OPINION
The University Daily KANSAN January 16, 1984 Page 4
The University Daily KANSAN
Published since 1889 by students of the University of Kansas
The University Daily Kansan (USPS 606440) is published at the University of Kansas, 181 Stauffer Finl Hall, Lawrence, Kan. 60655, daily during the regular school year and Monday and Thursday during the summer sessions, and on Friday and Saturday for the final period in school. Subscriptions by mail are $1 for each subscription and $18 for six months or $3 for a year outside the county. Student subscriptions are $1 a semester through the student activity for POSTMASTER. Mail subscriptions are $1 a semester through the student activity for POSTMASTER.
DOUG CUNNINGHAM
Editor
DON KNOX
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SARA KEMPIN
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JEFF TAYLOR
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ANDREW HARTLEY
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A hope for peace
The East-West conference on European security now taking place in Stockholm gives a world weary of war a chance to hope for peace.
Leaders from the United States and other NATO countries are meeting with Soviet bloc leaders to discuss ways to prevent war in Europe. The discussions mark the first time Soviet and U.S. officials have met for negotiations since the breakdown of arms control talks in Geneva.
To the millions in Europe and the United States who are tired of endless spending on defense including nuclear weapons — the talks come as a welcome sign.
Moreover, several moves designed to lessen the risk of war are scheduled to be discussed. These measures deserve the support of even the most hardened hawks.
Among the measures is advance notice of some military maneuvers, which will help both sides know
when large military movements are only part of an ordinary exercise.
Unfortunately, the conference will not even begin to solve all the problems and differences between the nations of the East and West. However, it is at least a step toward greater understanding and world peace.
In another encouraging sign, President Reagan has signaled a slight warming in Soviet-U.S. relations.
Reagan's past denunciations of the Kremlin have done little to increase understanding between the two nations.
The unknown in the whole equation is what the Soviets will propose. If the world is lucky, the conference will lead to a resumption of arms-control negotiations.
Of course, election-year politics probably are on the minds of Reagan strategists. Still, whatever the motive, a more conciliatory tone from the Reagan administration is long overdue.
A fast-food legend
In 1954, Ray Kroc was a fast-talking Chicago salesman whose personal trademarks were a bow tie and brilliantined hair. His sales specialty was the Prince Castle Multimixer — a newfangled apparatus that could make six milkshakes simultaneously.
when a San Bernadino, Calif., hamburger stand ordered eight of the mixers, Mr. Kroc went to meet the owners, Maurice and Richard McDonald. He showed up after deciding that he wanted a firsthand look at an operation that found it necessary to make 48 milkshakes at the same time.
What Mr. Kroc found was a popular restaurant with garish golden arches and ready-made hamburgers kept warm under heat lamps. The rest of the story is well-known: He bought the company and built it into, like it or not, an American institution.
Today the flags over McDonald's restaurants fly at half-staff in honor of Mr. Kroc, who died Saturday at 81. During his life he helped build 5,985 McDonald's restaurants — each one a well-deserved monument to his financial and marketing genius.
But many will remember Mr. Kroc for the hurried junk-food culture his restaurants seemed to inspire. Several communities, in fact, fought successfully to prohibit Mr. Kroc from building McDonald's restaurants.
In Martha's Vineyard, Mass., the editor of the Vineyard Gazette led the battle to keep Big Macs out. McDonald's, he said, was "a symbol of the asphalt-and-chrome culture that we do not have here, and its coming means that we have succumbed at last to the megalopolis that we have dreaded."
The dominance of McDonald's cannot be underestimated. Each day, 1 percent of the United States eats at a McDonald's restaurant. Half a million head of cattle are slaughtered each year to satisfy America's appetite for Big Macs. The chain is the nation's largest employer of young people.
Mr. Kroc was without doubt an amazing man whose corporate knowledge was truly admirable. But his gift to society — thousands of restaurants that seem to promote monoculture — was perhaps something we could have lived without.
Real needs overlooked
Heading into the final year of his term, President Reagan finds the Department of Education still in business (and with its largest budget ever), no private school parents receiving tuition tax credits and no public school children reciting prayers in their classrooms.
