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Opinion
University Daily Kansan, November 30, 1982
No time for haggling
State legislators are predicting a most productive legislative session come January. What their statements imply about past legislative sessions is, at this point, moot, but it is heartening to know that our representatives in Topeka realize that a typical legislative session could spell disaster for Kansas finances.
A few relatively painless moves will probably be made at the beginning of the session. One of those will likely be the acceleration of withholding-tax payments to bring in that revenue on a monthly rather than quarterly basis.
From there, things get increasingly difficult. Some legislators expect reappropriations of funds from non-nivital agencies to be considered early. That may alleviate some emergency needs, but it cannot bring the state into long-term fiscal health. In the end, if the programs affected by reappropriations were worthwhile in the first place, it may only prolong the need for drastic changes in state financial policies.
Some combination of increased taxes and smaller budgets, then, will
become the unavoidable focus of battle for most of the remainder of the session. Proposals should get proper consideration, but legislators should keep in mind that the sooner that is decided, the more time those agencies affected by cuts will have to recoup.
That is a particular concern in regards to higher education. KU and other Regents schools must be willing to make their fair share of cuts. If more cuts must be made, the schools can be expected to do everything possible to adjust to those cuts.
But when funds prohibit replacement of administrators, when work is continually being forced onto fewer and fewer employees, when tuition is allowed to climb while academic and physical conditions deteriorate, legislators may expect fewer faculty and students to find these schools desirable places to work or learn.
Sufficient notice, preferably a good bit more than was given last summer, would at least give the state's universities time to seek additional private funds and to think of ways to deal fairly with employees and students.
Innovative visuals of MTV addictive coping mechanism
Fleetwood Mac, the Clash, Adam and the Ants and Billy Joel are going to help me through finals this semester. No, they're not going to tutor me for my social problems exam. But I am going to gear up for finals by spending a few hours with them via MTV.
One 12-year-old who shares my passion for music television predicted not long ago on national television that MTV's popularity signalized the demise of radio. That, perhaps, is
LISA GUTIERREZ
an overzealous statement. However, MTV is spelling "boom" for promoters, recording artists, cable systems and their lucky coincidences when televised to television since Erwin Kovacs and blackouts.
Almost every well-known popular and rock recording artist can be seen and heard over any of nearly a dozen cable and broadcast television music programs. MTV is the most successful so far. It is a 24-hour cable channel produced by Warner Music Entertainment, a joint venture of Warner Music Group and American Express Co. MTV currently joins revenue from 7 million subscribers.
Video is clearly a successful marketing device. These seven million don't stop at shelling out the bucks for yearly subscriptions. They buy the albums from which many MTV "clips" are taken. Clips are the mainstay of MTV interleaved between interviews with rock stars and artists, where they can as well as a taped session or as complex as mini-movies. Often, musicians act out the words to their songs. Record promoters are finding these clips to be irresistible teasers.
A recent nationwide survey by Billboard magazine indicated that record stores were reporting sales increases of 15 percent to 20 percent in the last quarter, artists in particular garnered increased sales.
The survey helped indicate that, increasingly, video promotion can make the difference between a hit album and a mediocre one. Take, for example, sales of an album by the group Def Leppard on the Mercury label of Polygam Record Records. According to a recent Wall Street study, the music company peaked at 100,000 after its release last year six months later, a video clip from the album began running on MTV. Sales surged. The album has now sold almost 500,000 copies.
Clips may be expensive to produce, costing anywhere from $2,000 to $20,000. A clip may require a script, director, cast, on-location filming and special effects. But the benefits of successful clips can be plentiful. A CBS spokesman told the Journal that its staff on MTV would use the clips in MTV they ask for a record." Others are more direct in attributing their record successes to MTV.
An album by a group called Steel Breeze, RCA Records, sold more than 100,000 copies within four weeks of its release in August. "It didn't get me into this business" is said of MTV," an RCA spokesman says.
MTV is also bringing rock music to small towns where radio is a weaker medium than in larger cities. Record companies depend on radio stations, especially FM, to promote new artists. Consequently, punk and new wave rock are not given substantial airplay in places where there are few radio stations. An entertainment company might be "the only way kids in places like the Dakotas, the Carolinas, Montana and Wyoming are going to be exposed to new rock music."
This exposure through MTV may prompt a few parents to begin screening the television habits of their children, MTV, avant-garde and pornographic videos, and some parents rather tasten video clips. Video clips know that sex sells. MTV and cable television allow record companies to promote their artists in ways that would be accepted on radio or over the airwaves. Various forms of sadomasochism and adultery are subtly, and often more severe, video clips. More such clips are on the way.
