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University Daily Kansan, July 13, 1981
Opinion
Budget, hopes curtailed
America is known throughout the world as the land of rising expectations. As we expanded our borders and improved our technologies we invested the fruits of our labors into an ever-growing communal pool of resources, and in turn used those resources to educate our young, to close the great distances that separated the nation and to make that nation secure.
While we experimented with those mechanical technologies, we also experimented with social technology, and the results of those constitutionally rooted developments are echoed in the way we have made our laws and in the goals that have been outlined for us by our leaders.
We are currently going through a difficult but hardly unique period of our history in which the validity of those social experiments are being called into question. Programs such as Social Security and welfare, while being touted as products of our nation's compassion, are also being closely scrutinized for possible reduction at the hands of those who wish to trim the budget. Some of this page today deals with the outcome of and the perceived reasons behind
this backlash against social experimentation.
Thought should also be given, however, to the impact this backlash will have on the expectations of the citizens of this country. For instance, newspapers are already inundated with stories about people on Social Security who are afraid to make decisions concerning their futures because Social Security no longer seems secure.
Apart from these types of important financial considerations there is also growing concern about a number of social advances that, by 1981, we had thought secure. A case in point is the federal voting rights act that will come up for renewal in Congress next year. While the act is likely to be renewed, a number of strong voices have already been raised in opposition, and after the recent victories of conservative forces in Congress it would be foolish to underestimate their power.
Taking these developments into consideration, it becomes time to look seriously at what the priorities of this nation are, and to ask what will happen in this land of rising expectations when those in control decide those expectations have been rising too long.
Credibility of U.S. media questioned
By ACHAL MEHRA
Guest Columnist
A Gallup Foll two years ago found that fewer than one in three people thought that the ethical standards of journalists were above average. But a new survey of ethical standards of reporters were just average.
That ought to be disconcerting news to members of the Fourth Estate, who have arrogated to themselves the role of guardian of public morals.
Recent events have seen the media's "dirty little secrets" spill into the open. Not surprisingly, only 19 percent of the people have considerable confidence in the press.
The most notorious of recent scandals involved Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke, whose Pulitzer Prize was withdrawn after it was disclosed she had fabricated her sensational story about an eight-year-old drug addict, Jimmy.
But the Cooke case is only the more celebrated media fraud, and far from being the aberration media men would like to have us believe.
Even before the flak following the Jimmy hoax had subsided, the second largest circulated daily in the country, the New York Daily News, was wracked by its own scandal.
Michael Daly, award-winning columnist of the paper, was forced to quit after being accused of fabricating the source of his article on police brutality in Northern Ireland.
Shortly thereafter, the invincible New York Times had to put out a sheepish retraction of a story of "questionable accuracy" about Polish unrest by freerain Carley Lippman.
More recently, the Toronto Sun fired two reporters who wrote a totally false exposé (how impressive that word sounds) of a Canadian minister.
And veteran and highly respected columnist William F. Buckley has been accused of misquoting a source in a story about an Israeli exile.
NEW YORK, WABC-TV sacked five reporters
who watched viewers that had been
alarmed during their protests.
And soon after the assassination attempt on President Reagan, another television reporter was sacked for conspiring with psychic Tamarra Sullivan. The attack had predicted the attempt two months before.
The list could be endless. Every year scores of heavy libel judgments are handed down by the court.
Many, many others never get to court because people Jack the resources to challenge.
The purpose of this self-flagellation is not to dissuade journalists from doing their job, which is to be a watchdog of public morality. But WE need to perform our role on the leash is necessary to perform our role.
We have become intoxicated with our own power and importance to a degree that we are privileged to know.
Jack Anderson, who has built his reputation spilling highly classified dossiers in the marketplace, might do well to reveal the little-known details about the National News Council's rulings of questionable journalistic practices by him in his columns.
The media is only as powerful as its credibility, and arrogance strikes at the very core of society.
What is needed from the media is greater humility.
Gay's hectic spring schedule reveals a growing homosexual social scene
By ARMISTEAD MAUPIN New York Times Special Features
SAN FRANCISCO-June is a hectic month for brides and homosexuals.
Take my own schedule, for instance. Last month, I read from my books at the Gay American Arts Festival in New York City and at the Walt Whitman Bookshop in San Francisco, attended the New York premiere of the San Francisco Gay Men's chorus, addressed a rally at the San Jose Gay Pride Celebration, rooted for the contestants in a gay triercycle race benefiting Animals and attended a graduation of Cruelty to Animals and attended a gender education by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, an "order of gay男士 nuns dedicated to the expiration of guilt," as it describes itself.
