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Wednesday, September 2, 1987 / University Daily Kansan
Opinion
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Two scoops
If we were to play follow the leader, the United States could be headed for trouble.
No one should follow the rules more closely than leaders. Leading is setting an example. But following President Reagan's latest example would not only irk the National Taxpayers Union but also could be unconstitutional.
but also could be unconstitutional.
Over the last seven years, the sides of Reagan's wallet must have ballooned substantially to accommodate his yearly salary of $200,000. But that has not satisfied him.
He has received and accepted $178,000 in California pension payments, over the last seven years. Reagan's example of
He has received and accepted $178,000 in California pension payments over the last seven years. Reagan's example of "double dipping" — simultaneously collecting money from two governments, in this case one federal and one state — once again shows his poor judgment and disregard for playing by the rules of the Constitution.
While the National Taxpayers Union tries to crack down on "double dipping," the president sends a conflicting message to the people. The Taxpayers Union estimates that Reagan is one of 150,000 "double dipers".
Instead of asserting that "double dipping" is constitutional, Reagan should apologize for accepting his pension, taking advantage of the system and setting a bad example.
Then, he should return the $178,000 and stop accepting pension checks until his term ends and he retires, for good.
No secrets
It's good news tainted with bad news
It's good news tainted with bad news. Six airlines have agreed to adjust schedules in an attempt to reduce delays at airports in Chicago, Atlanta, Boston and Dallas-Fort Worth.
That's the good news.
The bad news is that the airline executives and the Transportation Department officials met secretly to reach these agreements.
Department investigators found "deceptive and unrealistic" scheduling practices that violated the Federal Aviation Act, according to a spokesman.
according to a spokesman.
But the agreement does not require the airlines to admit that the schedules were deceptive. Instead of offering the specific results, it obscures them.
Investigations recently have started at four other airports: Newark, La Guardia, San Francisco and Stapleton in Denver.
Newark, La Guardia, San Francisco and Oakland Perhaps the results of those investigations will be open to public scrutiny, as they should be.
No armed doves
The air in Washington is blowing hotter than usual this month as the president, his backers and would-be successors try to build the case for Reagan's peace plan, including renewed aid to the contras.
But all the rhetoric, no matter how it is couched in ambiguity or sugar-coated with cliched slogans about peace and democracy, boils down to this: Reagan wants the Sandistas out.
Contra leaders have proposed that the United States appropriate military aid now but hold the money in escrow until Nicaraguan reforms can be assessed. Reagan administration spokesman Marlin Fitzwater says the President supports this plan, calling it "constructive."
If the contrasts are assured of U.S. military aid in the event that peace efforts fail, the rebels will have no incentive to seek compromise. Why make earnest efforts at negotiation when only chaos and conflict will open the floodgate of money from Washington?
Presidential hopeful Jack Kemp, an advocate of Reagan's policy, considers himself a dove — "a heavily armed dove." But the philosophy of "peace through strength" is riddled with contradictions. Peace cannot be attained when one side benefits from continued fighting.
from continued fighting.
Teddy Roosevelt coined the phrase "speak softly and carry a big stick." President Reagan is using a modified version of this policy.
Speak out of both sides of your mouth. Then use the stick
Editorials in this column are the opinions of the editorial board.
News staff
News Star
Jennifer Benjamin ... Editor
Ball Warren ... Managing editor
John Benner ... News editor
Beth Copeland ... Electronic editor
Sally Streff ... Campus editor
Brian Kabertine ... Sports editor
Dan Rueltimann ... Photo editor
Bill Skelton ... Graphics editor
Tom Eblen ... General manager, news advisor
Business staff
BUSINESS START
Bonnie J. Hardy...Business manager
Robert Hughes...Advertising manager
Kelly Scherer...Retail sales manager
Kurt Messersmith...Campus sales manager
Greg Knipp...Production manager
David Derfelt...National sales manager
Angela Clark...Classified manager
Ron Weimann...Director of marketing
Jeanne Hines...Sales and marketing adviser
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THANKS TO THE
INGENIOUS ADMINISTRATION AT FORT HAYS STATE UNIVERSITY STUDENTS NOW HAVE A PLACE TO GO WHEN CONFRONTED WITH THE QUESTION OF WHETHER TO HAVE SEX OR NOT ...
