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Wednesday, September 22, 1971
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN comment Kerry Appears
It costs 50 cents to listen to John Forbes Kerry tonight.
It should be well worth it. Kerry is an articulate and eloquent spokesman of antiwar sentiment among those who have been closed to the war's turmoil—the
Certainly not all Vietnam Veterans are now actively opposing the war. But as much as they have been, there is a sizeable element of antwar sentiment exists among GIs who have been there.
Keery's credentials to speak for disaffected veterans are impeccable. While stationed on the Mekong Delta, he received a Silver Star, Bronze star and
He is intelligent and knows what he is talking about. His talk shouldn't be another in a long series of boring, emotional polemics against the war.
nthree Purple Hearts. Earlier, he was Yale's class of 1966 valedictorian.
John Kerry appeared this summer on the Dick Cavett show with John O'Neil of the Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace. Kerry certainly came across as the more reasoned of the two men, even though his views may have been debatable.
Respect Ruminations
College years are, among many other things, awkward times. They are an ambiguous age. New, more mature self-concepts replace old ones.
So, go see what a veteran has to say about this tragedy we call Vietnam.
It can be irritating and shattering when others display ignorant and contemptuous of these concepts. It happens every day.
Pat Malone
It last happened to me in a clothing store. Nothing can shatter my confidence like walking into a store and seeing a row of smiling mannequins sizing me up. I wished they would have gone into the back room, took off their faces and laughed.
I began frequenting the cheap stores, where the held a moment away when I saw a woman looking
It was at one of these stores. I had picked out a couple of shirts and waited through a long line to pay. My check was ready.
The owner looked up at me and smiled.
"This all, for you, fella?" he asked.
I nodded. He quoted the price, I gave him the check and started out.
"Wait a minute. Is this your real address?"
no I thought. I live down on the river caddawabs. I'm trying to deceive you
"Yes. It's right." I said.
I dug through my wallet for the L.D. thinking, surely it would appease him.
"Well, is this your correct I.D. number?" he asked, smiling.
It didn't. I've had the card since my sophomore year and the signature had off.
"Now how do you expect me to tell
you?" he asked. "Are you a signature?
are you a signature?" he asked, almost giggling.
**win a dramatic gesture I flipped out**
the whole row of plastic picture windows
and removed the curtain.
driver's license, credit cards and social
security card. I did not say anything.
"Oh yes—Raymond," he said. "You're in here so often. One of these times I'm going to remember you, Ray."
I was thinking very hard about how this was going to be the last one of those times. I have never gone by the name David. This is his idiot had ever called me Raymond.
I started out the door, furious. He stopped me.
"Oh—uh—Ray?"
Expecting some flurry of apologies, I turned to face him. I was determined not to accept his "I'm-so-sorries" and "please-come-again."
"Would you mind putting your phone number on this check?" He was leaning across the counter, slithering back and forth on his elbows, smiling a frenzied, friendly smile. Though embarassed, he was determined to get my phone number.
I was churning inside, but at the same time felt weak. If I had to set off blasting caps, or rip off his price tags to get out of the way, I could easily say anything. I looked at him a second, pointed to where the phone number was printed on the cheek and staggered out, just as drained as I would have been after an hour's scrutiny by a half-dozen clothes
As I said, it can be irritating and shattering when others reject one's advice. It makes a good story I think, because it happens to so many people.
There comes a time, though, when one decides he is entitled to respect. For me and, I suspect, many others, this is an issue. You can do nothing, we deserve it but, a lot of people don't.
Respect is something no king or Congress can guarantee. Maybe it's a lot to expect. But, when you can drink, go to movies and vote, what's left to ask for?
Chip Crews
Exactly when it began is hard to say. Maybe when Lyndon Johnson ceased bombing North Vietnam, or after the Bay of Pigs flasco or maybe before. Perhaps it started just recently. No matter. It is too late for that. It does Congress, or the marquity of the American people, regard the military or the Pentagon, as "sacred cows."
No longer will military get what military wants. People are demanding answers. No longer will the saying "to serve your country" be justification
Chip Crews
Associate Editor
Draft Morass
The draft. Perhaps this week, or next, or even in a couple months Congress will approve a two-year extension giving the college more time to develop a system the right to again conscript men.
And perhaps most tragic of all—the feeling of many drafts they spent their hitches, not in constructive work but in destructive ones. In an ingeniousion that only the most advanced bureaucracies is capable of devising it. "Look busy but dodge work; Say yes Sir; don't volunteer." Two years spent in the army, a year in college and the dilent to pick up the crumbs.
Tragic. Tragic because two years will be plucked from the lives of more of our young men. Tragic in that some of those future draftees will be sent to Vietnam for their personal attempt at American roulette. Tragic because some will lose.
