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Monday, October 13, 1986 / University Daily Kansan
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Registration deadline
There is no excuse for not registering to vote, and tomorrow is the last day to do so.
In order to vote in the Nov. 4 general election, voters must be registered by tomorrow, and several places around town will be open late to give everyone a chance to add their names to the Douglas County voter rolls.
The Douglas County Courthouse, 1100 Massachusetts St., will be open from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. today and tomorrow. The Douglas County Democratic Headquarters, in Holiday Plaza, 2449 Iowa St., will be open for voter registration from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. today and tomorrow. And the Republican Headquarters, in the Malls Shopping Center, 711 W. 23rd St., will be open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. today and tomorrow.
To be eligible to vote, a person must be a citizen of the United States, at least 18 years of age by Nov. 4 and a resident of the voting precinct for at least 20 days before the election
It is the last requirement that should interest students the most. Students, especially.
should take advantage of the chance to register in Douglas County, whether or not Lawrence is their hometown.
The average student spends at least three-fourths of the year here, and the candidates and issues that affect student lives should be influenced by student votes.
Students should feel strongly about many of the issues in this year's race: drug testing, liquor by the drink, the lottery and pari-mutuel betting, to name just a few. But students who are not registered here will not be able to have an effect on how those issues are decided in Douglas County.
A step toward peace
Students registered elsewhere, especially out-of-state students, should strongly consider changing their registration. It's simple — they must register using their KU address and then fill out a postcard to cancel any previous registration.
Students who don't vote — or don't vote here — will have no ground on which to stand and no basis for complaint or comment when the election is over.
Pope John Paul II has declared Oct. 27 as "World Truce Day." On this day, the pope asks that all warring countries and all terrorist groups stop fighting for 24 hours and consider why they use violence to achieve their goals.
One-day truces have worked before, most notably on Christmas Eves during the world wars. A one-day ceasefire will not stop a war. But even if it stops the killing for that short time, it is miraculous.
Without the worry of having to dodge bullets, some fighting groups might have time to begin considering peace talks. And even if military leaders don't acquiesce, civilian groups still will have a chance to protest for peace.
Opinions
rhetoric of the cause.
Unfortunately, the proclamations of the leader of the Roman Catholic church aren't going to carry much weight with those who need to consider peace the most. For Muslim and other sects engaged in a jihad, their fight is for their God. Even fighting Christian groups will be reluctant to listen to anyone without a couple of M-16s backing up his decree. The response from many will be, "You gonna make us? You and what army?" And the bombs go off, and the death toll mounts.
"World Peace Day" is a good idea, and it is hoped that some groups will listen and put down their guns and rockets for one day. But more than temporary truces are needed to stop senseless killing. Perhaps the pope and other religious groups should take a step further toward peace by actively negotiating with warring factions for peace conferences, cease-fires, peace treaties, peace.
Melting pot is a plus
But the remarks were anything but harmless, and any criticism he's received is well deserved.
Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone has been catching a lot of heat lately for some remarks he undoubtedly thought were relatively harmless when he made them.
On Sept. 22, Nakasone was quoted as saying that "blacks, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans" were holding back academic progress in the United States.
After the remarks caught the attention of the Western press and the disdain of some Japanese groups, Nakasone's spokesmen said that the prime minister's comments were taken out of context or that they were mistranslated.
They finally explained that the prime minister had merely been pointing to why he thought Japan excelled in academics, and that Nakasone was crediting Japan's ethnic unity for some of the success.
But ethnic diversity should not be seen as a detrimental factor - ever.
Some of history's most frightening characters have expressed a similar dedication to the strength of a one-race society. Nakasone probably does not belong in that class of tyrants, but world leaders must be held responsible for the comments they make, and the Japanese prime minister would do well to watch his words more closely in the future.
News staff
Lauretta McMillen  Editor
Kady McMaster  Managing editor
Ted Clarke  News editor
David Silverman  Editorial editor
Johanna  Campus editor
Frank Hannel  Sports editor
Jack Kelly  Phily editor
Tom Eblen  General manager, news adviser
David Nixon ... Business manager
Gregory Kaul ... Retail sales manager
Denise Stephens ... Campus sales manager
Sally Depew ... Chessified
Lisa Werner ... Production manager
Duncan Calhoun ... National sales manager
Beverly Kastens ... Traffic manager
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This is the week when millions of Americans must make a tough decision. Which baseball team do we cheer for?
Boston is common enough to root for
It's easy for the fans in the cities that made the playoffs. But for the rest of us, the choice is between being a passive bystander, which is un-American, or finding some artificial reason to cheer for a group of young millionaires who don't want their urine analyzed.
