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Tuesday, November 3, 1970
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN comment
"For Better or Worse"
By FRANK SLOVER
Kansan Staff Writer
There has been a reaction against the recent actions that have led to a diminution of the homecoming festivities and the demise of the Christmas Vespers. The loudest voice decrying these measures has been the editorial page of the Lawrence Daily Journal-World. The editors and the sentiments they represent are missing the point.
The point is not that Vespers costs only $2,000 and Abbie Hoffman, a godless insurrectionist, received almost that much for his appearance here. It is not that a homecoming queen would not really hurt anybody and would make some people much happier because she perpetuates a tradition.
The point is that values on campus are changing and the students who adhere to the new ways want it known. The days are past in which the ideal college life was four years of fraternity beer-drinking and "wild times," followed by a marriage, a home and a family that relegated the graduate to Thoreau's "life of quiet desperation" with an occasional drunk and infidelity to interrupt the blissful reminiscences of the good old days.
For better or worse, many students now do not feel they should have to stop living the day after graduation and, therefore, feel no overwelhming compulsion to accumulate a store of glorious memories to be savored in the years to come. Some students do not think that a girl is unworthy of respect because she has lost her chastity before marriage. Some do not hold the captain of the football team as their ideal, not even if his grades put him at the top of his class. A change in values has taken place and will probably continue to do so.
This is not to say that the traditional student is no longer in existence. There are still fraternities and sororites with their ivy-covered brick and esoteric ritual. On Saturday, the football stadium fills with drunken, screaming spectators whose blood pulses faster with each heroic feat performed by the helmeted gladiators below.
It is perhaps the long-standing preeminence of these latter students and their excesses in glorifying the existence for which they stand that has prompted the strong reaction against tradition by students of other leanings. According to the new feeling, a homecoming queen is irrelevant if her office perpetuates a way of life that espouses values unfit for reasonable human beings. Christmas Vespers may be just as irrelevant or, possibly, worse if, as some people feel, the campus is no place for religion. Those who are demanding an end to these activities are doing so from a feeling that these things are symbols of a philosophy that is antagonistic to their own, not that all traditions are bad.
In time, student sentiment will probably swing back toward a more conservative, traditional existence. There will, however, be different traditions to maintain by that time, so it will not be the same as its predecessor. It will reflect the wider interest and involvement of the student body. Perhaps there will be several cycles of change and reaction to them until some sort of new stasis is reached that more realistically reflects student sentiment than the decades-old monolith now under discussion. One can only hope that, when this point of balance is reached, each campus faction will be willing to give full respect to the views and needs of the others represented in it.
Now it's official . . . no more second-class citizens in the South
Winn Letter Rebuffs ZPG
LETTERS
(Editor's note): This is a copy of a letter sent by Rep. Larry Riddle to office to the Lawrence Chapter of Zero Population Growth.)
Miss Mary Makepeace Zero Population Growth:
In the absence of Congressman Winn from our Washington Office, I am acknowledging your questionnaire which we received on Oct. 28. I must say I find my action curious since it comes less
than one week before the election
Because of the late date to receipt of your questionnaire, it may be impossible for us to consult who is in the District, and prepare a comprehensive reply organization before the election.
you had indeed sought the congressman's views but that he had failed to respond.
I therefore conclude that your organization is only interested in other attempting to justify your behavior or commitment by being able to claim that
Bick Doub of our district office informs me that while the congressman was unable to meet Growth on Oct. 19, he did present alternate dates to spokesmen for your group. As a result, your officers said they would be back in the city. As you know, they never were.
Bil Brief.
Executive Assistant
Bill Brier.
War of the Worlds Remembered
Bv Ted IIiff
Let your imagination go for a while and consider the following:
It is the night before Halloween. You come home a few minutes after 9:40, and someone is watching "Torn Jones" on ABC. You don't have a program listing handy, but you know "Bracken's World" in on CBS, and you've waited all week for it. After a short argument with your fellow viewer, you win and turn to CBS 10 minutes late.
Instead of "Bracken's World," an old movie is on, but before you change back to ABC a news bulletin tells you the North American Air Defense Command has detected an unusual group of objects in the upper atmosphere over Norway.
