4.
Monday, April 1, 1974
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN
Editorials, columns and letters published on this page reflect only the opinions of the writers.
Morality in Amnesty
The still sizzling issue of amnesty for those who evaded the draft during the Vietnam War is being seriously debated in Congress. President Nixon has suburban opposed amnesty and Congress has cautious about this divisive issue that involves such tragic considerations.
Many of those who served in Vietnam, especially the prisoners of war and the families of those who were killed in the war, are resentful of attempts to pardon the draft exadvers.
They should be resentful since amnesty would imply that either the U.S. Vietnam policy was a mistake that caused many lives to be foolishly lost or interrupted, or that the draft evaders are vindicated for avoiding the risk of death and imprisonment that so many others had to face. The draft evaders are the most natural target for the feelings of bitterness of those who served and were scarred by the Vietnam experience.
But eventually the tragic fact that the intervention into Vietnam wasn't worth its price must be accepted. It should be recognized that the government chose those who followed their consciences and refused to serve.
But the U.S. government is
evidently not humble enough and lacks the strength of character to admit its mistakes. The delusion is perpetuated that the Vietnam war was an honour to those men and women who forgive those men who refused to be a part of it.
Nixon said in a White House position paper on amnesty, March 5, 1973, that he opposed amnesty because those who fled the country weren't seeking forgiveness but approval from the U.S. government that they were wrong. This admission of error is one of the most difficult signs of maturity for Nixon to achieve.
Yet, even President Nixon campaigned in 1968 on a platform that said the Vietnam policy had been largely a mistake and that withdrawal from the conflict was the best course.
We tried to demonstrate our military greatness in Vietnam, and the limits of our power were sorely revealed. Now it is time for the United States to demonstrate its moral greatness and its strength of character by admitting its mistakes and correcting them. No threatening precedent will be set if it is clear that annesty is provided in difference to good conscience and moral concern.
Bill Gibson
Bull in a College Shop
The art of bullying is a college student what a mallate is to a carpenter; a handy tool to have around when you can't seem to hit the nail on the head.
Students who master the technique of balling in their freshmen and sophomore years may be able to coast through succession years solely on the basis of its power.
Students who never figure out how to buil
mind, find themselves at a disadvantage.
More than one student has studied diligently for an essay exam, only to receive a lower grade than the student who couldn't care less about the class—the same student fitted at the assigned reading material and rarely attending the lecture sessions.
That is one of the disadvantages of large lecture classes in an even larger university.
Since a professor can't get to personally know every individual, a student's work usually is graded on appearance with little consideration as genuine effort in its production.
So, students who sometimes have no knowledge whatsoever about a course are often taught this way through the skillful use of plagiarism, impressive references listed in lengthy bibliographies and other devices which they are zealously seeking knowledge.
True evaluation of a student's knowledge can only be made through closer teacher-student relations. If this element is lacking, college becomes simply a system through which students are processed in the place of higher learning, simply becomes a lot of bull.
—Linda Doherty
By ISIDORE SILVER
The population of the United States increased 13 per cent in the 1960s; the crime rate rose 144 per cent. And a frustrated, frightened American public is looking for the reasons. Drugs? Permissiveness? Insecurity in the criminal justice system?
Special in Newsday
In their search for answers, most Americans proceed from the premise that crime is an aberration, that it's some sort of disorder. The argument goes that Crime, say the social scientists, the criminal justice experts — indeed, nearly all healthy social organism — in an otherwise healthy social organism.
There are serious defects in this thinking. Crime persists because of what we are and what we have become as a people. We have become a society that produces crime. It arises from our restlessness, our competitiveness, our diregard for social amenities and our belief in progress and perfection. And it is hard to believe in the industrial, urban, technological society.
Psychologists study heredity or early childhood experiences to find the causes of crime. Broken families, absence or imbalance in poverty and poverty are all assumed to play a role.
Phill Slater, a sociologist, has described the American condition as "the pursuit of loneliness," it's the quest for wealth to the exclusion of anything else. This has resulted in the uprooting of neighborhoods and the loss of community dissatisfaction with the status quo and a sense of personal failure and inadequacy when one has not made it.