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Hall residents deserve protection
The University of Kansas is taking measures to educate people about the causes and effects of acquired immune deficiency syndrome by offering a new class, "Educational Conference in AIDS and Other STDs," through the department of education.
or education. Now, I suggest that the University go one step further and provide some form of dispensing condoms in University housing.
condoms in University hospitals. This is not a new idea. Although the Board of Regents has not taken an official stand on the matter, Fort Hays State University has been providing condoms to its housing residents for at least three years.
Jim Long, director of Weist Hall, a men's residence hall at Fort Hays State, said the service was started before AIDS was a familiar term. But now, with the number of AIDS victims in Kansas rising, the service is more necessary than ever.
Through the Fort Hays State health office, the university's residence halls are supplied with condoms that are available to students who ask
for them at the hall's front desk. For those residents who are embarrassed or who would rather not request condoms in person, resident assistants also provide condoms or will go to the desk and get them for residents.
desk and get at them. The system at Fort Hays State is simple and started as a logical service to college students. Long said that Weist Hall had heard few complaints about the service. Those complaints stemmed mostly from religious beliefs, Long said, because the Hays community is primarily Roman Catholic.
front decks of residence halls is the use of condom vending machines. Similar to tampon machines in women's restrooms, the dispensers are discreet.
An alternative to distributing condoms at the
Sixty-eight Kansans have been infected with the AIDS virus since June 1981, with most cases being reported in eastern Kansas, including the Topeka and Kansas City areas. That may not sound like a significant number, but by the time the next report on AIDS is issued, that number can, and most likely will, increase
can, although, remain apathetic on the prevention of AIDS today is inexcessable. As we have heard time and again, AIDS is no longer a problem only for drug users and homosexuals.
A well-defined
Along with education and safe sexual practices,
providing condoms for University housing
residents is a logical and responsible action to be taken.
Jane Zachman is a Russell senior majoring in journalism.
Nazi's cell depicts hollow vengeance
You don't have to be crazy to be a Nazi, but it helps. See the career of Richard Rudolf Hess, whose rise in the National Socialist German Workers' Party was almost as meteoric as his fall, which occurred when he took it into his muddled head to make a separate peace with the British. And I mean a separate peace:
The deputy fuehrer, reich minister without portfolio, member of the Ministerial Council for the Reich and the Secret Cabinet Council, leader of the Nazi party, and second in succession to Hermann Goering, slipped into the cockpit of a flight plane at Augsburg on May 10, 1941. Eight hundred miles later he was parachuting into enemy territory, namely the estate of the Duke of Hamilton, the Lord Steward, near Dungavel in Scotland.
Scotland.
When Winston Churchill was told who had chanced in, he thought his caller was playing a joke (his majesty's chief minister was watching a Marx brothers' movie at the time.) The distinguished visitor brought generous peace terms, for a Nazi, but after he had delivered the three-hour monologue to his interrogator, it became clear that Rudolf Hess didn't represent his government, his Fuehrer, or anyone but his own befuddled self.
Churchill, who had a way of summing things up, decided the flight was a "frantic deed of lunatic benevolence." Herr Hess was taken away quietly and would spend the remaining 46 years of his life under lock and key, until he was reported a suicide in August.
