1.
Opinion
Page 4 University Daily Kansan, November 12, 1981
A glowing performance
Have you heard that Kansas City may soon be making its debut on the small screens of America? That's right, if tourism officials have their way, that charming, livable city will be popping up in living rooms all over the country in a made-for-TV movie.
ABC Circle Films is considering a script that would give KC a starring role, and a copy of the script arrived in Kansas City last week. The theme of the four-hour drama is that a crisis in Germany escalates into nuclear war, somebody pushes the fateful button and Kansas City—nestled between intercontinental ballistic missile fields—is blown neatly over the rainbow. Unfortunately, that's where most people living outside the Midwest think the city is now.
The last half of the script is devoted to showing the adjustment of the surviving neighbors to the devastation.
Naturally, K.C. tourism officials are
pleased as punch that their city will potentially get all that free publicity.
Some publicity! Kansas City is still typecast all too often as an old cowtown whose main contribution is providing motels for people passing through on their way to someplace really important. Would this "big break" dwell on the city as a maturing cultural center, a respectable metropolis with conventions and sports clubs, an oasis with lots of fountains?
No, it would show the town being effectively vaporized. What better city to sacrifice, after all?
With friends like Hollywood, we certainly don't need any enemies. Seems as though there must be a better way to get publicity for Kansas City than portraying it as the first unfortunate victim of nuclear war. On the other hand, when that show-biz bug bites, and the beautiful people tell you they can make you a star, it's probably hard to hold out for the ideal part.
Letters to the Editor
Students need variety of news
To the Editor:
There is no substitution for Rick D. Potter's remark (Oct. 23 Letters) that "the majority of students do not really care to read" stories about national and international events.
If he had taken a survey of a representative cross-section of KU students, he should have stated his results. He suggests that if students were interested in news they would read the Lawrence Journal-World or watch news on television. But how many students subscribe to the Journal-World or have time to read newspapers daily? Many students may not have televisions available, and other students may not have time to watch TV.
the Kansan normally devotes the bulk of its non-advertising space to stories of local, regional and student interest. On the day Potter's letter appeared, the only Kansan stories not directed toward these areas were the UPI newsbriefs, stories about PATCO, food aid and politics and the World Series. The newsbriefs are especially helpful in giving busy students the bare facts about news events, if they "do not really care to read" longer stories.
Potter would prefer that the Kansan not cover the recent clash between groups of Iranian students. This request is contradictory to his argument, because this incident involved the University and local courts. The 186 Iranian students at KU are part of the student body and deserve news coverage, as does any other group at the University. It would be severe censorship to leave out information concerning non-American students.
merely be offered student and student news when there is a broad range of events occurring beyond this region. Potter may not want to read about politics and economics, but shouldn't other students have the choice of reading about areas that so greatly affect their lives?
Bridget J. Todd
The University of Kansas and Lawrence are only small parts of the world. Students shouldn't
Bridget J. Toud
Lawrence graduate student
Heterosexual dance?
To the Editor:
Did I hear something about a heterosexual舞 dance? (Oct. 30 letters.) Excuse me, but isn't every dance on campus a heterosexual舞 dance? Granted, homosexuals have the right to attend classes with whom they choose. However, some homosexuals place value on keeping their skulls intact.
Every time a straight couple holds hands in public, that is the Heterosexual Club's airborne sign. Every time a new romance develops in Hollywood, that is the Heterosexual Club's blatant advertisement. So you see, my friends, the proposed organization already exists.
A heterosexual dance? Fine. However, if the day ever comes that your parents disown you because you sleep with the opposite sex, you lose you job because of such suspicions or a beer bottle flies at you from a speeding car (accompanied by the phrase, "goddam heter") I may take your request for a hassle-free evening seriously.
Christopher Budd Lawrence senior
The University Daily
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Editor . . . . .
Nuclear war best not dwelt upon?
Psychologists and torturers agree that the constant threat of physical pain breaks human wills more effectively than the affliction of pain itself.
