OPINION
University Daily Kansan, June 22, 1984
Page 4
The University Daily KANSAN
The University Daily KANSAN
Published since 1889 by students of the University of Kansas
The University Daily Kansas (USPK $60-640) is published at the University of Kansas, 118 Stauffer Fint Hall, Flaunt, Kan. Kane, 60015, daily during the regular school year and Wednesday and Friday during the summer session, including Saturday, Sunday, holidays, and final examinations. The student subscription is $29 a month or $72 a year in a Douglas County and $1 for six months or $4 for a year outside the county. Student subscriptions are $3 a semester paid through the student activity fee POSTMASTER. Send address changes to the University Daily Kansas, 118 Stauffer Fint Hall.
JAMES BOLE Editor KAREN DAVIS Business Manager
SHARON BODIN JILL GOLDBLATT Managing Editor Retail Sales Manager
JILL CASEY ROB LEONARD Campus Editor National Sales Manager
CHARLES HIMMELBERG KRISTINE MATT Editorial Editor Classified and Campus Sales Manager
MIKEKAUTSCH JOHN OBERZAN News Advisor General Manager and Sales and Marketing Advisor
Thriller?
It's close to show time, a superstar is lurking by the stage
Under the spotlight, you see a sight that stops the young girls' hearts
You try to think, but the public frenzy drowsens it with their screams.
You start to cringe as Michael looks you right between the eyes
'Cause this is rip-off, rip-off night
And no one's gonna save you from the beast about to strike
You know it's rip-off, rip-off night
His concert ticket prices are just way out, far out of sight You mail your money,and hope they pick your number from the lot
You're nearly bankrupt, and wonder if you'll ever get it back
You close your eyes and hope that this is just imagination
But all the while he's putting tons of money in the bank Sign of the times
There ain't no extra seats to see the guy with just one glove, girl
Rip-off, rip-off night
You shell out 30 bucks, oh baby, pay up, pay up, tonight They're out to get you, promoters closing in on every side
They will possess you unless you throw away your MTV Now is the time for you and I to say "This is too much" All through the hype, we've got to save each other from this scam
That it's a rip-off, rip-off night
Oh, can't you see
Cause he can rip you off more than anyone would dare to try
Rip-off, rip-off night
So let him take all of your money to see his so-so, so-so show
show
We've got a rip-off, tonight
Panic rips across the land
The mailing deadline is close at hand
Teenagers crawl for any seat
To terrorize y'awl's neighborhood
And whosoever shall not be found
Without the dough to see the show
Must stand and face the howls of peers
And rot inside a pool of tears
The foulest stench is in the air
The funk of $40 million cleared
And merchandise of every kind
Is popping up in young kids' mind
And though you try and avoid it
Your body starts to quiver
For no mere mortal can resist
The evil of the rip-off
Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha . . .
Funding Superfund
By creating the Superfund in 1980, Congress thought it had the answer to abandoned dump sites that leak poison. Yet such dumps continue to mar the health and environment in every state, particularly New Jersey and New York, and the Superfund only mops at the surface of a sea of waste.
New sites are being added to the national priority list faster than the Environmental Protection Agency, which manages the Superfund, could remove them. In four years the agency has cleaned up only six sites but has added 133, and the list may reach 1,000 by next year.
The Superfund law doesn't expire until near year, but Rep James Florio of New Jersey, one of its originators, is rightly pushing to reauthorize it now. He wants to put EPA on a strict timetable to clean up the current 546 priority sites within five years.
The number of dump sites containing toxic wastes is now estimated at 16,000 to 22,000. Even a well-managed agency can only hope to meet that challenge with extra funds and a strict timetable.
LETTERS POLICY
(The New York Times)
The University Daily Kansas welcomes letters to the editor. Letters should be typewritten on two sheets of paper, double-spaced and should not exceed 400 words. They should include the writer's name, address and phone number. If the writer's affidavit with the University, the letter should include his class and home town or faculty or staff position. The letters should be addressed to the University Office. Emails and letters can be mailed or brought to the Kansan office, 111 Stainster-Flint Hall. The Kansan reserves the right to edit or reject letters and columns.
Pro basketball is high tech among sports
Twelve seconds remain. Magic Johnson dribbles on my television screen.
"Pass the ball to Kareem. Magic.
Drive! Do something. You idiot!
What's he doing?"
The buzzer sounds. Magic has stopped like a dead watch, leaving the Los Angeles Lakers tied with the Boston Celtics in regulation time. The Celtics won that game in the second half and the Lakers in the seventh game last week to win the National Basketball Association Championship.
The NBA season ended on the seventh day. And it was good. Even though my beloved Lakers lost, I have been fulfilled, and so have other hard-core professional basketball fans.