Americans live under a terrible and sometimes unbearable pressure to achieve. These pressures can actually serve to indulge them, but in the form for example, are highly motivated to achieve. Suburban life, with such pressures as car and mortgage payments and countrytubel memberships, has given rise to people especially employ theft and embezzlement.
America's Capitalist roots make us an acquisitive people. Such resulting dominant values as competitiveness and the willingness to tolerate practice skirting the limit of legality foster conduct we later condemn. The very permissiveness that the Nixon administration attacks is at the heart of the American laissez-faire ethic.
The Execution of Justice
Ironically, we base our perceptions of increasing crime on criminal statistics whose starting point, the 1930s, was a time when the United States had no war. II, there was little change in the '40s, and the '50s showed only a moderate rise in the crime rate. In broad historical perspective, the soaring crime rate of the '60s compared to that of the '70s, pattern rather than a startling deviation.
Countries with the highest rates of economic growth have the steepest increases in juvenile delinquency which is the result of a shift in the population mayor of a town in southern Italy told an
America's Character Abets Crime
By WILLIAM RASPBERRY
The Washington Post
And now the lobbits for morality are in their effort to keep people safe in their effort to keep death penalty
WASHINGTON - The Senate may have been reflecting the wishes of the people if not its superior wisdom last week when it passed a bill to require for certain categories of federal offences.
I'm guessing that their argument will be as ineffectual in the House as it was in the Senate, and for the same reason. It misses the point.
As was the case when the bill was under consideration in the Senate, its opponents in the House will argue that there is no reliable evidence that capital punishment deters crime. Therefore, they will argue, it shouldn't be enacted.
But that isn't the point.
Capital punishment would certainly deter income tax evasion, for instance, or speeding. If it were certainty that any person caught deliberately underpaying his income taxes or driving his car too fast would die, death, hardly anybody would do either.
Brual rapes, mutilations and mass murders strike some people as so foul that
Of course no one ever proposes capital punishment for the kinds of crimes that would clearly deter. And the evidence is inconclusive that it would deter the crimes for which it is proposed; treason, kidnapping or murder in the course of skylacking.
While many people who support the death penalty say it would help prevent certain beinous crimes, my guess is that they support it for another reason: retribution
they are willing to see the perpetrators dead, no matter whether anyone is deterred
I don't feel that way, but I appreciate the difficulty of arguing with those who do. If your statistics are drawn with enough care and presented with enough clarity, you can win the argument over deterence. But if you want to minimize your deserts—whether a particularly low-lifted s.o.b. deserves to die—you might as well shrug your shoulders and walk away.
"I oppose the death penalty," he says, because it *demands human society without protecting it*. "Hughes is saying that a lynch mob by proxy is still a lynch mob.
It is interesting, though, that even among those who conclude that certain abominable offenders deserve to die, few are willing to take action. Yet, many of them would be willing to participate in a lynch mob. But it's okay if the state does it. The state, speaking solemn legalisms and conducting stony-faced executions, would prevent execution, which sounds much less offensive.
That is one of the key reasons for the Supreme Court's 1972 decision outlawing the sale of marijuana.
He made some other points that deserve consideration. Capital punishment, almost of necessity, is "capricious and unjust in its application. It discriminates against the luckless, the poor and the racial minorities."
But it is really? Sen. Harold E. Hughes, Dowa, invokes the usual efficacy argument against capital punishment and "the loathing of Commandments." Thou shalt not kill."
The bill that now goes to the House seeks to overcome the court's objections by spelling out specifically the crimes that are subject to the death penalty and by making the application of the penalty, with certain exceptions, automatic upon conviction.
much discretion in deciding when to impose the death penalty, and used that discretion in such wildly varying directions, that the court ruled it unconstitutional.
But Sen. Hughes' objections aren't so much constitutional as moral and moral.
Capital punishment prolongs court proceedings, he says, both because of the lack of evidence that every possible appeal and because of the added weight it puts on jury deliberations. If a mistake is made, if the convicted person turns out to be innocent, there is no road ahead.
Unfortunately, Hughes' arguments—and those of others, including Sen. Philip Hart, D-Mich., and Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass.,—left a majority of the Senate unmoved. Nor is there much hope for a more civilized outcome in the House.
"Finally," Hughes says, "I oppose the death penalty because it is grossly destructive of human hopes for a society under such conditions." He also on violence for the solution of its problems.