THE COLUMBUS DEPARTMENT © FOR ORIGINAL TRANSFER-N.Y. NEWS-CORRECTED
This must be because man's capacity for fear is infinite. You can tear at his body, and he knows that eventually he will die. But in reality, you are also seeing results in only spiritual and emotional horror.
In recent weeks, I've come to wonder how many human wills are broken by the threat of a terrorist attack.
KEVIN HELLIKER
Yet the contingency of war, like that of torture, is spiritually wearisome. It seemingly means the significance of all one's efforts, especially when—as at college—those efforts are directed toward an already uncertain future.
when, morning after morning, news about a
groundrun in Europe blackens the front page.
I do not believe, as does our president, that a limited nuclear war is possible. Nor would I further fret over my future if I understood a nuclear war to be inevitable.
Another acquaintance of mine, like Dylan, recently experienced his second birth. Now he preaches the futility of preparing for the war. Will he be essential to the war, fell below belief. The nuclear fireworks, he said, will be followed closely by the second coming of Christ.
The threat of nuclear war seems to imply that a big business sends songs on the backtrack, like what it else is.
Or as Bob Dylan put it, "To understand you know too soon there is no sense in trying."
If one, then we would certainly pray for the other, but must the threat of nuclear war lead to it?
Death (and some wrongly add taxes) is our only absolute. Logically then, a nuclear war represents only one of a thousand possible circumstances under which death
After two years of study, an acquaintance of mine quit school to sell cocaine. Although he vowed last year to leave the business while the leaving was still good, he said at a recent meeting that he felt his business pursued the matter, he muttered something about the imminent destruction of the world.
And in one sense, this fear of mass murder is noble. It belies the popular philosophy that all men are motivated by self-interest, and it provides evidence for an altruistic side of humanity.
many occur. And death by nuclear bombing, in terms of pain and speed, is quite likely preferable to many alternative methods of dying.
But what horrifies and paralyzes people who think about nuclear war is, of course, its magnitude. The recurring nightmare of innocent men, women and children reduced to mounds of melted flesh is enough to send anyone tripping on drugs or Jesus.
John Donne, as he lay on what he considered his deathbed, wrote, "Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind." The threat of nuclear war reverses the order of this statement, forcing us to ponder the unthinkable: How much
would the death of mankind diminish any man?
This is not a pleasant question to go to bed with alone.
Like many unthinkables, the reality of nuclear war is perhaps best not thought about. I suspect that the man who dwells obsessively upon the fate of all mankind is likely to be one who is decided to abstain, broods over the seemingly infinite "days he must now face without liquor."
His ability to imagine future pain and horror renders him presently helpless.
It is easy, under the threat of nuclear war,
to resign oneself to the notion that all is lost,
and thereby rob the world of a micro-bit of
hope.
But then the threat of nuclear war no longer is confined to the future. Injury is already suffered when the fear of nuclear war leads to an abandonment of the present.
Real college life seldom matches the ideal
In the book, Hardy, an older, brooding student of noble qualities, takes the freshman Brown under his wing, much in the same way that the tragic, heroic Athos befriended the impetuous young D'Artagnan in Dumas' 'The Three Musketeers.'
In this, the last autumn of my undergraduate career, I have been spending time with "Tom Brown at Oxford," one of those Model Boy books about how life at university ought to be, if one is young and robust and straightforward in all his acts and intentions.
Both of these literary friendships show how the fresh-faced enthusiasm of a youngster can help to stir an older man out of a resigned cynicism that has to accrue, it seems, with age. More particularly, Hardy's friendship with Brown emphasizes the discrepancy between a student who is beginning college with ideals and one who is finishing with regrets. Hardy finds vitality and hope in the presence of Brown and says to himself, "The very sight of him does me good."
Such is the effect of freshmen at any university. Jayhawk Boulevard would indeed be a dreary walk if one did not now and then spry the sprightly step or simple smile that comes most often from a student in his first year of college. This wholesomeness awakens in us memories of the happy carelessness we once had and perhaps
"FIGHTING, SIR? US? WHATEVER GAVE YOU THAT IMPRESSION, SIR?"
