OPINION
The University Daily KANSAN
January 19, 1984 Page 4
The University Daily KANSAN
Published since 1889 by students of the University of Kansas
The University Daily Kaman (USPS 60-640) is published at the University of Kansas, 118 Stuart Finst Hall, Lawan, Karen 6053, daily during the regular school year and Monday and Thursday during the summer sessions. Students receive a $20 fee for each session, holiday, and final period. Second semester students receive a $30 fee for each session, holiday, and final period. By mail or online, students pay a $10 fee for six months or $18 for six years or $14 for a year outside the country. Student subscriptions are $13 semester fee through the student activity feed. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to usps@usps.edu.
DOUG CUNNINGHAM
DON KNOX
Managing Editor
SARA KEMPIN
Editorial Editor
JEFF TAYLOR ANDREW HARTLEY
Campus Editor News Editor
DAVE WANAMAKER
Business Manager
CORT GORMAN JILL MUTCHELI
Retail Sales Manager National Sales Manager
PAUL JESS
General Manager and News Adviser
JANCE PHILIPS    DUNCANCALIHUO
Campus Sales Manager    Classified Manager
JOHN OBERZAN Sales and Marketing Adviser
Consumers win
The Supreme Court's decision Tuesday to allow Americans to tape television shows on their home video recorders is a victory for the home recording industry.
More importantly, it is a victory for the consumer.
Fortunately for owners of video recorders, the justices decided that moviemakers' protection under the Copyright Act was not abridged by private use of home video recorders.
The decision was difficult — one that took the court two years to make. But it was a decision waited for by more than 5 million Americans who now record shows at home.
But although it is good that consumers have benefited from the court's decision, Hollywood should not be asked to bear the full brunt of the burden.
If consumers are to have the freedom to use home recorders, they
should be willing to pay for that privilege. A California congressman has introduced a bill that would give Hollywood producers and performers royalties for home taping of films and television programs.
The decision was long overdue. Although television is still a "vast wasteland" offering little high-quality programming, some special programs and mini-series are worth watching. Home recorders are expensive, but if people can afford to buy them they should be able to use them to record programs for later viewing.
Perhaps a better way to compensate the film companies, such as by adding a charge to each recorder or film, can be found.
It is now up to Congress to change laws so that both the consumer and the Hollywood producer are fairly dealt with.
Freedom and restraint
Freedom will accept no intrusion. Yet reptilianlike restraint invades every crevice of American society.
Self-preservation must prevail. Yet diversity anchors the desire for advancement.
Despite the paradox, the arguments are perpetually valid. But in the context of American education, self-preservation has wrongly been sacrificed for a potentially dangerous freedom.
The Texas School Board ruled last week that freedom should take precedence over societal benefit in that science and biology textbooks need not mention Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.
In this instance, direct and obvious freedom may infringe on other less obvious freedoms.
Such a decision may not seem to transcend state boundries, but because Texas is the nation's largest school book buyer, the ruling may force publishers to stop printing books that they could not sell in that state, which could then limit the
The ruling could also usurp school children's liberties in that adults decide what the children should and should not learn. Children must be exposed to a variety of theories so they can draw their own conclusions.
selection of textbooks for all the nation's schools.
Also, if Texas sees the need for expanding this immediate and seemingly dictatorial freedom in our schools by not requiring Darwin's theories of evolution, then it could allow schools the freedom to delete other vital ideas.
The federal government has intruded far into American society, regulating areas it should not. But what our children learn should not be dependent on a school board in Texas but on the will of the nation through Congress.
In education, satisfaction of an immediate freedom should not risk the self-preservation of cultural freedom. And the United States must guard against further sacrifices.
Something else to do
If there's nothing else to do. The famous words uttered so often. It might be interesting to go see the exhibit at the art museum. If there's nothing else to do.
Going to hear an opera might be OK. If there's nothing else to do. Watch a ballet? Well, if there's nothing else to do. The list goes on, activities considered and then cast aside because usually, there is something else to do.
Not that the something else is better, cheaper, more interesting or even more fun. But usually because the something else is more familiar — an activity previously participated in or at least one a roommate, sibling or friend is interested in.
The University Arts Festival starts Sunday and runs through
But go. Try it on and see if it suits you. Discard it if it doesn't, but give it a try. Have reasons for not liking something.
Let this be the semester for the ballet or the play or the jazz concert to be in the something to do category. Write it down in pen so it is not so easy to erase.
Go for the adventure, the new experience. Treat your ears to a new sound, your eyes to a new sight. Listen to the New York City Opera or watch the Kansas City Ballet. The University Arts Festival features a variety of performing and visual arts, but it's up to you to put them on your calendar.
March 4. It's full of those events often filed away in the if there's nothing else to do category.
The University Daily Kansan welcomes letters to the editor. Letters should be typewritten, double-spaced and should not exceed 300 words. They should include the writer's name, address and phone number. If the writer is affiliated with the University, the letter should include his class and home town or faculty or staff position. The Kansas also invites individual students to send special letter columns. Columns and letters can be mailed or brought to the Kansan office, 111 Staffer Flint Hall. The Kansas reserves the right to edit or reject letters and columns.
