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University Daily Kansan
Opinion
Thursday, Dec 5, 1985
The poll was one of the first that asked students their opinion of the new policy. The answers, which were published in the AURH newsletter, suggest that at least the 200 students polled find the policy neither fair nor effective.
The former policy allowed students who were old enough to legally drink 3.2 percent beer to do so in their rooms. Apparently, most residents agree it was better than the current total ban on alcohol in University housing.
Beer in residence halls
Not surprisingly, nine out of 10 hall residents surveyed by the Association of University Residence Halls said the policy that prohibited residence hall students from having alcohol in their rooms didn't make sense.
Also, not too suprisingly, 50 percent of those students said they regularly broke the policy by drinking alcoholic beverages in their room.
But many of the students surveyed aren't just snubbing the rules. They also are worried about the dangers of residents drinking away from the halls and then weaving their way home.
Housing officials are rightly concerned about drinking and driving. But the ideas from hall residents appear more creative and less overbearing.
The office of student housing rejected the idea because of possible University liability and because it didn't think the idea would promote responsible drinking.
Although some of the ideas proposed by residents do have their flaws, they show that residents are concerned and willing to take responsibility for their own safety.
One idea broached by AURH was to form an "I'm Driving Club." Members could receive free soft drinks at participating taverns so that they could stay sober enough to drive drinking friends home.
If residents can show that much maturity, housing officials should recognize it and repeal the new policy.
Rocky and the summit
In the latest installment of that less-than-classic movie series, Rocky Balboa vindicates the United States and ends U.S.-Soviet problems with a resounding, apple-pie victory.
The timing of the release of "Rocky IV" is as bad as the movie's title is unoriginal.
What drivel.
Posters for "Rocky IV" show a triumphant Rocky, played by Sylvester Stallone, swathed in an American flag after a fight. His opponent is a big, mean, communist fighting machine.
The release follows the Geneva summit of President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, a "fireside" summit marked by one-on-one discussions between the two leaders.
Reagan and Gorbachev
agreed to start a cultural exchange program involving educators and artists. The agreement will help Americans and Soviets get to know each other better.
It is both ironic and unfortunate that a movie such as "Rocky IV" opens in theaters as hope for better U.S.-Soviet relations and a less tense world hangs in the air.
Indeed, that was the lasting impression of the summit - a picture of two leaders meeting each other and finding that they can at least talk amiably.
And the attitudes prevalent throughout "Rocky IV," attitudes based in fear and ignorance, are what summits and cultural exchanges are designed to change.
Reagan may have learned something. Perhaps Hollywood should, too.
War of the words
A Strategic Defense Initiative by any other name does not smell as sweet to filmmaker George Lucas.
So he raised a stink in federal court to stop two lobbying groups from using the logo of his hit movie "Star Wars" to indicate the space-based defense system proposed by President Reagan.
But last week the judge ruled that the public could not be prevented from giving the term an extraterrestrial meaning. He said the groups could refer to Star Wars in their TV commercials because they were not using it to make a profit.
This doesn't seem fair. It's understandable that Lucas wants "Star Wars" to conjure up thoughts of Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia, not killer satellites.
Would Walt Disney have wanted "Fantasia" to become shorthand for Reagan's promise to eliminate the federal deficit by 1984? Would Tom Wolfe be pleased if "The Right Stuff" were synonymous with Colombian drug deals? Or would Alfred Hitchcock be happy if "Frenzy" referred to the lobbying going on as Congress tries to reform the tax code?
Maybe nothing could or should be done to regulate words and phrases used by the general public. But creators should be able to have some say about how their work is used by organized groups for specific purposes.
Would Rambo ever willingly act as a spokesman for groups calling for a nuclear freeze or U.S. withdrawal from Central America?
Rob Karwath
Editor
John Hanna Michael Totty
Managing editor Editorial editor
Lauretta McMillen
Campus editor
Susanne Shaw
General manager, news adviser
Duncan Calhoun Business manager
Brett McCabe Sue Johnson
Retail sales Campus sale
Megan Burke
National/Co-op sales
John Oberzan
Sales and marketing adviser
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Modern spies dodge outdated image
It is unsetting sometimes the way the images of things change. I suppose it is inevitable in modern times that some of our favorite sentiments should be subjected to the cold shower of realistic reappraisal.