As you may have guessed, I'm a San Franciscan. I 'm therefore wistfully aware that simple logistics prohibited me from taking part in the two-day gag party block in New Orleans, the gay Mississippi River boat cruise in Minneapolis or even the Fireman's Ball sponsored by Black and White Men Together, in Houston. I suppose I could have passed down Denver's failed gay beer if it didn't mean missing the music of the 100-member Ice Cream and Leisure Center Kazoo Band. As it was, there were scarcely enough time for me to complete my gay square-dance course and the gag wagon train that was ready to roll in the California desert.
A friend of mine, Vito Russo, who wrote "The Celluloid Closet" it's about homosexuality in the movies—also suffers from gay overload in June. His schedule included a mad dash to the coast for the San Francisco International Gay Film Festival where he screened, among other things, "rare footage" of Bette Midler performing at the Continental Baths.
"Are you a mess?" I asked Vito at lunch
eccentrally, "I say as well am."
He smiled softly and replied: "It's just June."
"But it's getting worse. " I said.
He shrugged. "Judy should've picked another month to die." He must medJayGard, long an object of adoration among gays, for reasons that are not obvious in the garden's funeral was a dozen years ago this day.
Also, on June 28, 1969, under the first full moon
of summer, a small band of gay New Yorkers who had finally had enough stood their ground and fought back against policemen attempting to bust a gay bar in Greenwich Village. That event, commonly called The Stonewall Rebellion (after the establishment under siege), is regarded as the Lexington and Concord of the modern gay rights movement.
I know exactly what he means. There are times when I wonder how I can muster the stamina to attend one more Cops vs. Homos softball game, one more Dentists for Human Rights awards brunch and one more pollutic supper and bingo night to benefit gay Cuban students. I know that somebody asks myself, to know that someay the Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name would qualify him for membership in a health club, a bowling league and a savings and loan association?
I don't know. I do know what my own life was like before these oddly Rotarian-sounding institutions became a part of it. I remember all too often that they were brought when I was 14 years old and living in North Carolina, too, that there are still children being brutalized by the obscene fundamentalist notion that their sexuality is an abomination to the God that created them, and that there are still nervous people whose behavior is different than that they don't care "what you in bed in" but wonder "why you make such a big deal of it."
Ever since then, June has been an exhausting time for members of our tribe. Ken Malenay, a San Francisco media consultant who has spent the summer in Kansas through "The Gay Capital of the World," says that June is the month when many homosexuals find themselves "gayed out" for good. "A lot of people can't take it," he says. "I myself am not gay." This July with my straight brother in Kansas.
I make such a big deal of it, I suppose, because I wearied of other people making a big deal of it behind my back. The cards are on the table now, and the world seems a nicer place because of it. If nothing else, June is a time when I remind myself that I am queer in almost every sense of the word, and that I wouldn't have it any other wav.
(Arnold Mangin is author of "Tales of the
Mangins" and another that appears in The San
Francisco Chronicle.)
Voting equality not ensured for blacks
By HOWARD BALL
New York Times Special Features
STARKVILLE, Miss.-The 1965 Voting Rights Act is due to expire next year and already loud voices are heard calling for burial of this major civil-rights law.
The legislation, enacted in response to bloodshed in Selma, Ala., represented a strong national effort to end racial discrimination in the voting. The act was triggered in any state if less than 50 percent of registered voters registered or voted in the 1964 presidential election. Because nine states of the old "conferencing-Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas" fall under the act's coverage, Southern senators have strongly supported the legislation. In North Carolina and Jesse Helms of North Carolina call the law unfair and blasted against one region. They and other Southern politicians recommend outright burial or "nationwide coverage"—the shorthand term for removal of the triggering mechanism, which would have the effect of ending all racial violence in America be approved by the Justice Department, making enforcement impossible.
Supporters of the act, including all civil-rights groups and such legislators as Sens. Edward M. Kennedy, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Barry M. Goldwater, as well as Dan Edwards, chairwoman of the Constitutional Rights, are fighting hard to extend the existing law through 1992. They believe that the task of ensuring voter equality, especially in the South, has not yet been completed and that the justice Department should end the eradication of racial discrimination in voting.
President Reagan's position on extending the act appears unclear. On Sunday, he said he
Since 1965, more than 1.5 million Southern blacks have registered to vote. In Mississippi, where blacks constitute about 36 percent of the population, in 1964, 6.7 percent were registered; in 1861, nearly 70 percent were registered. A survey conducted by the Department of devices that frustrate registration, among them literacy tests and poll taxes, has been moderately successful. It is Section 5, the "preclearance" section, that is anathema to white officeholders. This section, put in because of Southern whites' horrid record in delaying voter registration, calls for pre-clearance of all voting orders to the Justice Department or by the Federal District Court in Washington D.C.
would support only nationwide coverage of it, but on Monday, at the convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Denver, he refused to comment on the administration's position, saying that he needed additional time and information to study the issue. It is easy to understand his pained uncertainty. Administratively and politically, the administration has made interdependent changes in local registration and voting processes, supervised by federal officials.