No Pasaran! No Pasaran! The battle cry of revolutionary Nicaragua is everywhere — on the bullet-pulled walls of buildings; on banners and billboards; on the sides of smoking trucks that have lost their mufflers and that look as if they were manufactured in Paleolithic times. That must be a wonder of the lips of Nicaraguan citizens determined to die with dignity if their revolution is not allowed to live in peace.
The revolution's fervent cry
Revolutionary graffiti is sprayed or scrawled on seemingly every wall — slogans, raringly cries, anthems of insurrection — but the predominant expression and the predominant feeling that he while visiting to Nicaragua is not "No菩萨" or "They Shall Not Pass!"
For awhile, after the triumph of the Sandinista Revolution on July 19, 1979, the new government asked, for aesthetic reasons, that the people curb their revolutionary zeal for political graffiti.
That zeal seemed both an expression of the people's pride in their victory over the Somoza dictatorship and a symbol of their victory in the campaign against illiteracy, which had increased the national literacy rate from 48 percent to 87 percent. And then they first and possibly proudered achievement of the revolution.
LETTERS POLICY
We also saw a different kind of graffiti, slashed and smashed into the buildings of Nicaragua's cities—the iron graffiti that has pocked and splintered the stucco and adobe of block after block in Managua, Masaya, Matagalpa and Leon, etched by the machine guns and bombs of Somorza's National Guardsmen.
This legacy of the 1978-79 civil war
Twenty-four of us, mostly blue collar workers from industrial America, traveled through Nicaragua to observe the revolution and the response of its people to the contested Contra war on it borders.
But later, in the face of attacks by Contra rebels from bases in Honduras and Costa Rica, the government again encouraged its citizens to express their support for the revolution with spray can and painbrush, as well as with AK-47 and M-16.
An occasional well-dressed member of the former ruling class came up to us to rail loudly on the street corner of this nation that Reagan calls a police state about how the Sandinistas are ruining the country by parceling out to families of land-hungry campesinos hectares of
I sound a happy revolution — the people in good spirits and optimistic about the future even in the face of invasion and possible U.S. intervention. There is indeed rationing of some staples because of the embargo and the Contra war, but it is required to by the rich and to insure that every citizen gets his fair share, no matter how poor.
that cost up to 50,000 Nicaraguan lives is an ever-present reminder to the people of the price of the victory that they so resolutely guard against those who would reverse it.
And, if the Reagan administration was to be believed, I thought I would find a people fearful and apprehensive under the eye of a pervasive police and militia. But the reality was different.
landowners' huge estates that have been let to lay fallow.
I had journeyed to Nicaragua prepared by the U.S. media to see a people beaLEDged. I expected to encounter a people divided over the revolution and its promises and failures, a people disgruntled over the rationing of many essentials and discontented about the long lines before bare-shelf stores because of the U.S. economic blockade.
On those same streetcorners, in a land Reagan had claimed had no freedom of the press, we could buy La Prensa, the opposition newspaper filled with anti-Sandinista diatribes.
There were, indeed, a great many militias and women. Women make up 47 percent of the militia, just as they make up half or more of all revolutionary organizations and their leadership - this is very much a women's revolution.
But they were truly citizens-uniform, a people in arms, who were enthusiastic about their service in defense of the revolution and were just as enthusiastically supported by companies, enterprises, and companies in the street.
We journeyed north into the coffee-growing mountains around Matagalpa, the scene of recent Contra raids. The trip served further to convince me that continued U.S. sponsorship of the Contras or direct American military interment would be more beneficial moral and political error, but also a strategic and tactical blunder on the scale of Vietnam.
Scanning those forested mountains, I flashed back to the months I spent humping the Central Highlands of South Vietnam in Search-and-Destroy operations against the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese. Given the fierce de
termination of the Nicaraguan people, I knew that a U.S. military invasion would quickly conquer the cities and would just as quickly become bogged down in a never-ending guerrilla war in the mountainous region of northern generation of American soldiers would return home in body bags.
My last impressions of Nicaragua,
as I was based on the airport on
the final day of my visit were the same
as those of my previous grafti of revolutionary defiance.
Nicaragua has been long called by Central Americans "the land of eternal youth," not because of any bubbling fountain of youth to be found there, but because of the oppression of people in Nicaragua. Sonoma's National Guard, which combined to make the sight of an old person a rare event.
out the Nicaraguan people are prepared, if necessary, to sacrifice another generation to defend the gains and goals of their revolution, so that future generations can live into old age in peace and justice.
Today Nicaragua and its revolution is striving to provide, through its programs of social justice and humanitarian progress, the basic right to life — the right to grow old — to its citizens.
They are determined, like Petain at Verdun in 1916 and like La Pasionaria before the gates of Madrid in 1936, that — "They Shall Not Pass!" — "No Pasaran"!
Sentimental value
In a day where people are worrying about failing the first quiz of the semester, debating whether to drop the French course they can't seem to wake up for five days a week or contemplating how much
I lost my hat today. I do not convey the news in response to the "Hello, how are you's?" I receive, part of me want to shout the news to everyone. "Help, I lost my hat!"
