create the negotiating machinery and to give it something to do. Results are another matter—elusive, important thing is that it is important thing is to keep the process going. And that is really the biggest advance which the nations of the world are maintaining.
The system was designed by Harold Lewis Malt Associates, environmental planners and designers of Washington, D.C., who also wrote a 90-page report on the causes and proposed cure of the visual chaos.
The whole, ugly mess is thus increasingly self-defeating and expensive.
Perhaps Cincinnati's "Operation Streetscape" is different. At least, the program was designed for development, which in November 1969, funded this demonstration operation with a $123,500 grant, remembered its largest time this and issued a press release about it.
There have been repeated attempts to simplify and modernize America's "street pharmacy" system, but these are called. But these well-intentioned efforts have been mostly amateur and always sporadic. There was no real diagnosis of the disease, even when band-aids were applied after these band-aid cures were applied.
Does anybody ever try to do anything about limiting the planes, the guns, the tanks, the artillery, the military electronics which any government anywhere in the world can purchase without limit—except cash?
The problem, the report said, is three-fold:
1. Incompatibility of products with contemporary needs and performance standards.
Translation: The various city departments keep planting these architectural weeds.
"2. Non-interface of products made by different manufacturers."
Smaller tri-poles support bus stop signs, information and bus routes and parking
"3. Uncoordinated product responsibility between various municipal departments in procurement, installation and maintenance."
The pole for street lights is 50 feet high and supports spherical lamps which have virtually no glare. Directional signs and signposts are mounted on a pole structure in a "traffic boom," or banner, 15 feet high, which is where motorists can see them best. Lower down
Translation: Every manufacturer does his own thing and doesn't care whether his own product is good or bad.
Translation: The highway department chief doesn't talk to the police chief, neither talk to the fire chief and the mayor has other worries.
The report, if you can plow through all its gobbledygook, reveals much about graphic clarity, your perception of signs and the greater safety, convenience and attractiveness of simple, coordinated street furnishings.
*Translation: Find out what is needed,
design something that meets these needs.*
Malt Associates did this, and luckily, their design is better than their English.
The triangular space between the poles
Malt devised a standard structure, consisting of three poles arranged in a triangle, which can support just about anything that anyone would want on the street.
Nor would the manufacturers of fire alarms, fire hydrants and public telephones cooperate, according to a Cincinnati urban development officials. They have no trouble
Malt put簡 simple simple for traffic signs because lower case (small) letters are better read than uppercase letters. The cimmira traffic engineers insisted on the less legible dictates of their bible, the National Road Safety Code.
boxes litter boxes, telephone booths, mail
boxes and other convenience and safety
contraptions. The basic system is highly
flexible.
The bureaucrats, alas, are not. Neither are the manufacturers of street furnishings.
Griff and the Unicorn
But Malt will right when he wrote: "The public will accept innovation in street furnishings. The learning curve for use of such devices needs not necessarily a constraint."
Contrary to Malt's expectation, economy wasn't achieved "through synergistic benefits derived from components sharing of support and energy subsystems." There are few components that make to make enough of an investment in urban improvements to make them nav
selling their antiquated equipment, so why venture anything new?
bv Sokoloff
Do nations ever talk about keeping weapons out of the hands of such tools as Uguana's Gen G. Abd Amun or fanatics such as Zimbabwe or Racism, or racialists such as South Africa?
Cincinnati's public learning curve seems to be way up there. People, by all accounts, think that their city has made the right kind of progress and like it.
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Such topics are regarded as much too impolite for the Geneva discussions. The
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Have a Cat Up a Tree? Write to Washington
WASHINGTON — The envelope was quite heavy and fat with an unusual number of pages. The address was elaborately written in sweeping longhand from one edge to the
By JOHN PIKE
Kansas Washington Correspondent
When the contents were spilled out onto the desk, there lay income tax forms of several years past, half a dozen letters and copies of other letters and the calling card of the
writer.
Almost every sheet was marked with the inky thumbprint of the gentleman, a former military officer who apparently thought thumbprints were a good defense against forcery.
10 kJ
he really found out what the man wanted because that kind of mail is not my responsibility. I did find out, however, that he writes frequently, and always sends along
They say it takes all kinds, and that is exactly who write their congressmen—all kinds. We have one man, not even a constituent, who sends at least one letter a week. It is usually one sheet from a yellow legal pad, on which is scrawled what purports to be the names of 20 or 30 organizations out to impeach the President.
The man also always lists the "reasons Nixon is being impeached" and includes the punishment he has decided the law demands.
The latest suggestion was something in the neighborhood of 40 years and $40,000, but the figures for both go up a little with every letter, so who knows what Nixon will be facing by summer.
People write their congressmen for most every reason except to get their rat out of a tree, and I suppose somebody might have done that once.
Students ask us to have the Library of Congress write term papers for them. Friends of the Congressman write to thank him for going to something. People who would like to be friends of the Congressman write asking him to come to something.
A convenient way to keep an album organized is by using a vinyl record with ear times a day, tied in neat bundles. When the strings are cut, the dozens of envelopes out from between the big breezes can be stored in a sleeve that is much smaller than too much tuna fish.
the top and bottom of the desk. Working here I read every letter. I was fascinated by them. The office in the office seemed very bored by it all.
The mail so interested me that I would comment aloud on the ones I thought were weird, which was about one out of three. The staff would all chuckle politely, and I dismissed them as shell-shocked.
dismissed them as shell-shocked. Now I'm shell-shocked. I write so many letters ordering the Congressman to solve the often impractical the President or to save the Presidency, for God's sake, (it is very often impact the President or save the Presidency—semantics are wonderful), that they just don't have much meaning anymore.
Read the mail "the Congressman told me once." "Be sure to read the mail."
My personal favorites are the ones that take three pages or so to say. "I don't really know what we should do but I sure feel better for writing." These do wonders for the girls in other office who have to figure a category to file them under and what kind of letter to send, in reply.
And so I did. I read about people's gas bills. I read about their problems with welfare and the VA. I tried to play detective and figure out whether a given letter was part of a writing campaign or whether it was a spontaneous individual action.
campaign or whether it was a sponsorship of one I also tried to figure out whether there was a typical letter. Whether there was one subject dearer to people's hearts than others or whether there was one thing people seemed particularly sincere about.
I've decided that there isn't any one subject, and I've decided that they're almost always sincere about writing their Congressman. About sending their feelings, about putting a lot of private things in black and white and sending them to a difficult unknown man who probably most of them have never seen and undoubtedly many of
them didn't vote for it that they can't all get a return letter of equal sincerity, with the same blunt and straightforward style in which they wrote to us. . .
But just wait until that letter arrives about the cat up the tree. Maybe that's one thing we can just flat out tell them we can't do anything about.