But to most people, including many sports fans, the exhaustive NBA season is a droning, annoying pain-in-the-butt — like hayfever or the presidential race. The disrespect shown toward professional basketball by these otherwise healthy sports fans and the accompanying low attendance at the arenas and low ratings on television scares me. I don't want to see Larry Bird and Bernard King buried in some cave of forgotten history alongside the Edsel and the carrier piggen.
Professional basketball deserves better. But why doesn't it get more respect?
People say one-on-one play has overtaken the game. The overly discussed slam dunk symbolizes the one-on-one style. Others say the game lacks the drama and pace of its little brother, college basketball. So they say pro basketball is too fast and that NEA athletes don't play defense.
But more sports fans used to like basketball. What went wrong?
The players, unlike their counterparts in football and baseball, have outgrown the team game. James Worthy and Dominique Wilkens are so fast and can leap so high that it makes more sense for them to soar
through the lane for a basket than it does to "work" to get open or pass the ball.
The athletes with their amazing speed, leaping ability and grace have created something of a monster.
But I think it's a beautiful beast, and I guess other hard-core basket ball fans like the monster too.
DAN
PARELMAN
Guest Columnist
The monster-lovers differ from the average sports fan. Basketball fans are more future oriented than other sports fans because basketball has changed so quickly and is still evolving. Basketball is high tech. Baseball is more of a smokestack industry.
Weirness is another hallmark of the basketball fan. For evidence, go no farther than the front row of the Forum in Los Angeles where Jack Nicholson will be beneath dark shades shouting encouragement to his Lakers. Nicholson is definitely a former player. When the Lakers traded his favorite player, point guard Norm Nixon, Nicholson wore black.
Consequently, Jimmy Carter — a future-oriented president — is a pro basketball fan but doesn't care much for baseball or football. He also loves stock car racing. I'm not sure what this indicates, besides attesting to the common belief that Carter was a little weird.
And it seems that more basketball fans have acquired learned appreciation of the game than many football and baseball fans whose appreciation is genetic, transmitted by fathers to sons, and sung to the fan-to-be in the womb.
THE ORIGINAL ©MIMA BY THE TRUMBLE COMPANY
My cousin the Denver lawyer never turned an ankle toward any sport except skiing, for obvious reasons. Then one day, this balding man in his '30s who listens to classical music and reads books on number theory becomes a Denver Nugget season ticket holder.
Personally, I like pro basketball's paradoxes. Julius Erving soars through the air with a ferocious burst of energy and then completes the sequence with the slightest flick of the wrist. Johnson darts back-and-forth with the ball then snaps a perfect pass to Jamaal Wilkes who has sliced by a Kareem Abdul-Jabara pick — perfect orchestration achieved with individual movements.
645,118,706,213
Pro basketball likes you. Please let it into your living room. Before long you too will be shooting at the television. Maybe by then Magic found a way to beat the Celtics in twelve seconds or seven games.
This number represents:
A. The year A.D. the budget will balance.
B. The Pentagons annual expenditure on screws & nuts.
C. The number of promises Mondale made last week.
D. The number of pages in the Grace Report.
E. How many times over we can kill each other with nuclear weapons.
Reagan and states' rights
In the presidential campaign of 1980 Ronald Reagan made some wonderful promises. Aside from his now famous plan from the Hollywood School of "Voodoo Economics" which allowed for a defense spending increase, a tax cut, and a balanced budget, Reagan also promised to get the federal government out of people's lives as much as possible.
He stated that he would not only reduce federal involvement in citizen's affairs, but he would also scale down the size of the federal government. Reagan's premise was this: Who knows better what is good for your state than your state legislators? Who knows better what is good for your community than your local government?
Reagan was articulating the frustration many Americans felt with what they perceived as the unbridled growth of the federal government, and their unhappiness with having legislators in Washington control certain facets of their lives. Reagan was bright; he understood the American people were not pleased with the course the federal government had taken. With this in mind, he told Americans he wanted to get the bureaucrats in Washington off their backs.
Well, almost four years and a couple of sets of briefing papers later, President Reagan is supporting an effort by Congress to coerce states to raise their drinking age to 21, if they haven't already done so. Under the bill introduced in the House of Representatives, states
which do not raise their drinking age will lose highway funding from the federal government. If states do not raise their drinking age within two years, their funding will be cut that year and each year thereafter.
I do not intend to discuss the merits of either raising or maintaining the current drinking age. It is an emotional issue, and is like abortion and the death penalty in that the chances of changing someone's
GLENN
JEWELL
Guest Columnist
opinion on it are slim to none. On one hand you have young people talking about the paradox of being "old enough to vote and die for your country, but not old enough to have a beer." On the other hand, you have statistics showing the disproportionate amount of alcohol related accidents in the 18 to 20-year-old age group.