Despite his inability to achieve those simplistic goals. Reagan is apparently getting ready to battle over school discipline, yet another questionable issue which could divert attention from the real needs of public schools.
Speaking last month at the National Forum on Excellence in Education . . Reagan said he had directed the departments of Justice and Education to "find ways (the federal government) can help teachers and administrators enforce discipline."
Reagan should be backing up Education Secretary Terrel Bell and help find ways to reverse the increase in the school dropout rate.
Boston Globe
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LETTERS POLICY
White House now a fortress
WASHINGTON - Backstairs at the White House:
The concrete barricades in front of the White House are an eyesore so far, changing the open feeling that the iron fences have. But those days are gone and the house is taking on the (perbarking look of a fortress).
forbidding look of a White House. Attempts have been made to try to dress up the barricades with plantings. The cosmetics may help, but the old look of the unfettered White House has disappeared.
The threat of terrorism has sparked the changes, which are under the supervision of the Secret Service.
One aide said she was aware of threats last fall and did not mind the tighter security because "I like to feel safe."
The concrete structures also beat the sand trucks placed at the gates since the Thanksgiving season.
The first lady's ailing mother lives in Scottsdale, Ariz., and Mrs.
HELEN THOMAS United Press International
- Nancy Reagan donned surgical attire when she toured a surgical suite named in honor of her late father, Dr. Loyal Davis, and mother, Edith Davis, at Scottsdale Memorial Hospital North.
When the president was in Los Angeles at the Century Plaza, limousines instead of sand trucks were placed at strategic entrances.
When one wag complained the security measures were "ugly," an adewry wryll observed: "Have you seen the Berlin Wall?"
Since an attempt on President Reagan's street, streets next to the White House have been closed off for one pretext or another and concrete barriers in different shapes have been put in place.
Reagan makes frequent trips to spend a few days with her.
- Mrs. Reagan is returning the hospitality extended to her in Monaco when she stayed at the palace.
She has invited Prince Rainier and all members of his family, including newly-wed Caroline and her husband, to stay at the White House while they are in Washington during a weekend in February.
The occasion will be fund-raising activities to further the charity interests of the late Barbara Grace The late Mrs. Press and Mrs. Reagan were friends.
- Of all the first families who have lived in the White House, the Reagan children are the most reticent to be seen in public on the grounds. Once in a white Maureen Reagan will stay at the White House for a few days as her father's political adviser on women and she will pop over to the room to greet her. She usually makes a quick departure when she spots reporters.
The Reagans' daughter, Patti, and son, Ron, and his wife, Doria, give the official side of the White House a wide berth and do not dare go near the Oval Office. They shun the presidential limelight and have
never posed for a family picture since the Reagans moved into the Executive Mansion.
No other first family has seemed so remote, or their lives so detached after the togetherness of the Kennedy Johnson's, Nikons, Fords and Ford.
But on the other hand the Reagan children have known the spotlight when they were youngsters in Sacramento and their father was governor of California, and a former state senator who prefers to stay in the background and let their parents occupy center stage.
Resolutions you can't break
Happy New Year! (A few days later.) So, it's 1984 at last. And what's one of the first things you do? You got it; you make your New Year's resolutions. And then what do you break? You break your New Year's resolutions.
But don't despair, fellow students,
HELAINE KASKEL
Staff Columnist
help has arrived in the form of Unbreakable New Year's Resolutions. No longer must you feel any obligation to quit smoking, lose that spare tire or try to become a better person in any way.
You can now feel free to enjoy all the bad habits that made 1983 so much fun, secure in the knowledge that the resolutions you made come with a lifetime guarantee of unbreakability.
You can beat them with bad intentions, whip them with waning willpower, slice them, dice them or just plain forget them, but no matter how hard you try, you cannot break them.
break in Beirut. The Lebanese capital, famed for its sunny beaches, exotic nightlife and the even temperament of its natives, by the National Resistance Association 1983. Unfortunately, SUA has canceled its Beirut travel package for
Here are a few examples of these wonders for the weak-willed:
1984, making it impossible to visit the city on a student budget.
