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Opinion
University Daily Kansan. October 30, 1981
Week of big games
Almost ex exciting as watching the World Series was watching the score change in the Ronald Reagan AWACS game.
When the fight over the arms sale to Saudi Arabia began in the Senate, a resolution of disapproval was being sponsored by 50 senators, including 18 Republicans, and was favored by even more.
But then the White House began working its persuasive magic, and the wall of opposition begin to erode. By Tuesday, the score stood at 52 senators against the sale and 47 in favor. When actually put to the test the next day, the Senate reversed itself and voted 52-48 in favor of the sale. A thriller to the end, to be sure.
All the president's men had been lobbying hard for the controversial proposal, but it took the big man himself to rally the final support in the Senate.
He sent a formal letter of assurance to the Senate saying that the deal could be canceled at any time if it suddenly turned out to be less than a great idea. Kind of like
those "options to cancel!" you get with a record- and book-club deals, and you know how well those work.
Uncommitted senators who ended up supporting the sale repeatedly used words like "persuasive" and "sincere" when describing the president during his eleventh-hour meetings with them. They didn't seem to feel overly pressured.
Others took a different view of the whole situation. Sen. Howell Heflin, D-Ala, and an AWACS opponent to the end, said, "I feel as if I'm going to need an arm transplant. It's been twisted so much—this way and that way."
But arm-twisting seems to work for the president. It helps him win games—such as those involving AWACS and budget cuts—that are crucial to his national and international prestige.
That may be good for the image of the nation, but one hopes that Congress won't let itself be twisted against any of its convictions or better judgments. It should be voting on the basis of politics, not personalities—even if the strongest personality happens to be that of the manager.
Domestic robots are versatile, but they don't compute as gifts
With the morning frost on the car's windshield getting thicker and the furnace kicking on more often, thoughts of Christmas and its obligatory gifts begin creeping into the consumer's mind.
at one time, toys, books and down-fitted coats
are enough to keep children of all sizes
interacting.
Then, with the development of the computer chip and the indispensable, although disposable, small-volt battery, electronic games became popular Christmas gifts.
Now, the latest, and perhaps the most expensive, electronic wounder, to ask Santa for is a robot.
KARI
ELLIOTT
Neiman-Marcus, a specialty store that offers expensive and unusual Christmas gifts, is selling ComRo 1, the Domestic Robot System. Ultimation Inc. is producing the robot, which costs $15,000 for the basic model and $17,500 for the deluxe model.
Although ComRo 1 is no CSPO, this modern-day robot can be programmed to do various household tasks—opening doors, serving food, watering plants and cleaning the house.
The 4½-foot ComRo I also can be a smoke
detector, free extinguisher, wireless telephone,
or camera.
Don't ask me how Ultimaton can get all those creatures into a short robot. Maybe its arms and legs.
I can take Atari television games, computerized microwave ovens that "think" and even the flashing-light electronic toy in which players must repeat a specific light and tone pattern, when electronic machines move and take on other anthropomorphic characteristics.
There are too many potential problems associated with a moving robot.
Consumers don't need more machines when they can't take care of the ones they own now. Automobiles are always a pain in the bank account. They die at the worst times and in the worst places. Small electrical appliances go on as long as they run, so machines get sockets, though never the same pair.
What are owners going to do when ComR0 reap
breaks down? Take it into the local robot repair
machine.
The robot's computer could glitch, wreaking havoc on the house. An owner could find his laptop stolen.
A broken robot could open the front door to that and open bathroom doors at inappropriate temperatures.
As computer technology becomes more sophisticated, robots will be programmed to do more human functions. If designers have in mind, weave over that thinks, a thinking robot is possible.
Because robots will have more human characteristics, they will be bought by people who don't want the expense and problems of raising a family.
Why bother with cranky babies or disrespectful adolescents? To keep a robot family in line, all an owner would need to do is take out the batteries.
A family also could have a baby robot to keep its full-size robot company and to help with small household tasks. A family of robots could be human characteristics requested by the owners.
A more aggressive robot could protect the family and its possessions, and a humorous robot would be able to steal.
But if thinking robots get too intelligent, they might form unions and demand their robot rights—every other weekend off and no window cleaning.
Robots might demand higher salaries and a short workday. They would learn how to talk back.
With all these problems, people might as well go back to human maids and human children. How can we do this?
Besides, look how much money would be saved by not buying batteries.
Halloween rekindles lost mystery
F. Scott Fitzgerald, a haunted writer, once called the test of a first-rate intelligence "the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at one time and still retain the ability to perceive."
This thought flatters us learned individuals who still cannot resist the promises of Halloween. As the night of horror approaches and we secretly prepare our deceptions (with the proper intellectual hum-bugger), an eerie sense of expectancy arises as from the wooded landscape. This year, the Great Pumpkin will provide patch, wipe—even though we know better.