This statement is followed shortly by another saying the objects are heading toward North America, and interviews with unfamiliar men wearing military uniforms mousue.
Broadcasts of crowds seeking shelter in New York are now on, and friends watching the same program are phoning you.
Before long, you realize the spectacle on the screen is live coverage of a nuclear attack.
What will you do?
If you quickly turn channels to verify the coverage and find "Tom Jones" still on and going strong, and NBC is showing "It Takes a Thief," only commercial breaks, you eventually figure out
"A Pittsburgh husband had to subdue his fear-crazed wife who had grabbed a bottle of poison and screamed, "I'd rather die this way than that!"
the CBS broadcast is a “Playhouse 90” dramatization of an attack, and you have missed the first moments, when the producers stated the program was only a play with a news format.
If, however, you think you might panic, pack up and head for open country, don't feel bad. You would be reacting the way thousands of radio listeners reacted to a broadcast 32 years ago, that was probably the biggest mass communications hoax in history.
Shortly after 9 p.m. October 30, 1938, a program of dance music from the Park Plaza Hotel in New York was broadcast by CBS-radio affiliate WABC. But many listeners began the hour listening to NBC's ventriloquist Edgar Bergen. After his 10-minute performance on "The Voice," CBS intending to return to Bergen later in the hour.
They missed CBS's opening warning of the dramatic nature of the Mercury Radio Theater presentation of H. G. Wells' classic science fiction novel, "The War of the Worlds."
Instead, they heard constant radio bulletins about strange gas explosions on the surface of Mars, followed immediately by reports of seismic disturbances near Grover's MNJ, I.
Few listeners realized that the voice of "Princeton astronomer Richard Pierson" was actually that of Orson Welles, director and 23-year-old boy wonder of the New York theater.
What those listeners did hear were reports from "American observatories" confirming the Martian explosions and on-the-spot coverage of a strange object on the Wilmoth farm near Grover's Mil.
They sat spellbound as reporter Carl Phillips described a "black, leathery creature with something resembling a face and saliva dripping from his mouth" that had emerged from the cylinder.
The horror mounted as their living rooms were filled with the sound of a Martian "heat ray" warming up and annihilating the crowd around the room. As the crowd ran, they stopped abruptly when he too was reduced to ashes.
Statements by scientists, a station vice president, and even the secretary of interior were followed by an eye-witness account of the machines, tall as a skyscraper, entering New York City spraying black, gas.
A short time later, a 7,000-man force armed with
rifles and machine guns was wiped out by the
warheads.
If the listener stayed with the broadcast tor 30 minutes, he realized that the program was a drama because of Welles' sollicitation as Pierson described his survival and the death of the Martians from
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY
KANSAN
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Newark police found 20 families in an apartment where their faces swelled in weetworms to ward off poisoning.
A Pittsburgh man had bid to subdue his fear-cried wife who had grabbed a bottle of poison and then stabbed her.
One New Yorker reporter heard the "swift" of the Martian invaders; another said he heard麦克特.
Waves of hysteria broke out across the nation. Police stations, hospitals and newspapers were flooded with calls from frightened citizens asking how to escape death and demanding gas masks. Spontaneous religious services broke out everywhere.
A team of Prifters treated 15 persons for shock. A group of Prifters gistens set out to recover a specimen of the "matter."
someone called Brooklyn药政 and said, "We can hear the fire from here, and I want a gas machine."
A man with binoculars atop a Manhattan building "saw" the battle flames.
Among the multitude of individual incidents reported were:
A man叫 a bus terminal for a reservation, shouting, "The world is ending and I have a lot to do."
bacteria. But many persons didn't wait for the end, and they didn't turn to other stations for help.
How many persons took the broadcast serioity or not, known, but there were enough to cause repercussions?
An Oakland man called police and told them he was willing to go on dead. He then received the injunction.
Member Associated Collegiate Press
was willing to go east and "help repel the invasion" was willing to go east and "help repel the invasion" as almost devastated as the fictitious Communications Commission, which called the Army's commanders, was pressured by n resurgence of demands for radio
Author Wells was caustic: "The network and I agreed it was to be used as fiction. I gave no perforation for the change of scene from Britain to America, and this meant that might lead to belief that it was real news."