MARGARET SAFRANEK Staff Columnist
free time they won't have taking 21 hours, the loss of one thick, cream-colored, woven wool hat is of little consequence to anyone but me.
I do not try to explain to people that it is not so much a cold head that I am concerned about. When a friend offers to buy me another hat, I appreciate his offer but realize that he doesn't understand.
Retracing my steps, I make excuses to take frequent trips to Wesco Hall, hoping to spot the hat worn by one of them that has turned it in to one of the offices.
In the back of my mind I hear my father recommending prayers to St. Anthony, patron saint of lost items, decide there no harm in asking.
The hat was loaded with sentimental value. When I think about it, I'm surprised I ever took my hat out of the house, I was so afraid of losing it. Over the years I've lost enough mittens, hats and other accountments of winter to fear that wearing the hat would make it only a matter of time before it suffered the same fate.
not to Congress.
I did not expect to be so attached to a simple piece of winter clothing. My mittens could easily have been replaced. Losing them would have been viewed as justification for season sales. The season sales I would have been happy to choose a pair that more closely matched my coat — and hat.
But without the hat, memories of the friend who had given it to me are not enough to warm me. I think of the careful observations he made to make sure the hat matched the color of my coat. I hear him admonishing me to dress warmer so I wouldn't catch a cold.
I cannot help wondering about the hat. In a trip over to Wescow, I saw that I was not the only person who had lost one. Several hairs lay on the floor, waiting for their owner's return or a jantor's clean sweep.
But mine was not among them. I have visions of someone picking up my hat, meaning to drop it in the lost-and-found at hoch Auditorium. Maybe St. Anthony had a slow day and will have located the missing item. Perhaps the hat is lying in one of those small classrooms, left there because no one claimed it when it was held up in front of the class.
I have also considered the possibility that someone picked it up and now considers himself the owner of a new hat. After all, many things are lost by one person and found by another and never do the twain meet. Or maybe sometimes they do, but I do not think I would inquire of a hat-wearer as to where he got his hat.
Oh, I know. I could wear another hat and my ears would still keep warm. It is something on the inside that is cold.
What does it mean to put "sentimental value" in the lost-and-found? I include the two words in the hopes that others will understand; that perhaps whoever found the hat will read it and recognize the functional hat, that functional things sometimes serve more than a functional purpose.
Some of the more expensive things in my life could more easily be replaced. They may cost more than one simple wool hat. But finances are often better with a much bush. The accounting section of my inside is much less sensitive.
Hart argues that some of the senators and congressmen who will be named as "umpled delegates" have already endorsed a candidate and therefore they are indeed not umpled.
I lost my hat today. It's silly to have such a sentimental attachment to something. The hat did not take with it all of the memories of the giver. I will find another hat, to keep my ears warm. But I don't think any store is selling one that can take care of the cold on the inside.
The editorial board of the University Daily Kansan meets weekly to set editorial policy for the newspaper. The meetings are at 6 p.m. Sunday.
Members of the board are Michael Beck, columnist; Jim Bole, editorial assistant; Doug Cunningham, editor; Sara Kempin, editorial editor; Don Knox, managing editor; Margaret Safranek, columnist; and Gary Smith, columnist.
We invite representatives of student. University and community groups to set up a time to meet with us to discuss questions or concerns about editorial policy. If you cannot make it to a regular Sunday meeting, please call and set up another time for the board to meet with you.
WASHINGTON — Not long after Congress returns from its present hiatus, Senate and House Democrats will gather in separate, private conclaves to choose their delegates to next summer's national convention.
All members of the party's hierarchy, these delegates will represent about 10 percent of the total delegates but, in a brokered convention, would exert far more clout than their numbers indicate.
The so-called set-aside for members of Congress represents, in many ways, a retreat from the reform wave that swept the Docket Committee last year and brings the party a step closer again to the days of the smoke-filled room.
Delegates are courted
A serious objection to the process of electing the congressional delegates came recently from Sen. Gary Hart of Colorado, struggling far back in the pack in his campaign for the presidential nomination.
One, really, is technical. Hart says, correctly, that by selecting delegates in late January, the process will come before the "window" for picking delegates opens on the second Tuesday in March.
in a letter written to National Chairman Charles Manatt by his own campaign manager, Oliver Henkel, Hart complained that the selection process for the congressional delegation actually violated two of the new rules.
Exemptions have been granted only to Iowa and New Hampshire.
may have stated a preference, remain unpledged under the party's rules.
The national committee insists that these delegates, although they
STEVE GERSTEL United Press International
There is a great deal of validity in Hart's argument.
At a recent briefing for reporters, strategists for Walter Mondale claimed, among House Democrats, more than 70 unidentified supporters to go along with 40 who have already given the former vice president private commitments.
These strategists said they have found no more than 25 Glenn backers, but a spokesman for the Ohio senator did they were "hurting people."
If these figures are correct, Hart and the other candidates for the nomination appear close to being shut out in their scramble for
Rank-and-file delegates can retain their personal loyalties to a candidate without retribution. Most elected officials cannot afford that luxury.
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