This year there is a bright side. The vote this year against the draft will be the largest in recent year, certainly since this nation became preoccupied with the word "Red." The battles fought over the ballot have come the nearest to success. A pattern, a trend is certainly becoming evident.
enough. No longer will the standard answer, "We'll be a second-rate power in a few years," justify. People want to know why more men, arms and money are needed. They are beginning to suspect the military is more concerned with defending itself than with defending this nation.
Out of this rising sentiment comes something tangible, something that will be passed at the same time as the draft extension—an increase in military pay. It is a first step and certainly a feeble one. Nevertheless it is significant.
For the first time, the state and its people are seeing the use of a threat of imprisonment or coercive men into duty in many large cities. They wakes sufficient to attract needed bodies.
For the first time, the end is in sight. 1973. That's the date. Richard Nixon realizes it. at that time the military must be made to stand on its feet. Were it to do so now, it would certainly fail. For, the military is as archaic as history is old.
For the first time, the hypocrisy of a government violating its own principles against involuntary servitude—which could to forced IDeness—have been realized.
But in 1973 military pay should about equal civil pay. The dehumanizing vestiges of an outdated system should be almost gone. Continued public pressure will have wrought continued change and better control.
Then will come the test. If the military falls, so be it.
What is needed now and will still be needed in the future—nations not a United States and a military.
Dick Hay
Associate Editor
Readers Respond
KANU Response
Dear Editor:
A letter in your columns of September 20 does a severe injustice to KANU and its fine quality programs Ordinarily, we do not answer such letters since it would be less than ideal the ignorance Mr. Percival displays. But just for the record . . .
KANU is not an "educational" radio station. It is a public service radio station owned by the state of Kansas, with the Chancellor as the license. If Mr. Percival assumes that only the members of KANU are soley uneducated. If he is complaining that KANU air programs other than classical music, he is certainly entitled to that opinion. KANU presents classical music from nine until noon, between 12:15 and 1:00 pm, four days a week from 1:30 until 9:00, until 9:00 or 10:00, and throughout the day on Sunday.
The other musical offerings include one program about Bluegrass music and its origins, two programs about three programs about jazz, one Stage & Screen program, an hour per day of light jazz in the afternoon, an underground program even when which added to ourschool's early morning show which features light classics plus some contemporary music. It is unfair to say that any of these programs either duplicate commercial music or "pursuer to popular tastel."
the rest of our programming day consists of news, National Public Radio's "All Things Considered," and a variety of topical programs which provide the most current information of Kansas, and the rest of the world by highly qualified broadcast journalists. Perhaps
Mr. Percival unknowingly expresses his real fear that a legitimate education of the public is being undertaken by KANU, and that no longer will he and his classmates have access to a world of music they neither understand nor appreciate.
School Defense To the Editor:
Bill Redlin, Director Community Needs Programs
Bill Redlin, Director
I don't know why there is any reason to wonder about our educational system. I don't oppose it at all. Do others at KU feel the same as I? Yes, I see it all the time. It is not because of smugness or pretence. We know we feel this way, but we knew the whole picture of ourselves at KU and would avoid trying to change our system.
That is, students do not learn to control any urges to drop everything in search of information or competence because marks in their other classes might fail. They know to study their assignments and get them done and handed in. As they keep this up, they start to study for their own satisfaction. Later, when they feel a deeper satisfaction, and on it goes.
I don't know why society would crack down on students for not being perfect grade-wise when the transcripts go out before the exams. Even in the days before our society had an educational system, men had their share of business failure, domestic strife, and social injustice. There are three times the three weeks gone in this semester before it is over, or everything in the classroom is lost!
Mark Hildebrand Sophomore Lorraine, Kansas
Garry Wills
Kennedy Center A Compromise
People object to it should not have been shoved off to the edge of the Potomac, another Monument to
The new Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts was happily full of people last week—people going to performances, or buying tickets for them; going to or being turned away; or taking it on a look at it, or taking its photograph.
The place badly needed the people—outside, to relieve the austere white-and-gold symmetry; inside, to suggest the possibility of being by its intimate acoustics and rather trivializing decorative scheme. The dangly and spangly chandeliers make it look as if this outsize lady were swainted in strand on strand of dimoreste
1 like it—liked looking at it, walking through it, listening in it. Moment by moment, it looks larger than it is, or smaller; gaudier, or starker; more functional, or frivilous. It is female; it has moods.
Culture, but kept in town, close to the pulse of life where art is created, where things get painted or written or conceived. Art now travels straight from garret to museum, and some would like to move to a transition somewhere in mid-assay.
The Center is an artificial Forum, not the real cross-roads of a city; but so, for that matter, is Lincoln Center in New York. And since Washington itself is just a fake forum imposed on a swamp, we can hardly object to satellite ar-
But Washington is no place for that. There is no town there to house our theaters and concert halls.