So today is the day to come to grips with reappraisal. The subject is spies. Russian spies. My, how times change. I met my first Russian spy on television in the 1950s.
As I remember the story line, the young blond Russian had been coached for years in American language, customs and mores. At the hour appointed for his infiltration into the United States, he slips over the side of a nodesser fishing boat off the Florida coast.
He is to swim toward shore and mingle with a group of American college students holding a boisterous beach party. All goes well until late in the evening when one of the alien's new friends notices he has a steel cap on one of his front teeth. Here, the director gives the viewer a sense of the discipline and determination of our foe. He has the spy step into the bushes and tear out the offending,
Oakland Tribune
Robert C.
Maynard
Oakland, California
and most un-American, tooth with pliers.
That was the Russian spy of '50s folklore.
The Russian spy, modern-style, is something else again. An ideologue he is not. A determined and disciplined agent of the evil empire he is not.
What he is, by the most recent evidence, is a red-blooded American, sometimes even a far-right "good ol' boy" hard up for money.
Ronald W. Pelton, an employee of the National Security Agency with all the appropriate clearances, went into personal bankruptcy in 1979. Taking a hard look at the shambles of his personal life, Pelton came to a simple conclusion. He needed cash.
In the time it might take the rest of us to say, "Don't leave home without it," Pelton found himself in a warm
chat with an official of the Soviet Embassy.
there afterte, Pelton was taking frequent airplane rides to Vienna. There, he and the Russians continued their warm deliberations for five years. When, by a fluke, Pelton's activities came to light, a senior American intelligence official gave his judgment of the damage.
He called it the "most significant" damage done to our national security by any single spy. Pelton had told all he knew about the most secret of this country's secret agencies. Like the famous Walker family before him, Pelton hardly presented the image of the spy as we have known Russian spies, or thought we did.
To this day, it is unclear why we know about Pelton's activities. It is fair to say our own counterintelligence services were not about to catch him. In five years, Pelton made repeated trips to Vienna, sleeping at times in the residence of the Russian ambassador to Austria. His activities appear to have aroused no suspicions in our government.
Vitaly Yurchenko, the fickle
minded KGB defector turned born again Russian patriot, pointed the finger at Pelton during his brief sojourn as a dinner partner of the CIA bureaucracy.
As more and more spies come out of the woodwork, and we had four disclosures of significant cases in a recent five-day period, one thing about them is obvious and common to most. It is how ordinary they all are.
The woman arrested as a double agent in Ghana was a singer in the choir and a regular in Sunday school. Her neighbors mourned the fall of someone they never doubted was a sincere Christian.
To an even greater extreme, John Walker was a right-winger with Ku Klux Klan connections and a reputation for being a fanatic anti-communist. But his restaurant went broke and he needed the cash, so he sold the Russian our submarine codes, and God only knows what else.
And so it goes on a day of cold reapraisal. A Russian spy is not what we used to think, and it's about time our counterintelligence services adjusted to reality.
Mailbox
South Africa research
That is why I have compiled a file of articles on the subject for the use and scholarship of the KU community. The file is on reserve at Watson Library and is available for two-hour checkout.
South African divestment has stirred a great deal of campus controversy in recent years. So much has been written on the subject that objective research into the topic has become an overwhelming task.
The file is titled "The History of the South Africa Movement at KU." It consists of six large three-ring binders of articles on the general subject of South Africa and divestment.
The articles are not edited to support any particular viewpoint. They are arranged in chronological order, with the most recent articles in volume six and the oldest articles in volume one.
Contributions to the file are welcome from all sources, and all contributions will be included in the file, unless they are duplicates of articles already in the file.
I intend to continue updating the file until I graduate in August. By then I hope someone will have volunteered to update the file in my place. Volunteers may call or write to me; my address is in the phone book.
I encourage those of you who care about this issue to read the file, regardless of your political viewpoint. The KU debate on South African divestment will improve if we all educate ourselves on the facts.
And isn't educated debate what an institution such as KU is all about?
