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Wednesday, November 19, 1986 / University Daily Kansan
Coaches often say their players are "hungry." KU sports fans are positively starved.
Of course, no one expected the football team to cover itself with glory this fall. But lately, the fans have been tempted to cover their faces with paper sacks.
Sports should be fun, and usually at least the winning team has a good time. Not in Jayhawks games. Here, the losers are humiliated and the winners apologize. There's no satisfaction for "Goliath and all his brothers," as Coach Bob Valesente described Oklahoma when they run
While the armies clad in red (from the blood of their opponents, no doubt) from the North and South battle for the championship of the Big Two on Saturday, the Jayhawks will attempt to avoid ending up in sole possession of the Little
Six cellar Missouri's loss to Oklahoma (77-0) was even more horrendous than KU's to Nebraska (70-0), so maybe there's some hope.
The real hope, however, is in the change of seasons. KU fans will drag their battered sports egos tonight to the place where they're sure to get a lift: Allen Field House. Inferiority complexes will be left at the door. The indignities of the gridiron will be forgotten.
Ironically, the basketball team will have a chance to vent our frustrations tonight on a real Big Red. No more piddling around with the likes of Nebraska. Larry Brown and the boys play games of global proportions.
If the game is hoops, we'll confidently tangle with a superpower. Now if we could only negotiate a strategic points limitation agreement for next football season with a Big Red closer to home.
Enlightening prospects
By next fall, things could be looking a little brighter on Jayhawk Boulevard, thanks to some new lights. And it only took the University 17 years to do it.
Last week, an Illinois company, Huxtable and Associates, was awarded a $100,655 contract to install better lighting on campus. It's the consummation of years of work.
The lighting controversy has been going on since 1969, but in 1985, Student Senate allocated $25,000 toward the project. The other $75,655, for the lights, which still must be approved by the state, will come from the University's operating budget and the Board of Regents.
The new fixtures will give off more light, with less glare, and will extend from Lindley Hall to Bailey Hall.
But the question is: What took so long?
Granted, Kansas' bleak economy isn't always conducive to following up on student concerns, but the lighting issue should have been resolved sooner.
If this lighting project goes smoothly, campus leaders may want to consider other sections of campus that are inadequately lighted, and perhaps then the University will take less than 17 years to install lights.
An icy "Blast Furnace"
Better lighting is essential to improving campus safety; an off-talked-about problem that had prompted little action. It's true that crime wouldn't be eliminated even if the University lit up every square foot on campus, but having more lighting will prevent at least some.
It's a project that students have wanted and have demanded for 17 years. Every Student Senate Coalition in recent memory has tacked the lighting proposal onto its platform. But when Jeff Polack and William Easley's Frontier Coalition began working on the project, there seemed to be a light at the end of the tunnel. And this year, David Epstein finished the job. They, and the many others who worked with them, deserve congratulations.
It was doomed from the start. In July, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration secretly shipped 160 troops and six high-performance Black Hawk helicopters to the Bolivian jungle on a search-and-destroy mission against narcotics laboratories. They were to work with the Bolivian army.
Soon after its inception, news of the classified mission Plot Fearnouns
The last of the U.S. soldiers were removed Saturday after failing to crush the people who export $600-million worth of cocaine every year.
- "Operation Blast Furnace was leaked to the press, who flocked to Santa Cruz to catch the action. The furnace then began to cool.
Without the element of surprise, the mission was crippled.
Even without the press leak
the mission faced formidable opposition. The drug traffickers were backed by the people who made their living producing coca leaves. Last month, thousands of residents of Santa Ana Yacuma surrounded U.S. and Bolivian agents and, in no uncertain terms, escorted them out of town.
U. S. officials are now putting up a brave front, saying their efforts have "largely paralyzed" the South American country's drug industry. Twenty cocaine laboratories and 23 dru-shipping sites were seized.
The 92 tons of cocaine produced by Bolivia each year cannot be stemmed by a few helicopters. The U.S. should not give up its efforts to stop drug trafficking, but should continue with more finesse than it used in the Bolivia fiasco.
