Page 4 University Daily Hanson, April 22, 1982
Opinion
Routine procedure
Last Tuesday, soldiers apprehended a journalist who they said was trespassing on government property.
They forced the journalist to kneel 23 as an M-16 was pointed at her head, then forced her to stand spread-eagled facing the morning sun for two hours. The soldiers later released her.
Where did this happen—in Argentina, the U.S. S.R. or in North Korea?
No. According to the journalist, Penni Crabtree, it happened near Warrensburg, Mo.
Crabtree, 22, was graduated from the University of Kansas in December and now writes for the National Catholic Reporter. She said that last Tuesday, she was covering a one-man protest conducted by James Richard Sauder atop a nuclear missile silo. Then, the Air Force security police came.
But many journalists still protested the Air Force guard's actions.
After Crabtree told her story, the Air Force issued a terse statement that said the guards had followed routine procedures.
Officials from Sigma Delta Chi, the Society of Professional Journalists, issued a statement that accused the Air Force of putting itself above the U.S. Constitution and sent a protesting telegram to Secretary of Defense Casper Weberberg.
Edward Fox, editor of the Catholic Reporter, threatened to sue.
Since then, tempers have cooled. And
some have begun to question last Tuesday's events.
For example, Why were the reporter and the protester trespassing on government property? And why did they wait for the authorities to arrest them, even though they had ample time to leave the premises?
Could it be that the reporter had set out not to report the news—but to participate in it?
Those are hard questions. And they should be answered.
The protester may have been making a simple play for publicity, and Crabtree may have been taken in by it.
But the Air Force has some answering to do. too.
But if Crabtait's story is true—and we have no reason to believe that it is not—the actions of the security force were sadistic and unwarranted. Period.
the protester and the journalist probably were a nuisance, but their actions certainly were not punishable by death. And that, it seems, is what the guards were threatening Crabtree with.
Most people will soon forget the incident at the missile site. It involved only two small people on one small hill in Missouri.
But we should all remember the lesson that Penni Crabtree learned that morning: The very people who are called upon to defend our rights are those who are given the most freedom to disregard them.
Routine procedure.
Job description doesn't tell whole story for secretaries
BY JAYNE GAUNT
Guest Columnist
DYNASTY
It sounds like another day created by Hallmark to fill the shelves between Easter and Mother's day. For the person who sits behind the typewriter all day, April 21 means an afternoon off or a free lunch from the boss. If she's in the right company, it means a free buffet at the Petroleum Club—a two-hour affair after which no one feels like working, anyway.
The boss may forget his anniversary or Mother's Day, but if he's smart, he'll never forget Secretary's day. Every executive knows, above all else, that the secretary runs the company and is lucky, he'll realize it before the boss calls in sick and he doesn't know where to find anything.
That's the situation you usually walk into as a temporary secretary. If you can figure out how to work the coffee maker, you've got it made. And you enjoy the royal treatment every day that some secretaries only receive one day in April. Why? Maybe the company knows they have to treat temporary secretaries well or you'll walk out, and then you'll be as at home as you are when you you're usually a young change from the woman who's been behind the typewriter for the last 17 years. Maybe it's because they're paying your agency $8 an hour for you.
But I wonder if the agency would increase the price if they knew the responsibilities included not just typing, shorthand, copying and coffee making, but also polishing the furniture, fielding messages between the boss and his wife about the children's education, and meeting with three changes of titerary for tomorrow's business trip and making arrangements for the annual shrimp fry.
I'll never forget one office down in the warehouse district. The address was an abandoned antique store. A small sign directed me to the second story, up a long bannister watched over by a mannequin draped with a ball. One of his hats is oversized and the corporate president. Behind it blared a Beethoven overture. After persistent knocking brought no reply, another worker, undaunted by the music emanating from within, opened the door to reveal the junior executive of the firm smoozing soundly in a six-foot bean bag chair, clapped on his desk in true executive fashion.
Awakened more by our entrance than by that of the timpani, he calmly brushed aside his touled, boyish hair and proceeded to explain my duties for the day. Obviously, a bachelor.
Even more ludicrous was my experience as a temporary secretary to the vice chancellor for education.
His competent secretary, Eleanor, had been very thorough by providing a notebook with sample letters, forms, descriptions of daily routine and a file key. She even took an afternoon to write her notes, as well that I was competent. Obviously, she didn't want to leave me with a drawer full of "If you don't know what to do with it, just put it in here, and I'll take care of it when you return." Actually, the vice chancellor was always too thoughtful for me, but a thought of everyone, but her superior had not.
university. Also a bachelor, but in his thirties and soon to be wed, the atmosphere was strictly untroubled.