Washington is not a town at all although it has swallowed up a town or two in its time. Washington is Little Egypt on the Potomac—a Romanized city of Philadelphia, cupping it; pillars, arches, perchurs under the nation's obesik, with lumpy proterarian-heric sculpture, great cement slabs of mindless muscle. It is all a marble facade, with burlage houses and slums behind, in back yards of old buildings, though, if it were, it would breed in the back alleyes better than in porticos.
tificialities.
A second objection is that government should not use tax dollars on culture. Don't worry, though; it won't. Even the Bernstein Mass commissioned for the opening was Broadway arrived by way of the New York Philharmonic. It did not challenge the social-cultural establishment, but instead supported the cultural-historical-national interest, and the Mass was an American monument to past greatness—in this case, to West Side Story. It is said that the Smithsonian Institute is our national altar. Right—but only as the White House is our country's formal parlor, but it is also a National Gallery its artistic warehouse. The Kennedy Center will be a museum for the kinetic arts, as the National Gallery for plastic arts. The aim in both cases is not culture, but national pride—a collection of civilizational knick-knacks we have purchased for prestige reasons. The Center is better suited for its aircraft carrier would be; and it is almost as good looking; and it is far less destructive. So blessings on it.
Another objection is that the Center tries to do too much, combining opera, symphony, ballet, theater, and the film—not encouraging small enterprises independent groups in each field. But what else can you hope for in a city where everything is politicized? It is a place of compromise, of exhortation, but it also gives me more cultural bang for the buck, a search for TR X's of the art world. Political nerves tangle with friction wherever people gather here. The opening week reflected Nixon's tense attitude toward Bernstein, the Kennedy's tense attitude toward Mons. Orsanas, the nation's tense attitude toward three slain Kennedy brothers and its desire not to see the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy with a peace Mass coincides, room-broom, with a war President, and four theaters are none too well.
in the, the thing fits its setting; it
embodies falsehood, hypocrisy, and
compromise. Its acoustics are better
than those of the Senate Chamber. It is
big, expensive, gaudy, plain, and just
plain fun. Like it.
Copyright, 1971, Universal Press Syndicate
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
An All-American college newspaper
Kansas Telephone Numbers
Newsroom—UN 4-4810
Business Office—UN 4-4358
GIs Learning Hate
Published at the University of Kansas during the academic year except holidays and examinations, grants $6 a semester. $10 a semester. Permanent paid address paid at Lawrence. $50 goods, services and employment offered to all students without any charge. Services and employment are necessary those of the University of Kansas or the State Board of Regents.
FIREBASE SIBERIA
Vietnam (AP) — The GIAs are
combat infantrymen, in turn
fighting the brave and the
lowest of the low.
For some the thing they have learned best is to hate.
Del Brinkmar
David Barte
Mel Adams
Carol Youns
News Adviser
Editor
Business Adviser
Business Manager
Spec. 4 Gerald Dupasier hates the war. He hates his officers. He hates Remfs, the rear-chelon men. He hates back
Griff and the Unicorn
By Sokoloff
breaking mountains, steaming jungles and his 40-pound pack. He hates Washington politicians and an Army that says it's withdrawing but has him itching the bush in a Godoforsaken corner of Indochina. He hates being here.
But he's still here, still fighting, still dying a little each time a friend is killed or maimed.
"Copyright 1971, David Sokioff.
"I've been in the bush for weeks, I came out today and here I am three hours later going back in. For a year now they've been promising standout. The unit 'is going home,' they say, but we can't wait to see them in the bush." Promises, promises and guys are still setting killed."
Spee. 4 Jack McCullough of Loving, N.M., is blond, baby-faced and only 20 years old. He explained why he hates Martha Mitchell, Melvin Laird and George Romme, in that order.
"Laird said I'm in a defensive position. What the hell's so defensive about a combat assault?
"That Mitchell woman said the war's over. My mom wrote to me saying, 'The Army is busy any more. But I'm going on patrol same as before. The crew might be so many Gocks left, but we're still stepping on their own."
"And now Romney tells me the only alternative to combat deaths is unemployment back home. He doesn't care whether he be unemployed or dead."
Spec. 4. Terry O'Brien, a 28-year-old trishman from New York who was always looking to want to climb the promotion ladder on the bodies of their men.
'It's so easy to build up a hate out here.'
---
"Kill kills, all they want is kills," he complained. "The war is winding down and they're grabbing for a last chance to kill a Dink and win a medal. But they're killing us instead."
Do they hate the enemy too?
"What've the Dinks ever done to me?" asked Dupasier.
"Sure, they shoot at us and we step in their booby traps, but they wouldn't if we weren't here. It's the Army that pushes us on to
When he gets out of the Army, Dupasquier vows to "grow my demonstration. Against the Army, Pentagon, every uniform I see."
O'Brien wants to be a cop.