Although the knowledge of what's best and right and healthy is now available through our nearest therapeutic counselor, Halloween remains a challenge to one's capacity to
KEVIN
HELLIKER
wonder. The Kanan deserves credit for not running a feature such as "Psychologist" on the platform.
The October holiday raises these questions:
Is faith in mystery the opiate of the ignorant?
Is the rocky rite of passage successfully fulfilled? If not, is there a clusion that this is dreary life and life only?
But as the televised special rerun years later, the Jamison grows subtly more profound. He learns that his wife And the faithful viewer comes to realize that the trick to perpetuating the poetry of hallowen involves reconciling one's daily reality with the immortal and tragic Lains inside us.
It is a tribute to the insight of Charles Schulz that Linus, the Peanuts character who most holds Halloween sacred, also serves as a cartoon philosopher. A more cynical, less observant artist would attribute a belief in ultra-natural fruit to naf.
But when perplexing circumstances prompt Snoopy and the Gang to holler, What's it all about, Charlie Brown?" humble god of the pumpkin patch, his sinus, the noble pincushion of the pumpkin patch.
When first heard, Linus' speeches sound like simple pleas for faith in the unhopeful. One nearly dismisses him on grounds that there is nothing more to Halloween than candy.
Perhaps the mystery we seek from
Halloween in essence is provided by this inability to shake our childhood expectations. Our reluctance to fully become logical is reminiscent of the truest line in Shakespeare's *Macbeth*.
Many of us will concur with this revelation, I suspect, as we wander through a weekend full of masquerades. Yet the custom may not be so foolish as sad. Only by assuming disguises do we render ourselves mysterious and thereby defeat the common intellectualism that holds that we are "only human."
But disillusionment, like growing old, is inevitable and only temporarily suppressed. In "In Life On the Mississippi," Mark Twain observed that while he gained valuable knowledge as a steamboat pilot, the experience robbed him of something irrecoverable.
"All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river!"
"Since those days," he wrote, "I have pitted doctors from my heart. What does the lovely flush in a beauty's cheek mean to a doctor but who said that ripples above some deadly disease?"
"Does he ever see her beauty at all, or doesn't he skillly view her professionally?"
"And doesn't he sometimes wonder
what he's most lost or last most by
learning his adae?"
Perhaps the test of the first-rate student is the ability to suffer the fewest losses **willingly**.
If so, then it is fitting that Halloween, a celebration of both hope and death, represents for us the chance to measure, and represented by, what sense of mystery we have lost.
Letters to the Editor
To the Editor:
Defeat of ballot-box bill perpetuates injustice
The recent Student Senate struggle over the placement of ballot boxes was a throwback to the civil rights movement of the '60s. Then, it was whites trying to maintain an inequitable distribution of political power that kept the cards stacked in their favor against the blacks.
If Bert Coleman had been a white politician in the time of Martin Luther King, Jr., he would have denounced the Voting Rights Act as "a law that discriminated against whites."
Only about 10 percent of the KU student body is Greek. Yet more than half of the Student Senate members are Greek.
Of course Greeks have organizational advantages in elections, but this alone cannot account for the grass imbalance of Greeks in the Student Senate. More than 65 percent of the
student body does not live in an organized living group. And these students are surely not any less concerned about student government than the rest.
Senate Bill 021 would have limited ballot boxes to proper on-campus locations, thereby equalizing access by all students. This would obviously be the fair way to run an election.
I hope this issue will be brought up again next year. Our student body vice president, though a Greek himself, was quoted in the Kansan as referring to the injustice of the present system. It is people like Bren Abbott who eventually changed voting laws in the South during the 1960s. We may hope that the voice of justice will eventually be heard in the Student Senate also.
Alan Jilka Salina sophomore
We are in the season "when the frost is on"
and That's not all. Frost on the
football is also a threat.
Pot Shots
This year’s Halloween costumes include two new outfits—one in Yankee pinstripes; the other in Dodger blue. Traditional trick-or-treaters I can take in stride, but these double-decker ones, I can’t decide whether a World Series that lasts nigh ‘11 November is a trick or a treat.
In years past, the Series has marked the
beginning of autumn, not the waning. Just the knowledge that, as the first leaves begin to fall, they're thrown out the first ball, is enough to set a tingle in the air. The climax is when the ball should provide a comfortable carry-over for the transitional time from summer to autumn.
But this year the American pastime has run past its time. The extended playoff format and the belated Series have not served as reassuring, familiar touchstones for the winding down of the year, but as disheartening reminders that not even baseball is sacrosanct from the American illusion that more is better.
All of us need epochs—definite beginnings and endings to delineate our lives. Staked time boundaries make room for respite. Like baseball's final flavor has turned bitterly stale, like apple cider that has been left out too long.