BEN
JONES
prods us to uncover a little of the old
history, that we have been rooted out by the
realities of university life.
Many of us entered college with a general excitement about the broad prospects awaiting us there. We nurtured vague, fanciful visions spun from old movies, or from new movies about old times. "The Way We Were" set an idyllic campus dream in soft focus for us. It also instilled in our heads yearnings to be a compelling champion in the open-air debate, championing causes in an open-air debate, or an unassuming athlete, impassively absorbed in the intense action of a football game.
Such scenes illustrate the almost-impossible dichotomy of a college career. To fulfill the role, one must tackle intense challenges, yet still maintain a harmonic mood that allows one to manage the pressures inherent in such a divisive environment are more accurately revealed in another movie, "The Paper Chase," which centers on the pressures faced by a circle of J-L's at Harvard Law School and is a sort of "Mother Western Front" in an academic survival setting.
Other forms of media have served to reinforce the image of an ideal college life. Beer advertisements in college newspaper supplements convinced us we would always have three tight ties to our college and a beer. Four seemed to be the magic number for a college coterie. Other advertisements implied it was almost impossible to go through four years of college without dating a cheerleader. From the 1980s, some people personal Tom Brown, our own version of the ideal freshman, and then tried to become him.
My own notions of what college would be like were rather vague. I remember listening with anticipatory friend one evening to my father and an old college friend trade tails of the uproarious incidents that took place in an old boarding house they lived in as students. The beneficiary of many of their college friends was a particularly pet cat, a anguishly innocent victim.)
Since that evening I have wanted to rent a two-story clapboard house in a state of mild dilapidation and move in with several of my friends. But I have never quite managed it.
This will be but one of the “ambitions” of mine left unfilled when (knot on parchment) I get my diploma in May. As an undergraduate one comes to accept an increasing sense of lost opportunity. For every firm friend, there was one or more who could have been, had time and circumstance permitted. For every bit of reverence, there were a dozen self-denials for the sake of study. Despite that, one never assumed gain as an ability; one considered as one had hoped, to one's lack of brilliance. Often my studies became a pathetic scrounging for enough answers to fill a test with. My definition of a senior, therefore, would be a student whittled down to graduation.
Over time, the single, actual college student's life that I had lived became superimposed on all the different images I had conjured as being available to my Tom Brown. Instead emerged Hardy, the senior we find ourselves to be, alone in his rooms at Oxford, contemplating his life of the last three years, and hoping things would be different for his friend Brown.
"Perhaps he won't flounder into all the sloughs that I have had to drag through; he will get too much of the healthy, active life up here for that, which I have never had; but some of them he must get into. All the companionship of boating and cricketing, and wine-parties, and supper-parties, and all the reading in the world, won't keep him from many a long hour of mawkishness, and discontent, and emptiness of heart; he feels that already himself."
This discrepancy between freshman expectations and senior recoupment is partially created by our own shortcomings. As the "The Paper Chase" showed so starkly, all of us tend to settle out at one level or another, according to our capacity for savoring the privileges of college life while still completing the work required.
But even those who are able successfully to balance demands and whims are not immune to an attack of "mawkishness." Instrumented in the air of every college campus is a melancholic sense of nostalgia. Wescue Hain can hardly be as upplifted with the same enthusiasm. Gymnasium must have been, on the samoset.
And one cannot help wondering what campus life would be like if it were spied again by all the old college traditions that have become diluted, or neglected altogether.
Of course, no one can have the consumate college experience. College seems to be, to a great degree, a trading of options; a jugging of commitments.
“It’s about the toughest part of a man’s life,” Hardy tells Brown. “No amount of physical or mental work will fill the vacuum you were talking of just now. It is the empty house swept and garnished, which the boy might have had glimpses of, but the man finds yawning within him, and which must be filled somehow. It’s a pretty good three years’ work to learn how to keep the devil’s out of it, more or less, by the time you take your degree.
"At least I have found it so."