2 I resolve not to watch any intelligent, thought-provoking or exceptionally humorous prime time network television, with the exception of "The A-Team" and "Foul-Ums. Bleeps & Blunders."
1. I resolve not to vote for James Watt, who, rumor has it, may be staging a write-in campaign for the 1984 presidential election now that Jesse Jackson has mobilized minority voter registration.
4. 1 resolve to hold on to every last share of my AT&T stock, even if its price exceeds the cost of my next long-distance phone bill.
1. I resolve not to purchase the new book by an anonymous author: "How to Win Friends and Influence People While Dealing Drugs to Finance a Failing Automobile Venture."
6. I resolve to make a large contribution of time and money to the Rita Lavelle Foundation to Promote Integrity in Governmental Agencies in honor of any program the Environmental Protection Agency initiates that somehow benefits the environment.
1. I resolve to support censorship of "The Preppy Handbook" in America's high schools.
8. I resolve to purchase at least one product that is an official sponsor of the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.
9. I resolve not to enter any Jane Fonda or Christie Brinkley look-alike contests.
10. I resolve not to participate in the next mass marriage ceremony sponsored by the Moonies.
12. I resolve to accept the charges
11. I resolve not to buy any home computer which talks back when I tell it to do something.
for any collect phone calls E.T makes to my number.
13. I resolve to pronounce it Gre-nay-da instead of Gre-nah-da and to support Reagan's continuing efforts in providing information to the foreign press.
'No longer must you feel any obligation to quit smoking, lose that spare tire or try to become a better person in any way.'
14. I resolve not to impersonate the official U.S. diplomatic representative to the Vatican out of respect for the doctrine of separation of church and state.
15. I resolve to pay my taxes on time if a nuclear freeze is agreed upon by the United States and the Soviet Union.
16. I resolve to purchase one of the new "SHOPPING CAN BE A BLAST" t-shirts available in the Harrods London 1984 mail order store.
You're welcome to use these resolutions as your own. Or the more courageous among you can try to make up your own.
Getting the picture? If the Unbreakable New Year's Resolutions listed here appear to be far-fetched or completely out of the realm of possibility, you're catching on.
And if anyone manages to break one of these resolutions during the course of 1984, I would appreciate a confidential letter addressed to me on paper. But I won't hold my breath waiting, Happy New Year.
first full year in office drawing up and pushing for the administration's controversial plan to lift price controls on all gas, arguing it would result in more production, and that the price would eventually drop in a free market.
Adoption of energy plan is doubtful
WASHINGTON — The administration's efforts to promote natural gas decontrol, synthetic fuels development and nuclear industry expansion suffered serious setbacks this year and remain clouded for 1984.
President Reagan's most important energy policy initiative, a plan to end all federal controls on natural gas prices, remains stalled in both the House and Senate, with prospects for passage increasingly doubtful in the upcoming election year.
Energy Secretary Donald Hodel spent considerable time during his
United Press International
ROBERT SANGEORGE
But consumer groups and members of Congress from the Northeast and Midwest strongly opposed the administration's decontrol plan and lobbied for even tougher controls on natural gas prices. They contended that decontrol would spark a large price rise and provide a windfall for big oil companies producing natural gas.
Both the decontrol and "recontrol" proposals made it as far as the floor of the Senate, and both were overwhelmingly defeated — dashing most hopes for a compromise on natural gas reform.
Although natural gas prices soared last winter, the extremely mild winter effect dampened the effect of the price rise. With long-range weather forecasters predicting another mild winter, Congress appears unlikely to tackle the politically explosive issue.
The administration's drive to streamline and accelerate the licensing of nuclear power plants also appeared bogged down on Capitol Hill, while the industry encountered some enormous problems because of the skyrocketing costs of building commercial reactors.
When the administration announced its licensing reform plans in 1982, it said the effort was partly intended to encourage more interest from Wall Street in financing multibillion-dollar reactor projects.
But the massive bond default of the Washington Public Power Supply has made it mainly to cost overruns on nuclear plantings — sent the industry reeling.