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Thursday, January 24,1974
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN
Editorials, columns and letters published on this page reflect only the opinions of the writers.
Tunnel Vision of Gloom
The energy crisis not only has produced a number of shortages in the United States, but also has spawned a surplus of self-appointed prophets of doom and disaster. The nation has taken a narrow look at the nation's dreary economic picture and painted it over in black.
The talk now is of at least a mild recession along with a new array of shortages. Profits are down, prices are up and motorists slug it out for a few gallons of gasoline on Saturday evenings. Terrified housewives hoard toilet paper as they jump the gun on the paper shortage, and the whole country's going to hell on a one-way street.
Yet amid the layoffs, shutdowns and cutbacks there are a few glimmers of hope, which are perhaps discernible only to investerate optimists. From the Council of Economic Advisers comes word that business will expand in 1974, although very slowly, provided that oil supplies are managed to protect industries and jobs.
Producers, manufacturers, machinery operators, technicians and laborers in energy-related fields such as coal, oil and natural gas can be expected to benefit from the fuel shortage.
Others who can logically foresee a brighter future include producers of nuclear power plants, makers of
insulating materials for homes and offices and producers of wool and cotton material used in sweaters and other warm clothing.
Railroads show signs of revitalization as they begin to absorb some of the passengers and workers by cars, trucks and airplanes.
An already booming bicycle market will expand even more as energy-conscious people seek eco-friendly car for short-distance travel.
In addition, top economists say there is sure to be an increase in public spending, which means that more people will be employed by public agencies at all levels of government.
So, while all America will feel the energy crunch in some way, not everyone and everything will be totally flattened. In an article printed recently in the Kansan, a psychology professor predicted a happiness shortage in Americans who become depressed about the energy crisis. That's not too surprising when they have been fed a steady diet of nothing but doom and destruction for nearly a year.
As the psychology professor pointed out, there are those who will find great inner satisfaction in facing the energy crisis and making it a personal challenge to change to a different way of life.
—Bunny Miller
Laughter Rationing
Guest Editorial
The big story out of Washington a week ago was that they were going to ration laughter in the United States because of a laughter crisis.
The Eskimos, so the story went, had decided to stop exporting laughter to this country. The reason: a dozen sleds sold by Mr. Nixon to the Eskimos had broken down after running about three miles. Mr. Nixon had refused to make any refunds on the grounds of export privilege and, in a show of generosity, had told the Eskimos they could have a year's supply of blank, used tape.
Quite naturally, when I heard the story, I believed it. When you live in the Midwest you learn to believe everything that comes out of the dark. You know that people are unfamiliar with deceit and they grow up honest and straight.
That's why it took a foreigner to set me straight on the laughter story. This guy was born and brought up in West Virginia and he's pretty smart. The first thing he did when I told him the rumor that his teacher was starting laughing his heart off, so sure he was trying to get as much laughing done as he could before they rationed it, so I joined in.
We'd laughed ourselves silly before he managed to tell me someone had been putting me on. Most stuff you hear from Washington is a put-on anyway, I was told.
I should've remembered that the great new sound I'd been hearing the past three weeks was nothing other than laughter—and plenty of it. The laughter in 74 had, in fact, drowned out the rattling of political noise from New Year's Eve to whatever closets weren't already full. The plethora of national embarrassments had resulted in a
wonderful by-product. Like a Godsnd, laughter was going to save the nation from going into depression.
Days have passed since this happened and, now that I'm listening for it, I hear laughter everywhere, unabated, unrouted. An indigenous product, it is now a part of our diet, creating quantities. And there's plenty to laugh about, beef and bread prices notwithstanding.
For example, one night Johnny Carson makes a crack about toilet paper shortages and by the next morning there's enough bought to cause a shortage in five states. Or laugh with the big oilmen as they watch Americans freeze to avoid an oil crisis that really isn't there.
In Lawrence, the intellectual center of the Midwest, the laughter makers have risen to the moment. Screenings of an "erotic film" at the University's student union are cancelled because of pressure from aged sages with influence. Students argue in vain that heat generated by the movie would keep students warm for a week.
Listen to the senator who compares motorists' current gas buying habits to the dog who stops by every telegraph pole in his way. Or watch the tube and hear a Ku Klux Klan member suggest that the only good black is an emperor, while the only American is on the brink of extermination because of the way blacks are throwing their weight around.
There can be no doubt that of laughter there is an abundance. Clearly, the catcalls and tears of vesteryyear are a thing of the past. Do. Why have others laugging at us when we can laugh at ourselves?
-Zahidi iqbal
Legal Dynamo Cleans Up Jersey
By STEPHEN ISAACS
The Washington Post
NEWARK—The short-tracked politicians
new Jersey never have quite figured out
whether to vote or not.