The schedule of the vice chancellor inevitably included daily lunch appointments. Someone in the chancellor's office had taken to the idea of more informal brown-bag lunch meetings, tired of the fare at the local restaurant and student union. The bachelor of financial affairs met this by taking advantage of a deli across from campus, which featured sandwiches-to-go at a fair price, neatly packaged in a brown bag, complete with knife and napkin for picnickers.
Eleanor had gone so far as to dictate to me the necessary contents, should the vice chancellor not have time to pick it up himself. But he wasn't as good at anticipating such occasions. He was too busy dealing with the budget proposal to think about turkey on rve.
Normally, I would welcome an opportunity to run an errand across campus, to get out of a basement office and into the sunshine. So why did I feel so silly walking up the steps of the Academic Affairs building, knocking at a door behind which the university's site were munching on the upcoming budget proposal and delivering a brown bag to the second in command?
At 11:25, I handed him the required folder for a committee meeting. In exchange, I was given an order for the sandwich and Diet Pepsi, to be delivered to him at the meeting in progress.
I wondered if Eleanor ever had to perform this function or was it engineered just for temporary secretaries in their early 20s? Later, as I handed him his change and receipt for his expense account, he told me of the chancellor's envy of the chancellor's personally hand-delivered lunch.
Fortunately, it was my last day of work. I wouldn't have wanted to find out if I had started a new trend. Secretaries all over campus and in all 21 floors of office skyscrapers everywhere would never forgive me. Hallmark had assured them a day to be taken by the boss. Had I not given him a hard copy to take home to the boss, "It's in my job description. For this I'm being paid?" (Jayne Gauk is a KU graduate student who has worked as a temporary secretary for Manpower Inc.)
KANSAN
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Pain, beauty impossible to separate
Beauty and pain.
Wherever the two shall meet one can gain insight into this mysterious hurting rock we have been.
Take New York. On any day, you can open a book that reads 'a beauty-and-pain story that might read like a joke.'
"... a sixteen-year-old slashed her wrists and arms and then rushed to the steps of a Roman Catholic church, poking a razor to her head." Included is "screamed and screamed," "Do your mother, sister."
The blood sacrifice works as an aphrodisiac as the crowd surges around the girl. At last, she collapses, and after the tardy officials arrive and cart her away, people still murmur, bending toward the dark, bedeasted stone, until they are met with monolith, drained of their sudden and archaic lust.
The story would then make abstract com-
mon sense about urban depression and the inciidence of suicides.
The newspaper is a cultural repository for vignettes on the indifference and brutality of war.
purke's conventional sense of beauty often defends itself by creating an automatic recount for the numbers.
Aristotle offered in his "Poetics" a theory of tragedy in which pain and beauty achieve a subtle, necessary concoct. Through a catharsis of pity and fear, pain ultimately carries the spectator to a state of intellectual, emotional and aesthetic clarification.
What idea of beauty is it, though, that coincides with the image in a suicidal girl's eyes? Or does it represent the idea?
Eighteenth-century philosopher Edmund Burke had annexed pain to the sublime, leaving beauty to command the softer feelings and pain for Burke occupied different worlds.
The body's inner landscape, luxuriant with mystery and danger, is closed to all but the surgeon, whom Seizer represents as a kind of priestly naturalist:
Richard Selzer, a member of the Yale Medical school faculty, explores the buried connections between beauty and pain as a surgeon. He enters a region, in his "Rituals of Surgery, Mortal Lessons," that most readers have never viewed firsthand.
"A surgeon, who feels the slow wilde of intestines against the back of his hand and is no longer able to eat," she said.
W.J. ANDREWS
taking their comfort from such an indolent
human heart if it were some captivated bird."
In the damaged and perilous interior of the body, in the space abandoned by metaphysics and outlawed by tabeo, Selzer finds in fat, fluid, tissue and bone—in man as sheer mass and matter—a potential for beauty Burke would not have instructed us to discover.
To perceive the tragedy, says Selzer (Aristotelean in nature), is to wring from it bibbly.
Beauty, according to these aesthetics, cannot separate itself from the vision of "a bloodless woman." (Bruno Besset)
Selzer writes of the surgeon's knife as almost an extension of his body-survival as a pitiless act of love—and dispassion becomes the vehicle of an intimate and inaccessible knowledge. Knowledge that Burke could have never gained.
Pity and compassion may comfort both the
patient and the comforter, but they provide no
security. If you can see a void of patient
space which merely circle, endlessly.
As the British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein asserted: "Pity, one may say, is a form of conviction that someone else is in pain."