Prairie Village law student
is all about Chris Bunker
Plight of Palestinians
I regret to hear that Mr. Geller (Kansan, Nov. 26) was shocked to notice the plight of the Palestinians. I admit that the treatment of Palestinians by the Israelis is distasteful, even unhuman.
The posters are pictures of the massacres at two Palestinian refugee camps, Sabrie and Shaulla, where more than 2,000 unarmed old men, women and children (all
Perhaps israelis have to create scenes for their own propaganda, but the Palestinians do not have to do such things. They just have the facts.
civilians) were brutally murdered with machine guns and axes and later bulldozed to cover their bodies. No? Does Israel kill innocent Palestinians?
Yes, I admit Jordan is 75 percent Palestinian. But where does Mr. Geller think these Palestinians came from? They came from Palestine when the Zionists declared the state of Israel.
They fled the fear of massacre from Palestine; they weren't living in Jordan before 1948. Mr. Geller should get his facts straight.
I am also very tired of hearing how the Jews made the “desert bloom like a rose.” How long will they use this poor excuse to occupy Palestine? Palestine was known as the “land of milk and honey” long before the Jews came, even more than 4,000 years ago.
The immigrant Jews took over already existing Palestinian farms and named them Jewish settlements. Shall I go back to the native country of my ancestors 200 years ago and insist, "This is MY LAND!"? The Palestinians who were forced out also have ancestors that go back to the time of the Crusades, but they are not Jews, so they have no right to that land.
The reason that more than 45,000 Jews left Arab states was not because of the Arabs but because of the Zionists who wanted to increase the Jewish population in Palestine. Zionists bombed Jewish targets in
Baghdad and other Jewish communities in other Arab cities to persuade them to leave and go to Palestine.
Please spare me the suffering of the Jews of two centuries ago. No group of people in the history of the world had ever escaped suffering for one reason or another, so the Jews are not special in this respect.
Yet one would think that in this day and age we could be more at peace with one another. When I speak of suffering I speak of the Palestinians — people who are suffering now for their human rights.
Those who are informed and educated know these things. Only the uninformed do not.
Beth Mahmoud Council Grove junior
Political pipe dream
If he would have researched the United Nations' charter, he would have realized that that was one of its main goals. But have they been successful in Malta, Beirut, Afghanistan, Vietnam or Korea? No.
Did the U. N. prevent the duv of the Achille Lauro, the TWA hijacking or the Soviet murder of hundreds
After reading Dwight Hunter's column about world government (Dec. 4 Kansan), I realized how naive and idealistic some people are. Calling for a world government is a pipe dream, not a solution to terrorism and tyranny.
aboard the Korean Airlines 747? No.
The U.N. has failed miserably in most of its undertakings dealing with world peace, and so would a world government.
The sovereignty of the United States and the freedom of U.S. citizens cannot be jeopardized by a world government. If we wanted peace our freedom could be easily given to the hands of Soviet world domination.
Like millions of immigrants from all over the world, I know the value of a free nation. I cherish the freedom and opportunity we have in the United States. I'm proud to be an American citizen.
Mark L. Gillen Kansas City, Kan., sophomore
Who needs Far Side?
I have just finished reading Gary Duda's article about The Far Side. He stated that the creator of the cartoon strip was challenging and enjoyable, yet often overstepped his boundaries.
I am glad to see someone finally stepped out and said something about this ridiculous and trivial comic strip.
Now that we have finally made it to college, we find that such a thing as a comic strip can make us think more than a regular class. Who needs this strip? We think enough in our daily lives.
Bring back the old Ziggy cartoons, where everything is openly obvious and always sunshine. Thinking is a bummer and only taxes, if not kills, a few move brain cells that could be used more effectively in guiding our drunken bodies home after a granc night of boozing it up.
Come on, folks, give us people with minds of mush a break. We don't want or need these difficult and trying cartoons in the newspaper. Why not simply remove them and leave space for an abortion clinic to adver tise, or to print yet another story about race and murder?
What do you say we upgrade our standards and try to do something with our lives? It may be a little dif fictit at first without our mommies to hold our hands along the way. The Far Side has, in Milton's words, "a fi audience but fair."
Frederick Dee Haag
Wichita, KS
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