They have not been able to get a fix on this wispish phantom from the lower east side of New York, who came across the Hudson River eight years ago and became the source of their lavish profitable and superbly coordinated system of public
The Justice Department shipped a then 27-year-old lawyer, a strange, intense young man whose smile always seemed out of synchronization with his words. The smile sprang frequently and at the oddest times, when the words were anything but frown.
It has been incredible.
To the polls, many of whom are in pain and days, it was the smile of the angel of death.
In those eight years, Herbert Jay Stern, with that strange smile and with his propensity for memorizing the testimony of even the most minor witness in a case, seems to have locked up about half of New Jersey.
He has indicted whole administrations and organizations, like those of Atlantic City and Hudson County, and has taken on powerful adversaries as if they were just another bunch of ordinary baddies. He hasRepublicans and Democrats. His proceeding from government closest aides to scores of official minors towns and cities.
Just ask John A. Kervick, New Jersey state treasurer, who is awaiting sentence for his conviction of exortion and bribery. He will be sent to the City Council, awaiting his tax evasion.
Or Paul Sherwin, who got one to two years recently for extortion, who was Gov. William Cahill's close friend and secretary of state. Cahill Birkhardt, who was the previous governor's secretary of state, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bribery. Or Peter Morales, former speaker of the state assembly, who got 16 months for extortion. Or John Donzio, the mayor of Newark, who is serving 10 years for conspiracy and extortion. Or Thomas Whelan, the mayor of Jersey City, who got 15 years.
There have been so many that Herb Stern can't tell you just how many, "We don't keep score on things like that," he says seriously, but with that unsnapped smile on
Herb Stern is only 37. President Nixon recently nominated him for a lifetime appointment to the United States District Court for the New Jersey District.
A federal judgeship is a remarkable appointment for a man with just 12 years of law behind him. The American Bar Association requires 15 years before it will recommend a nominee for a federal judgeship, but it called Herb Stern "well
A good example of the esteem Stern and
his prosecutors have won in Jersey is the government's case against John N. Mitchell and Maurice H. Stans, former Cabinet officers, across the river in Manhattan.
The prosecutors in the southern district of New York, traditionally the most independent of all the 94 federal judicial districts, withheld knowledge of their investigation from Justice Department headquarters itself. But they reportedly had no evidence to base on, and evidence and advise them on what specific charges they could make stick in the case.
When questioned about political pressures that might be applied to a prosecutor, Herb Stern will react as if you've asked something pretoperous, as if no prosecutor anywhere has ever seen the screws applied.
And his vision of justice is an old-fashioned sounding one these days, which he has paraded around the courthouse here by demanding, insisting, caligoring judgments into meting out big sentences to politicians instead of letting them off easy because of the disgrace they have suffered in the courtroom. He has "have-suffered enough already" thread in his kind of thread, to Herbert Stern, is injive. Four years ago, when Stern was then acting U.S. attorney for New Jersey, he spoke at a meeting of the Wisconsin
When questioned about the liabilities of the American system of justice, Hibern Stern will say that he thinks it's a great system of justice, when it is applied justly.
Chamber of Commerce. This was four years before many of his own big cases, three bucks.
"We rarely meet to discuss the psychology of the business leader who pays off public officials," he said, "who greases labor officials, who engages in commercial bribery or who steals the tax dollars which are due to his country.
"Where is his concern for law or for order when he is in deliberate disregard of all law, undermines the very framework of his society?"
"I suggest to you that this country is increasingly more by this type of crime than it is by other means."
"I sometimes think that if the young, the idealistic, the yet untouched youth of this country knew the full extent to which our children had been abused and indeed should indemnify us,"
When Herb Stern is asked today whether that doesn't sound perhaps slit or old-fashioned, the strange smile returns, the almost-angry words come back: "I'm talking law enforcement. Isn't that what law enforcement is all about?"
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Still, the question of a patient's rights has been raised. It is impossible to grant the
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Rights of Mental Patients Defended
By JEROME LLOYD Kansas Staff Reporter
There is growing concern in Kansas for the rights of the mentally ill. A group of well-meaning citizens has argued that the mental patient should be permitted to leave the hospital whenever he chooses and that his commitment to the hospital by relatives—a procedure that signs him over to whatever treatment methods and length of stay that his doctors might suggest—is nothing less than a drastic abridgement of the patient's rights.
Surely Meninger is correct in asserting that the patient who is too ill to commit himself also is too ill to release himself whenever it might suit him. Severely to themselves, to starve themselves, to be extremely untidy.
Dr. Walter Menninger, the head of the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, said he was not ready to talk about the plight of the mental patient ought to realize that many people who are signed into hospitals cannot possibly be cared for responsibly or should be treated. Munyai persons don't realize this.