News staff
Laureta McMillen - Editor
Kady McMaster - Managing editor
Tad Clarke - News editor
David Silverman - Editorial editor
John Hanna - Campus editor
Frank Handel - Sports editor
Jack Kelly - Photo editor
Tom Eblen - General manager, news adviser
Business staff
David Nixon - Business manager
Gregory Kaul - Retail sales manager
Denise Stephens - Campus sales manager
Sally Depew - Classified manager
Lisa Weems - Production manager
Buncary Culturalism - National sales manager
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Jeanne Hines - Sales and marketing adviser
News staff
Opinions
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Barry Goldwater is gone from Capitol Hill now, but the conservative Arizona Republican left an enduring mark on the Senate and the country.
The world changed, not Goldwater
Eliot Brenner UPI Commentary
Goldwater hasn't changed much since he ran for president in 1964 and, because of his conservatism, was soundly trounced by Lyndon Johnson. It was the country that came around to Goldwater, not vice versa.
The plain-spoken chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee is packing up for his move back to Phoenix where he plans to "sit on my hill and shoot the jackrabbits."
Born when Arizona was a territory, Goldwater flew transports in World War II, spent 37 years in military reserve units and 30 years in the Senate. He has flown virtually every plane in the U.S. arsenal. He reorganized the Pentagon, his proudest legislative achievement. He is a naturalist, photographer, author, friend of Indians and a no-nonsense philosopher.
Distributed by King Features Syndicate
The closing days of Congress were full of accolades for Goldwater, slowed a bit by age — he turns 78 on Jan. 1 — but still vigorous enough to shout down a debating opponent. Many of the tributes played on the words of his '64 campaign slogan, "In your heart you know he's right," and upon the title of his book, "Conscience of a Conservative."
Many were moving, and even those from the other end of the political spectrum conceded the effect Goldwater's early and unabashed conservatism has had: paving the way for the entry of conservatism into the mainstream political debate.
"All of us, Democrats as well as Republicans, know how Barry Goldwater stood his ground, and how the world finally came around to him. The choice he gave the nation has echoed across the years, and its reverberations can clearly be heard today in Ronald Reagan's speeches." said Sen. Ted Kennedy. D-Mass.
Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, called Goldwater's departure "the end of an era of independent conservatism," and said, "It is not just his conscience as a conservative that sets Barry Goldwater apart — it is the fact that he lives up to the expectations of his own conscience."
Goldwater never shied away from saying what he thought, once describing the Senate one night in disgust about its dilatory behavior as a "cookie farm," a derogative phrase from his frontier boyhood for a bunch of wimps.
The Miami Herald
belaboring the point. That's a rarity in a chamber where many like the sound of their own voices and want their flowing rhetoric and blow-dried images on television.
And Sen, Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., often at philosophical odds with Goldwater, observed that he "wears his country not on his sleeve but in his heart. And in his heart, Barry Goldwater will always be right. That's a small r.' That's a big heart."
Goldwater's departure takes from the Senate one of its last few classic figures. He leaves the Senate, American politics and the country far richer for his service.
And he sometimes tired of the traditional and tedious niceties of running the Senate.
As one of his final acts in the Senate, Goldwater sent the Congressional Record a one-paragraph statement to insert in the chronical of House and Senate business. It is perhaps fitting that it was inserted as the last statement by a senator before Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole adjourned the 99th Congress.
As he presided over the Senate late one night, a member offered a "unanimous consent" request on a minor matter, making the request of the chair with lots of ceremony, flourish and formality.
His language is salty; not to impress or shock but just because that's the way he is. He keeps his words to a minimum, making his point without
Goldwater took him down a notch, ruling, "It's OK by me," rather than the more traditional "without objection, so ordered."
"After 30 years, I leave this body and I leave with one wish. Five times I have stood at the president of the Senate's desk, my left hand on the Bible, my right hand raised, and sworn to defend and protect the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. My wish is that when my time comes, our leader up above will say, 'Son, you did your best.'"