For example, an RCA group known as 805 recently finished a video clip of the song "Young Boys." The clip features the 1982 Penthouse magazine Pet of the Year. According to RCA, it shows the "pet" skating scenes with the rock group both in bed and in the back seat of a car.
But to those parents who start patrolling TV sets for fear of exposing little ones to MTV, I say MTV is generally a great way to escape daily pressures. At the same time, MTV viewing actually advanced this country has become. The special effects are often beyond description.
Where else could you see Fleetwood Mac performing in a desert surrounded by hundreds of broken guitars? Where else could you see dream-challenge sequences of Paul McCARTNEY and Stevie Wonder traipsing along the keyboard of a piano?
where else but on MTV. Try it to relieve some of those final wittries. Be warned, however: MTV is addictive. Cramming may become secondary when the Clash is rocking the cashah.
Andropov fluent in U.S. issues
By HARRISON E. SALISBURY New York Times Special Feature
NEW YORK—An argument already has erupted in Washington over the new Soviet leader, Yuri T. Andropov. Some say that he is a brutal "moral" alter; others that he is a brutal hard-liner.
This seems like the wrong argument at a moment when we should be concentrating on analysis of the character, personality and background of the man with whom President Reagan must share responsibility for war and peace in a nuclear world.
The first thing to know about Andropov is that he speaks and reads English. A casual visitor to his country house nearly a decade ago found him talking in English, and the audience of America broadcast — a long-standing habit.
"He's the best-informed man in the world." a Russian said a few months ago, "about your country and ours." As head of the KGB for 15 years, he should be.
Andropov is the first Russian leader since Czar Nicholas II to be comfortable with the English tongue. His interest in the United States antedates Leonid Brezdin's naming him head of the KGB. He is a longtime reader of our news magazines and newspapers. He doesn't have the money to buy books now, but he has many on his shelves — and not just detective stories and fashionable novels.
His conviction that relations with America are the single most important factor in Soviet foreign and military policy impelled him more than 20 years ago to direct his son, Igor, into the newly formed Institute of U.S.A. and Canada Studies. Igor has long been a specialist there, devoting more attention to Canadian than American affairs.
However, Arbatov is expected to continue as chief adviser to party leaders on the United States, although he may share this role with Vadim M. Zagliadin, a policy expert with a wide background in U.S. affairs, particularly in arms and nuclear matters.
Georgi A. Arbatov, founder and director of the institute — probably the best-informed Soviet expert on the United States — has been a close associate of Andropor since the early days of the institute. Since Ronald Arbatov became president, the Andropor-Arbatov link is said to have been strained a bit, probably because Arbatov was much stronger than the intensity of Reagan's anti-Soviet attitudes.
Because of his intimate grasp of American affairs, Andropov is perfectly competent to check the views of Arbatov and Zagladin against the latest issues of leading American newspapers. It is as if Reagan could balance Central Intelligence Agency reports against his personal perusal of Pravda and Izvestia. This does not ensure that Andropov's assessments will be
accurate, but it means he can make a personal contribution to Soviet-American policy that transcends that of any predecessor.
Andropov's lifestyle is simple and by Soviet leadership standards comparatively enegging. His principal residence (this may change now that he has become a general secretary of the Communist Party) has been a villa, 15 or 20 miles outside Moscow's city limits, in a community where many high officials live. While he was KGB chief, there was little visible security, but access was only by excellently policed secondary highways. In Moscow, he has an apartment in the same building in which Breznev lived.
If modest by leadership standards, his country house was not the ordinary Russian's. It was a spacious stone-and-stucco mansion, very well furnished — Oriental rugs on the parquet floor, good paintings including contemporary abstract and non-representational works, a fine television set, a first-class short-wave radio, an audio system and an excellent tape and record collection. Andropov likes gypsy music — a favorite of Russians since the 18th and 19th centuries, and he also has a collection of American classic jazz of the 1930s and '40s.
One of the books in his library is my novel "The Gates of Hell." It was published in 1973 and revolves around two characters: Andropov, in his own name and role as head of the KGB, and a hero somewhat like Aleksandr Solzeniyan, somewhat like Andrei Sakharov. Andropov appears as tough-minded, intelligent, educated; he is interested in, even somewhat sympathetic with others; he performs an ace of his security duties, and he expels the hero from the Soviet Union.
"What are you trying to do Andropov?" asked an old Soviet friend who had read the book.
"What do you mean?"
"Well," he said, "you present him as a human being. You're going to ruin his standing in the parlor."