"Be it further enacted that members of any jury that die the death penalty, and any magistrate who upholds said vote, shall execute the sweeping military squad that will execute the sentence."
Well, if we are going to enact capital punishment, let me propose an amendment that occurred to me last week when I was told by NBC's "The Execution of Pvt. Slovak."
bv Sokoloff
Griff and the Unicorn
astonished American reporter several years ago;
"I wish we had some of that juvenile delinquency you have. We could use it. Well, I wouldn't say it's exactly a good thing. But we could use the good things that always go with it—those nice new factories, the new car motors in. Short, prosperity!"
Although this viewpoint may be too esoteric for many of us to accept, a task report force to the 1967 President's Crime Commission argued, "Societies where there is little opportunity for delinquency or rebellion. Where change is rapid, the traditional institutional ways of dealing with problems are not effective answers. Many aspects of the American ethic, our freedom, our benevolent attitude toward the environment, our encouragement of mass migrations may produce the delinquency we deplore."
As a result of our beliefs about crime, we wage "wars" on it and demand unconditional surrender. President Nixon and the military forced crimes as if there were two armed forces with each other. What he overlooks is that many of the peace forces were once, or are, members of the criminal forces. Yesterdays those are today's domesticated managers.
The average American is worried about street crime. He is concerned with violence, especially muggings, burglary and kidnapping. Middle-class crimes, such as embezzlement and antitrust law violations, and political crimes usually arouse little interest. The Mafia elicits more awe and terror than the "crime" covers all, even the victorious crimes: drunkenness, prostitution, sexual deviation and druz possession.
Our national tendency to equate immorality with crime, our fear of deviance.
our invinible belief in the criminal law as the first line of defense and our suspicion of minority groups all contribute to our perception of crime.
We talk of prevention, of causes, of rehabilitation and of improvement in the criminal justice system. But we seek superficial solutions.
We are socially schizophrenic. We want the benefits of the system but are unwilling to recognize, much less pay, the price. We believe, for instance, that poverty has eroded social causes, but we also attribute some unspecified moral failure to the poor.
We must begin to critically evaluate the role that the birth rate, national migratory patterns, unemployment, housing conditions and racism play in crime. We must begin to think about our crime problem as a reflection of our character. As one philosopher expressed it, "all societies get the crime they deserve."
Pressing the President
The Washington Post
WASHINGTON—"I am not obsessed," said President Nixon to the National Association of Broadcasters, "about how the press reports me."
It may be, as the President said, that he is not obsessed about the press. But there has been a great demonstration greater conviction that the press (including radio and television) has been his undoing, and has spent more time, emotion and effort combatting it, than he
The observation came in the course of a question-and-answer session in which he repeatedly made offhand references and digs at the press, highlighted by his bit of irony: "The President should treat the press just as fairly as the press treats him."
By JULES WITCOVER
Perhaps the best recent illustration of that conviction—and his bitterness about it—was his Oct. 26 press conference attack on television network reporting.
"I have never heard of or seen such outrageous, vicious, distorted reporting in 27 years of public life," he said, when asked to state about shocks to the nation's confidence.
A few moments later, when asked by Robert Pierpoint of CBS News what it was that happened to his friend's past weeks and months that has aroused your anger," the President responded: "Don't get the impression that you are being so rude. Only be anyur with those he respects."
The bitterness of that answer revealed a deep, seated animosity that goes back to the President's earliest years in national political life. As both presidential candidate and White House occupant, Mr. Nikon has treated the press as a hostile and dangerous entity. In 1962, he determined. Convinced that the press helped defeat him in 1960 and 1962, he deliberately constructed his campaign of 1968 and his presidency thereafter to shield himself
Illustrated Book Ads Make Intriguing Junk
By JACK SMITH The Los Angeles Times
These ornate advertising brochures usually come in large envelopes with windows, so that even before we get the mail into the house we have looked at a golden scene from the Roman Empire or a snowy palace on the Russian steppe. Even if one is already quite satisfied with big, beautiful books, it is almost impossible to have a very detailed view without further examination. I can do it, but never without a wing of guilt, as if I had drawn a crayon mark across a Rembrandt in a museum.