No, I am not opposed to the goal of the legislation, but I am strongly opposed to the method initiated by the Department of Transportation Secretary Elizabeth Dole and embraced by Reagan and certain other members in reducing the size of the federal government and getting it off our
backs, Reagan has endorsed an attempt to force the states to pass legislation they may not favor. That is not the way the relationship between the state and federal governments should work.
Picture the following set of circumstances: The House and Senate have ironed out their differences and have decided to fund the building of twenty MX missiles for fiscal year 1985. Following this action the Kansas legislature passes legislation because of their opposition to the MX. This legislation forces the State to pay $24 million federal income tax from the federal government until production of the MX missile is ended
Can you imagine what the United States Congress' and the Reagan administration's response to this act of political blackmail would be? Would congress withdraw its earlier legislation and decide to defund the MX? Of course not. The federal government would resort to force it into retaliation, but that was nuce and rightly so. The states have no business trying to control the course of the federal government in this way. Get the picture?
The drinking age is a matter which should be controlled by individual state legislatures and not by the federal government. Ronald Reagan, the advocate of states' rights and opponent of centralized government, has struck a blow for hypocrisy everywhere.
Is Germany anti-American?
Why study? For most American students the answer is quite obvious: To get a degree, a job and earn money to support a family. A few talk about something called self-fulfillment. Not too many seem troubled by the idea of being unemployed or, what is more serious, few seem to question the path they have chosen.
A year ago, when I was studying at the University of Tuebingen in West Germany, the answer to the same question would have been quite different. If you were a German, and you didn't happen to study business or the sciences, your answer might have been something like: "Well, it's better than standing on the street," or "After all, isn't it the only way to avoid getting caught up in the 'system'?"
It is not only the high unemployment rate that discourages students on the other side of the hill, but also that seems to be that attractive any more.
Last week AP reported that the disenchancement with having a job wasn't limited to students. "The decline of the German work ethic" was the headline of an article about the 250,000 workers that were walk-in for a 35-hour workweek. What has happened to the near-obese pride in work known all over the world as "made in Germany?"
Social scientists and public opinion pollsters believe that they have some explanations. Germans have become tired of rebuilding their economy (shattered after World War II) and striving for prosperity. After years of comfort and ease of life, they are no longer interested in individual achievement and economic growth, they are concerned, rather, with peace, quality of life, the environment and other "postmaterialist" issues. Germans don't live in a post-industrial phase, they live in a
post-industrious phase, as Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann with the Allenbach Institute for Demoscopy likes to say.
Young Germans, and especially supporters of the Green Party, fit well into this picture. Cable television, nuclear power plants and cruise missiles, and almost every American has become suspicious.
Unlike their parents who found their "ersatz fatherland" in America after World War II, young Germans see America as an example for the "kaput industrialization" of the country. "The West" has degenerated to the slogan of a commercial advertising a new brand of cigarettes, and today evokes
WOLFGANG
DOBLER
Staff Columnist
But is what Arthur F. Burns, the American Ambassador in Bonn, recently called "anti-Americanism among the more activist members of Europe's educated classes," really anti-Americanism?
but why do the Germans, once praised as the "model partner" in the Atlantic Alliance, now lead the pack in their criticism of America? It's similar to finding one's first "true love": Enchanted. They are followed by disenchancement. Our parents were excited about those GL's distributing chocolate and chewing gum, and John F. Kennedy was even more of a hero in West Germany than in the United States. Overwhelming affection quickly changed to deep disappointment when we, the sons and daughters, learned about Vietnam, Watergate and more recently, Grenada.
thoughts about American domination of the Third World, rather than dreams of San Francisco and California.
Many people say no. They argue that anti-nuclearism, antimodernism, and pacifism are as much American as European phenomena. Not only Europeans criticize the arms race and useless overkill capacities, and not only Europeans prefer — let's say 'coq au vin' — to a Big Mac. America, due to its superpower status and its leading role in technology, not because of something inherently bad just in Americans, has become the natural target of this criticism.
I tended to agree with these people until the month before I left Germany.
Riding a train to Bomn on my way to a demonstration against soon-to-be-deployed American nuclear missiles, I casually told a 17-year-old woman sitting next to me that I wanted to go to the United States to study.
She wouldn't believe me. America!? Except for the nuclear-freeze movement and the American Indians, they are all degenerated, but they would be wasting my time in the "land of Coca Cola and commerce."
She convinced me. Obviously there is something like anti-Americanism in West Germany
In addition to the sharp criticism of Ronald Reagan's "evil empire" speech and his curious ideas about arms control (a criticism I agree with), there is also a crude, apolitical, almost anti-political protest against Western culture and values in general. The number of these people, however, is small, and Americans should be careful not to confuse political criticism with a minority attitude.
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