Apparently, the idea of showing Andropov as something more than the conventional cardboard billain was considered a danger to his political career. The remark had some foundation. Already Andropov had staked out a position opposite in many respects to that of Stalin's old ideologue, Mikhail Suslov, and it would be Suslov's death last February that would propel Andropov's successful drive to the top.
"How did you happen to write that book?" a man close to Andronov asked.
I said I wanted to vividly show how the system limited the extent to which even the most intelligent bureaucrat could change the ground rules of communist politics — a lesson to be kept in mind in evaluating Andropov's personal effect on basic policy, particularly considering the
vested interests of military and party bureau crats.
As KGB chief, Andropov courted the intellegentia. He and his lieutenants, expressing sympathy for creative individuals, insisted that they wanted to separate the "good" from the "bad." One of Russia's leading musicians was regularly invited to Andropov's flat for private recitals; even after the artist came to the support of dissidents, there was no break, but eventually the artist went abroad and stayed abroad.
It was Andropov who devised the tactic of arresting writers and poets, sometimes sending them to psychiatric institutes and labor camps. At the same time, he or his assistants were encouraging other artists to express themselves "any way you want — except for pornography or s.subversion." It was also Andropov who ordered Solzbitsenx expelled.
Andropov was ambassador to Hungary during the 1956 revolution. He is usually blamed for its bloody suppression; in fact, he had warned Moscow of the possibility two months earlier. He was rebuked for sensationalism — until the uprising started. He has, since then, taken credit for the Janos Kadar regime, the most successful, relaxed Eastern European regime.
Some associates have suggested that he would like to apply the Hungarian solution to Poland. The release of Lech Walesa may be his first act toward that end.
His second major political act may be to apply the Solzheniism precedent to Sakharov, exiled by his order to the city of Gorky. His third almost certainly will be a move to end the Afghan situation, possibly by pulling the Soviet armed out and replacing them with "volunteers."
What does this mean to the United States? A dissident now in the United States as a result of Anropov's actions said a few months ago: "You must be very careful. Don't judge his man only as a policeman. He is formidable." It seems clear from what is known about Anropov that the Soviet Union has gained a leader of the United States an opponent who knows American strengths and weaknesses as well as he knows those of his own country.
His conduct cannot be predicted, but he is the kind of man who could move with remarkable swiftness to liquidate weak Soviet positions — in domestic society, in Poland, in Afghanistan, even vis-a-vis China — in order to bring Moscow's diplomatic strength somewhere near its military strength in preparation for global talks.
Harrison E. Salisbury, former Moscow correspondent and associate editor of the New York Times, is author of the forthcoming "A Journey for Our Times."
More choices would encourage more votes
To the Editor:
First, a fist is not an incentive. A tax credit of $50 is an incentive. A $50 fine is a penalty. There is a difference between using a carrot and using a stick.
Though Catherine Behan's Nov. 22 column on election turnouts shows some insight, she is way off base to suggest that the way to cure low voter participation is a $50 fee.
Secondly, high voter turnout is no guarantee of good government. The highest voter turnout in the world is in the communist countries, where it approaches 100 percent. Furthermore, many of the people who don't vote are political illiterates and know little or nothing about the issues in the campaign. 1, for one, don't want these people to vote.
Third, the fact that students vote less than any other group is no reason to suggest that we don't want that privilege very badly. I know that I want it very badly indeed. Students don't vote too strongly because they really usually see are mindless Democrats and Republicans who offer nothing but more of the
status quo. Students are simply too smart to buy their lines.
Encouraging more alternatives to our present party system is a good way to improve voter turnout. It's far better than taxing people $50, which would only make people more antagonistic toward voting and further damage an already bad set of election laws.
There are ways to improve voter turnout, however, that don't involve compelling anybody to do anything. For one, make it easier for third-party candidates to get on the ballot. Most states require expensive petition drives just to get on the ballot. Florida, for example, requires 144,000 valid signatures. then these states require ridiculous percentages of the vote just to stay on the ballot. Another way to improve turnout is to abolish the Federal Election Commission, which subsidizes Democrats and Republicans but no one else.
Finally, the media should cover alternative parties such as the Libertarians, the Citizens Party and, sure, even the Prohibition and Communist parties and should at least report their vote totals when they run. In the most recent election, there were five candidates for governor in Kansas. You would never have to vote for a Republican who insisted on ignoring everyone but Sane Hardage and John Cardboard. Even though the Kansan did a better job than most papers, it was
still heavily biased toward the Demopublicans and failed even to report the final votes of totals.
John Reher
Grand Island, Neb., sophomore
John Reher.
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