Section 5 gets to the heart of the problem. The objective of the law is defeated if 70 percent of the blacks in Mississippi are registered but if Indianola, Miss., can successfully annex, without pre-clearance, white subdivisions in order to ensure continuation of the city's white power base, as it did in 1968. It is defeated if, though many blacks in Jackson are registered, on the night before the 1978 election for a U.S. senator, the all-white elections commission can succeed by the voting machines moved into one set of informing the voters, much less clearing the change with the Justice Department.
Studies of implementation of the act indicate
that Southern communities have flouted it with regularity by not reporting voting changes. Since there are, in the Justice Department, only about 15 staff members to implement it, the chances are good that a municipality, faced with an increase in the number of black citizens to the point where the blacks may win a mayoral race, avoidistrict, or annex white subdivisions, or change their tribute to a large elections, or call for re-registration of voters, to prevent blacks from winning.
Many Southern communities ignore the pre-clearance requirement. If there are 7,000 preclearances in a given year reported to the Justice Department, as there were in fiscal 1980, they would be not monitored by the collective voting changes, not monitored by the department, that dilute blacks' votes in the South.
The act should not only be junked, but implementation of it should be improved. An enlarged and better trained Justice Department staff is improved. Improved monitoring by the department, by other federal agencies, by state government, is necessary. Justice Department use of civil animal sanctions, authorized by the Voting Rights Act, may persuade people to obey the law.
In coming months, Congress and the public must examine the reality of voting-rights enforcement in the South. Such rhetoric should be ignored. The facts in such municipalities as Indiana and Jackson should be examined. Litigation in federal courts challenging voting changes and elections in the South should be made known. A lot has changed in the South, but the job of ensuring voting equality is not yet finished.
(Howard Ball, professor of political science and chairman of that department at Mississippi State University, co-authors, with Dale Kraue and Thomas Lauth, the forthcoming book, "Crimpified Compliance: Implementation of the 1985 Voting Rights Act.")
Time passes, but the wheat harvest endures
"Is it not wheat harvest now? I will call upon the Lord to send thunder and rain."
And rain it does. But unlike King Samuel's request of long age, the local farmer's prayer is for the rain to stop. The fields are ready for harvest, and the farmers have the reach of the combines and trucks. "They're just cutting ruts in the field something terrible" goes a common lament. And the moisture causes the wheat to deteriorate. For those whose inward grain they sell, "It's a mighty serious situation."
In September and October, the wheat is planted, or "drilled," fertilized, and soon
Judy Crawford
resembles lush green grass. The subsequent snows provide an insulating layer from the winter cold. In the spring, if there are no damaging frosts like the one this May, the wheat "heads" develop and by late June, the local fields are golden. With their mammoth comfort, farmers seek warm and then deposit the grain in large trucks that haul it to the local grain company.
At the Pumpkin Center grain elevator, my mother waits on her customers and tests the wheat for its moisture content. Wheat with more the 17 percent moisture is rejected. The accepted wheat is either sold immediately or stored until the farmer's need for money is greater.
The rain outside my window continues to delay this year's harvest, but the weather leaves time for the local folk to conjure up memories of the wheat harvests of long ago.
"The most romantic was back in the old days before the comedie," says the old country parson. With a machine called a "binder," each farmer would cut and bind his wheat into small
bundles. Then the bundles were put by hand into piles, called "shocks," until the threshing machine came a week to a month later. At that time, the neighbors would all go from farm to farm to help thresh each other's wheat. The wheels of wheat were thrown into a wagon by a "pitchcock" in a pitchort. The thrown bundles would be arranged "just so" in the wagon by another worker.
The bundles then would be thrown in the steam-powered thresher by the men while the women were busy at the house preparing home-grown roast chicken and beef, as well as all types of vegetables and pies. Before a rest, the workers would store the grain in a bin or load it on horse-drawn wagons to take to town. On the way to town, many a farmer's child would
become ill from eating too many kernels that "sort of swelled" by the time they made it to
The huge straw pile left by the threshing machine would become cattle fodder during the winter, and each year there would be a story of the three women who ran the farm and had "the whole shabang" fallen on ton of her.
For the workers, was there any reward besides the satisfaction of a job well done?" "When it was all over, they'd have an ice cream cupster and a dance."
The rewards from this year will come later. As the verse goes, "As long as the earth endures, winter and summer, winter and winter, day and night will never ever rain" Rain must be included in there somewhat.
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