Knuckle cracking is horrible, especially in a classroom that echoes worse than the Grand Canyon. It is comparable to scratching one's elbows. The habit of scratching the habit seems to be gaining popularity. I am
It never fails. Just as I am about to fall asleep during another boring lecture the person next to me does not. It not just once, but twice. You see his snuckles in this knuckle as a musician playing a scale.
blessed this semester with the myfortune of having one cracker in most of my classes.
I haven't figured out just what pleasure one gets from this ritual. One veteran cracker, though, told me it relieves tension. I'm inclined to believe that is it the pure thrill of being in a group of friends we can do with our bodies, like popping our cheeks as if they were musical instruments.
Really folks, a little consideration of your classmates would be nice. Between the knuckle crackers and the morons who haven't yet figured out that the hourly chimes on graph watches can be turned off, to listen to a lecture is becoming an impossible task.
Let's see . . . we could crack our elbows and then our knees. And, for the grand final just before the whistle blows, everyone in class could take off his or her shoes and we could have a mass toe cracking. Too bad Mozart would like to learn how to accommodate for the toe with a knuckle accompaniment.
For example, one KU senior, who is male and bears little resemblance to Janet Leigh, says he always makes sure both his shower and bath are well shined, slightly open before he steps into the bath tub.
To anyone who has witnessed the shower-stall stabbing of the pneumatic blonde in Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho," bathrooms are no longer benign.
In case of a stabbing attempt, he wants to have an early warning
Vanessa Herron
without being fully and openly acknowledged as such?
In our contemporary consumer society, most of us have learned to shop around and personally assess all of our major investments. We don't fall for the loudest sale pitch.
Of course, it doesn't help such shower-
phobes to know that Norman Bates was
played by Anthony Perkins, a very nice man
who later hosted "Saturday Night Live."
And it doesn't help to know that the sanguine solution that swirled down Miss Leigh's shower drain was not blood, but Hershey's vrun.
What are the participants like? Do they seem intelligent, balanced, thoughtful and aware? Or is there an underlying mood of desperation, an inability or unwillingness to think things over?
Instead, when millions of people step into their showers and turn on the water—water brisk enough to blind them and loud enough to muffle their screams—"Pswco" is real.
And Norman Bates is left with the same problem that faces Santa Claus: How can he find a way to deliver presents?
Besides, when Norman finally flings back all those shower curtains, he will probably be waist-deep.
We need to be just as careful, intelligent,
diabetic and responsible when embarking on any
practical activity.
Most Americans have lived through the infamous shower scene during every Halloween late show since 1967. So Bates probably won't be greeted by screams, or an emerald, or even surpises, just a simple statement: "Come in, I've been expecting you."
Beware of sales pitch
To the Editor:
Recently on the KU campus I have noticed several religious organizations prolegalizing for KU
Part of the excitement and opportunity for growth at a large university such as KU is the exposure to different ways of living and thinking that such groups provide.
It is a great tragedy when people are sucked into giving up everything they own and forsaking what could have been a lifetime of positive accomplishment so that scheming cult figures can keep themselves supplied with lear jets, expensive cars and mansions.
However, at least some of these groups engage in the most heinous of criminal acts. Unfortunately, the First Amendment shields their rights, and the only controls can be set up and enforced against them.
For those interested in exploring one of the Eastern religions, mind control, hypnosis, meditation, E.S.T., etc., here are a few questions to ask before becoming too deeply involved.:
Are hypnosis or other techniques of changing consciousness being used as part of the religion
Is there an eagerness to sign you up, to get a commitment (a sizable deposit), without respecting your right to think it over at your own discretion?
Is there a heavy emphasis on a rigid, higher or
greater-ground—guru leader or leader-
bear—build into your team?
Is there ample opportunity to question the techniques and theories used, or is there an implicit attitude of "we know what is best for you?"
Does the group seem to require the ongoing participation of people who have already "mastered" the religion, to the extent of having them actively recruit new members? Do these people provide free salesmanship in a way that is obviously time consuming? (If so, ask them why they choose to do this, and watch for repetitive phrases or an irrational zeal.)
Kris Kahnert
Kris Kahnert Lyons senior
To the Editor:
Hey, Gay Services, give us a break! We tolerate your ads in the Kansan. We don'tbarrass you members. We don't even complain in public about you (usually).
But, come on, fellas. Your "fly-by" ad last Saturday at the football game was in poor taste. In fact, we know some folks who wanted to storm your party after reading it.
Aerial ad criticized
Some of us are now thinking of forming a heterosexual club. We'll run newspaper ads, just like you. And we will have dances. And maybe, just maybe, we'll run our own airborne ad:
"Heterosexual dance tonight . . . Anybody interested?"
Al Kuh, Brend Shaffer
Overland Park seniors
Russell Treecree
Marshall, Ma. senior
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