If you ask those who know him, there's no doubt he did.
It's getting hard to know whom to hate
I'm as capable of working up as good a hate as the next guy. Gnash my teeth, pound the table, shout and swear, rant and rave, the whole satisfying outburst.
Mike Royko
Chicago Tribune
But I've got to have some guidance, a sense of purpose and direction. I've got to know who it is should hate. And like most Americans, I rely on my commander-in-chief to help me direct my hatred.
So for a long time, I've hated Iran. Not every individual Iranian, of course. I don't have that much
But I've had no trouble working myself into a lather at the thought of the Big Mullah himself — the Ayatollah Khomeini — and all the other lesser mullahs who help Khomeini spread mischief.
And why not? President Reagan described the kind of guys they were when he said:
"The American people are not — I repeat, not — going to tolerate intimidation, terror and outright acts of war against this nation and its people by the strangest collection of misfits, loony tunes and squalid criminals since the advent of the Third Reich."
You may remember that speech. The loony tones he was talking about were "a confederation of terrorist states . outlaw states . a new international version of Murder Incorporated."
These outlaw states, he said, included Iran.
which supported and financed various terrorist groups.
And you may remember when he said, "The United States gives terrorists no rewards and no guarantees. We make no concessions. We make no deals."
And you remember when he said, "Those responsible for terrorist acts throughout the world must be taken on by civilized nations . . . the world must unite in taking decisive action against terrorists, against nations that sponsor terrorism and against nations that give terrorists safe haven."
Or when he said, "Terrorists are on notice. We will fight back against your cowardly attacks on American citizens and property."
When he'd said those things, I'd find myself leaping to attention in front of my TV set and yelling, "Hit the mulbull again, harder, harder!" Just like at a football game.
But now I don't know what to think, or worse,
whom I should hate.
As we now know; while we were being encouraged to froth at the lips over the international criminal acts of the Big Mullah, the White House's very own National Security Council director was sneaking into Iran with gifts — including a cake and a couple of Colt pistols.
(I don't know who chose the gifts. From pictures I've seen of the Big Mullah, I suspect the geezer would probably have been more appreciative of some high-potency vitamin pills.)
But that was only the beginning. Before long, we were secretly shipping several planeloads of military hardware for the Big Mullah to use in his
war with Iraq.
Now, let me make this clear: I don't object to shipping weapons to Iran. We are a humanitarian nation, and if we obtained the release of three U.S. hostages simply by providing the means for the Big Mullah to slaughter a few thousand more Iraqi citizens, we can all feel better about ourselves.
Nor has the president gone back on his word when he made a secret deal with the Big Mullah. Remember, what Reagan actually said was, "The United States gives terrorists no rewards and no guarantees."
But he didn't say anything about not giving rewards and guarantees to those who sponsor, finance, encourage and lead terrorists.
My complaint is simply this: To be a well-informed citizenry, we should know who we are supposed to be bating. Even a writer like Orwell knew that.
All he said was that we should take decisive action against them. I guess bribling them with planeloads of weapons could be interpreted as decisive action, so we're OK on that score, too.
So it seems wasteful to keep burning a lot of energy hating the Big Mullah while we're sending him cake and guns.
The least the White House can do is have Larry Speakes or somebody make a forthright statement.
Maybe something like: "On all those outlaw nations — the criminals, loony tunes and misfits, the worst bunch since the Third Reich — uh, delete Iran from the list. It's no longer operative."
Mailbox
Suggestions wanted
Recently, the Student Senate established the University Safety and Security Board. This board has been charged with developing a long-term strategy for addressing safety and security concerns at our University.
Members of this board are examining a variety of programs that could be implemented at KU, including a campus escort service and a campus-wide safety education program.
The board would like to invite the faculty, staff and students to make suggestions on what you think are the most pressing safety and security concerns and what should be done to alleviate them. Please bring your comments to the University Safety and Security Board in the Student Senate office in the Burge Union.
Martie Aaron
Chairman,
University Safety and
Security Board
THE GREAT COMMUNICATOR
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