Pain initiates us into a new—or forgotten knowledge. It beholds, at its most intense, an unknown world of its own construction. Yet, to possess it requires a different kind of national obsession: anesthesia has become, like television, a household god, and at the first sign of discomfort, we rush for our pills and doctors. What we ask for before the cure, is that our pain be relieved, understood mainly as something to be gored rid of.
The relation between beauty and pain may not offer comforting insights, but there is the notion that pain can lead us beyond its own dark privacies. It is as if only through pain can be appreciated. Through pain, may be able to reach an understanding that avails new beauty.
For pain, mysterious and elusive and compelling, is the current theme. Samuel Johnson elicits that pain is a one-word definition of life.
And if pain is entwined with beauty—and as Socrates said, "Man seeks to be near beauty, because the soul's wings grow at the sight of beauty,"—might we easier understand the cheering crowds encoaching the enriched environment of the suicidal girl?
The fervor rising, unable either to intervene or stop watching, the witnesses cheered the girl as she reached beyond the thresholds of her pain and beyond theirs: the primitive rite having been played out, the ancestral themes having surfaced and the catharsis completed.
But the crowd dispersed, the insights of the moment remaining only in their exhaustion, except for maybe a subtly recurrent thought of the beauty of the girl's painful struggle.
Letters to the Editor
Columnist's portraval of Middle East slanted
To the Editor:
As an international student concerned with the image the public has about Arabs, I feel obligated to respond to the column by W.J. Andrews and Midwest peace an illusion," he writes on April 15.
I don't intend to use the paper for propaganda, but I can't sit idle when I read science fiction if it is meant to be the truth, especially when it is directed against me. Andrews reminds me of the star of "Raiders of the Lost Ark," who, by the time he leaves Europe by Palestinian Liberation Organization. He also depicts the Israelis as the good guys and all Arabs as dirty terrorists.
He thinks that a 48-hour stay in Amman was sufficient to investigate all the evils of the Arabs. Ironically, he couldn't find one decent thing about them. Moreover, he glamourously emphasized the smiles on the heroic and sharp soldiers when he crossed the border to Israel.
In the past two weeks, however, I didn't see them smile when they killed a 7-year-old Palestinian child. It didn't look heroic when they shot a 50-year-old Palestinian woman "suspected for stealing weapons." And an Israeli soldier didn't look sharp when he tried his machine gun in a holy shrine, killing and injuring many Palestinians!
I don't mean to call Andrews a liar, but the fact is that there has been only one clash between PLO and the Israeli in which a bus was destroyed. I wonder how he comes up with two such incidents, which he claims happened in two days.
Secondly, the Israelis only suspect where the "hideouts" exist, and hence, are likely to be behind them.
He reminded him of "the Fourth of July" when he saw Ira's planes attack "suspected guerrilla units" at the battlefield.
"hideouts" are in Lebanon, and attacking them is attacking an innocent country.
Finally, I didn't wish to amplify the Israeli's crimes and demonstrate our perfection, but I hoped to expose to the public the other side of the issue: ours.
Thaer Laham,
Damascus, Syria, junior
Details block change
To the Editor:
I'm moved, particularly by the Phyllis Schiflay visit, to write to the University Daily Kansan, a forum for public-speak. And, for the sake of attention span, I will keep this brief.
It seems clear that because of the mere content of our opinions and positions, we, the selfmade cognoscence at the University of Kansas, shall be content to bicker and squabble over details, by and large at the expense of effective and constructive social improvement.
I believe, if I may use a metaphor, that actors should agree about the general context of a play first, rather than defining the drama in terms of the stage-props.
"Evil is that which makes for separateness; and that which makes for separateness is self-
I would like to see those people who feel their power and effectiveness in the world re-examine their positions, first individually, then together, and distill out the contextual similarities (like 'balance between the genders' or 'de- balancing' in two examples) for in Aldous Huxley's words:
destructive. self-destruction of evil may be sudden and violent, as when murderous hatred results in a conflict that leads to the death of the hater; it may be gradual, as when a degenerative process results in impotence or extinction; or it may be reformative, as when a long course of evil-doing results in all concerned becoming so sick of destruction and degeneration that they decide to change their wavs, thus transforming evil into good."
Tom Dougherty, Garnett graduate student
Where credit is due
To the Editor:
Concerning the article, "Frame coordinates for fourth year" in the University Daily Kansas special edition, April 16, 1982: If Jan Boutte had made the effort to interview Tim Harrison, Mike Waddell, and Peter McKenzie, she would have had an article worth printing.
It is these three men who are in charge of coordinating everything the student committed
Instead, she wrote a sensationalized article using the first person she interviewed, against that person's wishes. This oversight we should attribute to Boutte's inexperience. Hopefully, in the future, she will use this as a learning experience.
Ann Frame,
Kansas Relays
Student Committee member