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Actor Welles had ended the broadcast by explaining it as "a practical joke."
"We knew we couldn't soap all your windows or steal your garden gates by tomorrow night, so we did the next best thing. We completely annihilated the human race before your very ears."
The next day he was astonished: "Far from expecting the program would be taken as fact, we feared the fantasy would appear too old-fashioned for modern consumption."
The American press, certainly no friend of radio, called the broadcast "a public outrage."
"a public贮蓄": CBS promised to "carb similar productions in the future."
The reader may wonder how such a program, full of obvious technical and scientific holes, could have been built.
The unexpected reaction by the众主 was mostly because of bad timing by CICS, both in a broad range.
The NBC show with Bergen and his dummy Chris CurtisPERTY was one of the most popular radio shows at the time.
As the New York Post explained, "Orton Wellesle many persecutors to Charlie McCarthy, and then they think Charlie will be back again. They were undoubtedly scoured out of their shoe leather to hear music."
But on a wider spectrum, the American radio audience had inadvertently been primed for a catastrophe for months, and all the tensions and fears of world-wide war were being impregnated in their listeners as they heard the events of the German-Hocoslovakian crisis unfold in their own homes.
A week after the program, The Nation magazine,
in a world where everyone knows the latest news
and information online, announced that
"They were undoubtedly scared out of their shoe leather to hear the world was being torn to bits."
surprising that the broadcast of an imaginary catastrophe only a little more fantastic than some of the major events of the past few months should have caused an underdate of conscious and subconscious fear to burst forth in all its foolish and pathetic terrifying manifestations."
Another point to consider is the relative sophistication of Americans today. With the advent of television, space exploration and at times incredible scientific achievements in all facets of America have become extremely skeptical anything not backed by scientific verification.
In 1938, there was still an element of romance and credibility in the average citizen. He could sit in the couch on his bed at night, looking at the nightmares after having seen Dracula and Franklinstein movies that we now watch on television.
With moon landings, organ transplants, and the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation be taken for granted by Americans, there is little left in the past decade to imagine or "scare us out of our shoe leather."
The horrifying broadcast that night before Halloween was the first manifestation of the power that mass communications had on our minds. But what imagination radio left to Americans was virtually wiped out by the stark reality of the black-and-white (or living color) tube.
Children may be the only humans left capable of stretching their imaginations far enough to enjoy an occasional attack of the willies, complete with goose bumps and popping eyes.
So as you sat in your living room last Saturday night trying to cope with the constant interruptions of people outside and doorsteps, perhaps you should have looked upon them with envy as you dropped candy into their
After all, that's what last Saturday night was all about.
"Why my legislation before Congress is so critically needed I'm almost tempted to visit Washington and fight it"
Miller: Lack of Judgement
From THE SUNFLOWER Wichita State University
Sedgwick County Sheriff and Attorney General candidate Vern Miller nearly caused a rot during a peaceful anti-Agwe Rally in downtown Wichita Thursday night.
Miller's first mistake was to appear personally at the rally. He was given a sarcastic, warm response when he appeared, but his presence was received as a form of intimidation.
No one seemed to object when Miller was standing in the crowd. It was Miller's presence near the podium that acted as the catalyst and led to a disturbance.
The crowd did not become angry until Miller arrested George Kimball, a speaker at the event. Kimball was arrested on charges of creating a language in his tone of voice or use of words which threatened to insult him at the podium while in the process of giving a humorous campaign speech. Kimball was insulting
The Committee for Student Rights, which sponsored the event, killed it as a parody of Sparo University.
The city police department also demonstrated its lack of good judgment by sending 30 officers "en-tered" into the street.
called for and foolish in light of the nature of the rally.
The action served only to anger the crowd, and wry the wound of Kimball's arrest. If the police department really needed officers on the scene, they should have sent them in slowly—in groups of three—rather than turning loose a crowd-provoking militaristic unit of law enforcement officers.
The acent should have been on quieting the crowd, not on threatening its members with arrest. Cheril Merrell Kirkpatrick would be wise to reconstitute the tactics of his police in demonstration situations.
And the voters in Kansas will be wise to re-evaluate Vern Miller's qualifications for any office. There is no room in Kansas politics for a man who thinks with his emotions rather than his head.
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