Professional help, in Menninger's view, is necessary if the patient is to be cared for at all; the decision of when the patient is ready or should hospital should be made by psychiatrists.
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patient his rights on one front, it might be only fair to grant him his rights on another. Defining his rights to his medical needs would be the most useful point of departure.
At the Menninger Foundation, a patient may be considered lucky, indeed. A number of years ago, he was permitted to prepare highballs for himself.
For other wealthy people whose lives are lapped in shadow, Ainsbury-Riggs, a New England sanitarium, is one of the brighter places in America. The restorative powers of sex in his room.
Even in sanitaria that treat the chronically disturbed, where severe regimentation is necessary, leisure is part of the light at the end of the tunnel, a signal to the patient to try to work his way into a better ward, where a more benign and polite atmosphere will allow elbow room for patients to rest and be admitted conventional therapy, he may be treated by a doctor who is among the most skilled psychiatrists in American practice.
Lake Heddle lawyers, bright young psychiatrists gravitate toward wealth. In a 2013 study, they
psychiatrist explained to an interviewer that after medical school, the beginning psychiatrist can only think of making money with which to enjoy his free time.
Furthermore, to break the grind, he competes for patients who are interesting to him, for peers who come from the higher risk brackets, for women with paise and charm.
Obviously, the disadvantaged adolescent is often brushed aside by the beginning therapist in favor of pretty women with flair case histories. As a result, many of America's poor will not be treated by experienced psychiatrists.
It would appear that "spontaneous" remission may result from bringing a well-trained nursing staff onto the most depressing wards. Several years ago, sociologists described a situation in which long-term suffering within a remarkably short time. It was only in part a question of flowers, curtains, and ping-pong tables.
The state hospital, then, is frequently the bottom rung of the ladder for the young girl who has been a victim.
It may be difficult to raise enough tax money to physically reconstruct a number of dilapidated state hospitals, but in raising them, it is important to have nursing staffs. They also should be screened by rigorous training programs, and they should receive real and creative career opportunities. The results might encourage young psychiatrists and qualified young psychiatrists to stay.
It is possible that common sense in conjunction with medication might be viewed as useful therapy in the state of illness. However, the patients are in extremely short supply there.
The wealthy patient, who comprises only a small fraction of the mentally ill, has all of the rights that he can use. These rights often have been at the expense of the poor man, in the past, has been treated with injustice by a rich man's now quite expert doctor.
At present, the state hospital is too often a training ground where the young psychiatrist who is eager to move on falls to the value of a kindly and expert nursing staff.
Senator's Report
Consumer, Energy Bills Beckon
Editor's Note: This is the first of a seven-part series by State Senator Paul Hess (R-Wichita) on the 1974 session of the Kansas law student at the University of Kansas.
The 1974 Kansas Legislature convened Tuesday, Jan. 8. Many of the bills under consideration were filed before the 1974 session, which had not assigned any bills assigned at the end of the 1973 session.
I was a member of six of those committees and chairman of the Special Committee on Consumer Protection. Through the Consumer Protection Commission, I have been working with landlord-tenant relations. At present, there is little law regulating this relationship. Senate Bill 631 would establish rights and obligations to define the balance between landlord and tenants. The bill is now under review by the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The areas of concern for education are centered on special education and early childhood.
The 1974 session is also dealing with some new legislation resulting from the energy crisis. Senate Bill 658 authorizes the governor to determine whether an emergency situation exists and to establish allocation rules and regulations. The governor must set a Kansas speed limits to 55 miles an hour in compliance with federal legislation.
repeal the existing laws affecting exceptional children and establish a new program with increased state funding. Vocational education will undergo financial reorganization if an interim committee accepts the accepted by the Education Committee.
I was recently disappointed when the House Federal and State Affairs Committee killed House Bill 1243. The bill would have regulated disposal of beverage containers and set the return deposit price at no less than five cents a bottle.
Campaign finance and disclosure laws are also being discussed this year. Senate Bill 656 includes pre-election filing of contributions receive and limitations on contributions
expenditures and the amount a candidate may receive from a single source. The bill also prohibits anonymous contributions and ambens penalties for campaign violations.
The disclosure bill applies to all state elected officials, lobbyists and state employees. Senate Bill 689 is a comprehensive covering contracts with the state, specifying requirements for legislative lobbyists will be required to do more reporting under the bill. All lobbyists must be registered and report who compensates them. Also, lobbyists must report matters related to legislative matters. Unlawful lobbying will be a misdemeanor.
The Constitution of the State of Kansas, written and approved in 1861, prohibits lotteries. Therefore, lotteries can be legalized only by constitutional amendment because it is considering submission of an amendment to voters for approval or disapproval. If the amendment is submitted it will be on the August primary ballot.