Mike Royko
Chicago
Tribune
Most fans pick a team because they like this or that ball player or because of an allegiance to a league or a region of the country.
But my system is more complex. It's based on whether a city and its fans are deserving of the privileges that accompany a championship — setting cars afire, assaulting women, getting drunk and falling out of trees
So let's examine the four cities that are represented in the playoffs.
On the other hand, when high gas prices helped make Houston a boom town while your city was depressed, did you get a get-well card from anybody wearing a string tie and boots?
Besides, the team wears silly-looking uniforms and play in one of the ugliest architectural creations in the history of mankind. A ballpark shouldn't look like a Hyatt hotel lobby.
Unfortunately, the Astros are playing the New York Mets, whose fans
If the Mets won a World Series, I suppose that watching their fans could be entertaining. Would they put their shoulders to the Empire State Building and tip it over?
When the Mets won their division title, the fans ate the field. If the players hadn't fled, the fans would have chewed them up, too.
don't deserve anything more than mass arrest.
Ah, yes, the California Angels. The choices become bleaker and bleaker.
What does that leave us?
Consider: We have a team from Texas, home of the nation's biggest blowhards. And a team from New York, home of the nation's loudest complainers.
Why can't we have a team from sane, unobtrusive places like Iowa or Rhode Island?
Having been reared in the Old Country, my grandmother didn't know that a real cowboy was supposed to shoot villains — not pluck a guitar and quiver his adnoids at them.
When I was a little kid, my grandmother to use drag me to the movie theater to watch Gene Autry, her favorite movie star.
I have to admit to a special prejudice against the Angels.
Gene Autry was probably the worst cowboy in film history. Compared to him, the Cisco Kid was another Laurence Olivier.
The one thing that can be said in behalf of a California championship is that the fans would not tear up the outfield grass. They'd smoke it.
Somehow, Autry made a living at it. A living? He made millions and ended up owning a baseball franchise, the ultimate status symbol of people who become rich by peddling hamburgers, gum, tax shelters or threatening Black Bart with his guitar.
NXN∏VWGcaapsthme
That leaves us with Boston.
When Harvard celebrated an anniversary this year, it invited a polo player from the British royal family to be its principal speaker. But a few years ago, it invited John Wayne to the campus just to laugh at him. The wimps.
But there's more to the real Boston than Harvard. In many ways, it is a truly representative American city. Remember how violent it got over school busing?
There's one good reason to dislike Boston. That reason is Harvard.
And it has an old-fashioned ball park with a grand tradition. I still remember when the great Ted Williams sent a message to the fans by extending his middle finger.
So my choice in the playoffs has to be Boston. Sure, it has an embarrassing number of rich, in-bred families that trace their roots to the Mayflower. But it also has its share of fine, second generation, political thieves.
Distributed by King Features Syndicate
Harvard should have made him a professor of philosophy.
△SPACE SHUTTLE EXPLODES
Δ TITΔN ROCKET EXPLODES
ANUCLIFAR SUB EXPLODES
ANET FIGHTER EXPLODES
ANCIENT REACTOR EXPLOSES
"The world has achieved brilliance without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants."
- Omar Bradlev
Nicaragua: sanctuary of a Soviet deity
Over the summer, Nicaragua president Daniel Ortega descended upon the United States to make his case against aid to the contra forces who are fighting to prevent Nicaragua from being completely
Michael E. Chapman
The American left has built a new altar at which they now pray. It is devoted to the "little dictator in green fatigues and designer glasses" and the construction of totalitarianism in Nicaragua.
Columnist
absorbed into the Soviet empire. In New York, "radical chic" holdovers from the 1960s held a dinner in his honor; Ortega's divine plans for Nicaragua were offered great praise, while the United States received a verbal flogging.
During the past month, four veterans have been demonstrating their willingness to starve themselves into martyrdom on the steps of the U.S. Capitol in opposition to U.S. policy in the region.
And at KU, we have an organization that regularly offers sacrificial rice and beans as a means to protest the Reagan administration's attempts to prevent the spread of communism in Central America.
These types of demonstrations are not uncommon in recent American history. Throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1770s, leftists in the U.S. paid ritual homage to the "revolutionary achievements" allegedly taking place in Fidel Castro's Cuba.
but the recent publication of Armando Valladeres' "Against All Hope" provided us with the facts about Moscow's Cuban pupet. With Soviet assistance, Castro built his own Caribbean gag for those who possessed the slightest desire to oppose him.
What precisely do Sandinista followers in the U.S. think these folks
How does this have any bearing on the situation in Nicaragua? It so happens that Ortega, in typical totalitarian fashion, has received the assistance of several thousand Cuban "advisers." Arrangements have also been made for the Sandinistas to obtain help from the East Germans, Bulgarians, Libyans, Palestinians, and, of course, Russians.
are doing in Nicaragua? Picking bananas and sugar cane?