During the prisoner's lucid intervals — when he wasn't blanking out, losing his memory or maybe just pretending to, chatting with his fellow war criminals, attempting suicide, malingering, oroarding other prisoners' socks — he would repeat Nazi propaganda, if you could call that lucid. The experts disagree about his mental state, as experts will, but it didn't require a board-certified psychiatrist to suspect that the deputy fueher was more than a few bricks shy of a full load. If Rudolf Hess was crazy before he entered Spandau, 40 years therein was not the
Throughout those years, he never showed any greater hold on reality than he did on that curious night in 1941. "I am glad not to be responsible for the way in which Hess has been and is being treated," Sir Winston was as long ago as 1950. "He was a medical and not a criminal case."
sort of experience to encourage sanity.
One by one the other Nazi leaders sent to Spandau checked out, dead or alive. After Albert Speer and Baldur von Schirach left at the end of their 20-year terms in 1967, only one guest was left in the 134-cell prison. The occupant of Cell No. 7 was the sole reason for rotating 100-man guard details from France, Great Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States. The search lights and towers, the 15-foot brick wall and barbed-wire fence, the gates and cellblocks, the whole bizarre routine of the 19th-century fortress-prison was maintained for one 93-year-old man, who had been its lone inmate since he was 74. For 20 years, Spandau has been a single-occupancy prison. The debate continues over whether Rudolf Hess was mad, but it would be difficult to argue that the circumstances of his imprisonment weren't.
circumstances of the Nuremberg tribunal, scarcely even The Nuremberg tribunal, scarcely a disinterested body, acquitted Rudolf Hess of crimes against humanity; he had left Germany before the Nazi atrocities reached their vast and, alas, no longer unimaginable scale.
The Allied powers represented on the tribunal gave Rudolf Hess a life sentence for the ex-post-facto crime of "planning (or) waging aggressive war" — while Albert Speer got 20 years. It was Speer who lent the Nazi regime competence and respectability, who should have known better and did, and who would never have done anything so crazy as to go flying off to Scotland to make peace. Or compare Rudolf Hess's treatment with that given to Kurt Waldheim, who, after his real record was finally revealed, was sentenced to the presidency of Austria.
The sight of the co-signatories to the Nazi-Soviet Pact sitting in judgment at Nuremberg on Rudolf Hess for planning aggressive war should of itself have been sufficient to unsettle the soundest mind. Yet few seemed to notice the spectacle, and even fewer spoke out.
In this country, only Robert A. Taft戴ed to tell a shocked audience at Kenyon College that the "Trial of the vanquished by the victors cannot be impartial no matter how it is hedged about with forms of justice" — and was promptly pilored from coast to coast for pointing out the obvious. It was the Soviets, those heroes of the Katyn massacre, who baked when the other Allies suggested releasing the prisoner of Spandau in his last, demented decade — and so were able to make a loony martyr out of an old Nazi.
make a loony martyr that you those who insisted that Rudolf Hess needed to be locked up for a year, and ever would have been closer to the mark if they had cited revenge rather than fear as their reason. But the kind of betment met out to the creature that Hess became was sour 20 years before. As George Orwell wrote in what may be the best essay on the subject ever penned, "Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also." Or it should.
also. Or it should be.
To even link for a few moments on all the years of Hollow Hess at Spandau is to wonder who was mutilated, the captive or his captors, and who should be judged guilty of a crime against humanity. One of the survivors of Auschwitz, or perhaps it was one of the other death camps, remembered that, when liberation came and the SS men cowered in their barracks, the gray mass of skeletons that were the liberated could have burned their tormentors alive, and with some justice. "Instead, we have handed them over to the proper authorities," he said. "That was the difference between them and us." The treatment of Rudolf Hess blurs that line between Them and Us — the line between vengeance and law, rage and mercy, nihilism and civilization.
and mercy, ninthishness. Perhaps in death Rudolf Hess can teach the world something he never could in his tortured, wasted, unrepentant and mercilessly long life; the pointlessness of revenge. As Flannery O'Connor once pointed out, the proper study of freaks has as its aim to notice not how different they are, but how much the rest of us resemble them.
BLOOM COUNTY
by Berke Breathed
.