Hardly a day passes that our postman doesn't bring to our door an offer to add some "big, beautiful, lavishly illustrated" book to our library, or more often, a whole set of big, beautiful, lavishly illustrated books.
I don't mean to ridicule either these formidable pieces of junk mail or the masterpieces they extol. We have succumbed all too often to their blandishments. Big, beautiful books cover our tabletops and we can almost be sure pushing out the humble old novels and paper backs, which go to the garage or off to Goodwill.
They multiply.
We have bought sets that seem to have no final volume, as long as the bills are paid. Innocently we subscribed to a set of big, beautiful books on each of the countries of the world. "And on they came, like the boxcars of the 1930s, years later we began to ask each other, 'How many countries are there, anyway?'
Now and then I come to my senses and rebel against this senseless acquisition of ostentatious volumes whose words remain unread and pictures unlocked at. But I might as well try to keep from getting hit in a halloween by clutching hallstones and
hurling them back at the skv.
"Well, she said, "they'll be nice for the urchardchildren."
"Why are we doing this?" I asked my wife once.
Not if we can believe Marshall McLahan,
who has already written a book of books
that have been used.
I would have loved such a wonderful collection of books when I was a boy. My untreasured memoirs, and my treasured engravings in my father's set of Ridpath's History of the World and on National Geographic magazines, which in them provide the best of what a woman looked like in the buff.
But by the time our grandson is reading, Tim afraid, the world will be brought to a halt. When you walk and fingertips, and children won't lie on the floor on rainy Saturday mornings among piles of books, escaping to ancient times and distant places, the memory of a vision can ever produce.
The end may be even near to I fear. There recently came a piece of alarming evidence in the mail. It was an ad for a "bookcase" which was, in fact, nothing but a shadow box. "Add a light touch to a lockhouse wall," it says.
The bookcase looks real enough in the colored illustration, including such titles as "Eight Cousins," by Lyssa May Alcott, "Der Strahlende Stern," by F. Steuben, and "Young Tenderfoot," by William McKinley. The books are undoubtedly real books.
But what's this? It suddenly appears that the shadow box is only 2 inches deep! The books must have been chopped off to leave them intact, and they are like a mini illusion of a tharer, but without any books.
I don't particularly care about Alcott, Raine and F. Steuben, but as soon as they're available in this form I'd like to have the complete works of Professor McLahan.
from the press and also to subvert its credibility.
In 1968, he removed whatever spontaneity he could from the campaign and showed himself essentially in well-staged events that dictated favorable press coverage.
When the press raised questions about his conduct of the war, Mr. Knixon sent Vice President Spriro T. Agnew on a hatchet mission against them, with one clear and paramount objective—to undermine the press' credibility.
As in the past, the press has reported many things concerning Wategate and associated developments that have hurt Mr. Bush. The media have damaged damages. The press didn't break into Democratic headquarters at the Wategate on June 17, 1972; the press didn't establish the "plumbers unit" in the White House; it did not inform the office of Daniel Ehlers's psychiatrist.
And the press didn't payush money to the Watergate defendants; or try to cover up such payments or improve Mr. Nixon's homes at Key Biscayne and San Clemente at taxpayers' expense; or backdate a donation of vice-presidential papers for maximum tax deductions; or that they conspire in violation; or tape conversations secretly in the White House; or erase 18½ minutes of conversation from a key tape.
The press record of reporting on Watergate and the other stories that have caused Mr. Nixon so much recent grief has, or should have, done much to buttress its credibility. Public confidence is a perishable commodity and no matter what will truth the press reports, it's effort will lie if the that which is reported isn't believed.
If the President can succeed in painting the press as a band of irresponsible bullies engaged in a personal vendetta against him, the role of the press as an independent force that will resist critical weeks and months ahead will be seriously undermined. As the nation, along with Mr. Nixon, approaches an orcheal that will test the strength and justice of the political system, it is especially important to realize that in a manner that minimizes this possibility.
It is a time, certainly, for putting hard questions to the President. It is a time, for instance, to press him when he sidestep demands on the president, who asked whether he would honor a subpoena for tapes and documents from the House Judiciary Committee. It is a time for tenacity on the part of the press, to get at the press, and for the press to be credible in the public's eye.
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