Hardly. Due to the failed economic policies of the Marxists in Managua, I doubt there is a great deal of harvesting taking place.
These "advisers" are helping to establish a political and economic system based on the Cuban model, where massive Soviet subsidies and a network of internal spies keep the regime in power.
When the Sandistas siezed power in 1979, they inherited one political prison from the Somoza regime. Since then, Danny Ortega and his thugs have deemed it necessary to construct nine more. Various human rights organizations have reported that torture, rapes, deprivation of food, and mock executions have taken place in these prisons.
"La Prensa," a newspaper that played an important role in the overthrow of the Somoza regime, was considered too subversive and recently shut down.
Does anyone seriously believe the Nicaraguan people wanted to purge themselves of a right-wing dictator only to have imposed upon them a left-wing oligarchy which dances to the tune of Havana?
One hears reports of Americans who make pilgrimages to Nicaragua and are led around by their noses to see this or that "achievement." They then return to their Yankee homeland and regurgitate whatever it was the Sandinistas had fed them.
The American left screams that, by our support of the contra, we are headed for "another Vietnam." They demand that we keep our "hands off Central America." Ironically, these are the same forces who insist on our intervention in South African and Chilean affairs to force changes that are, admittedly, much needed.
Then there are the charges of human rights abuses on the part of the contras. No one has denied that isolated incidents have taken place. But does this mean the U.S. should cut off all aid to the 20,000 contras because several of their ranks have dropped to the level of those they are trying to overthrow? Certainly not.
Even with the help the contras will receive from the U.S., they have a considerable task ahead of them. The Sandistas have amassed a huge stockpile of Soviet weaponry and Marxists are not in the business of putting their dictatorships up for an honest popular vote.
Mailbox
Existential parking
Apparently John C. Epperson got his bowels in an uprair the other day when he read my suggestion in the Oct 1. Kansan that faculty parking problems would be eased if faculty were given assigned parking spaces from which all others would be towed. As always, I'm happy to have provided a target upon which the pent-up rage of the graduate student underclass could be vented nonviolently. In fact, I think his suggestion that Memorial Stadium be converted to a parking garage deserves further investigation.
But, while we await development of the stadium, I suggest that interim solutions to the parking problem should be considered. My own was an example — and not a very outandish one if we consider the practices of other institutions.
The difficulty, contra Epperson, is not in deciding whether human existence is preceded by the essence of parking, but in the fact that my classes are preceded by the nonexistence of parking spaces. Again, 1
ask no one to waste time pondering the truth of Epperson's Dietum: "I park, therefore I am." I only hope one day to say "I park, therefore I am on time."
Donald Brownstein Associate professor, philosophy
Pornographic retort
Gil Chavez missed the point of the Meese Commission on pornography in his article "Porno stakeout has violent reward," that appeared in the Oct. 7 issue of the Kansan.
Chavez referred to pornography that is described as being "soft core." The commission did report on this type of porn, but it was mainly the so-called "hard core" porn that the commission cited as being harmful to its readers. This type of pornography probably would be offensive to most KU students because it is both sexually explicit and it depicts violence.
The commission studied pornography, not violent magazines and
Chavez also stated that the commission "objected to sex, but not violence." Come on, do you really believe that?
Stephen Gantz
Stephen Gantz
Downers Grove, Ill., senior
An objective response
film. It is probable that if a similar commission studied violence as depicted in such media, that its conclusion would have been that violent literature also is the cause of some violence.
It is true that we live in a violent country. The commission offered a report that has answers to why some crime occurs, yet Chavez scoffs at this report. If you had looked at the report, or used some reason, you would have seen the commission's objectives before writing about them.
The column "'Liberal bias' is lesson in objectivity' demands a reply. In it, Christian Colbert said, "Conservatives don't understand the media's primary role: to be a watchdog of the U.S. government, not the
Soviet government." I submit that the primary role of the media should be to accurately report the news.
In describing the positive role the media has played in the past, Colbert said, "In these cases, the media informed Americans of the truth so we could make intelligent moral evaluations." If reporting the news means exposing corruption in our government or oppressive U.S.-supported regimes, fine. But if similar policies of the Soviet Union are overlooked or downplayed, the media has failed in its responsibility to inform Americans of the truth. We get enough half-truths from Soviet propagandists. If the American news media won't tell us the other side, then we will be basing our "moral evaluations" on inaccurate data.
Will Rogers once said that the United States gets along pretty well in spite of what politicians do. Unfortunately, if we substitute the news media for politicians the same may not be true.
Ronald R. Lofgren Lawrence graduate student