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University Daily Kansan
Opinion
Tuesday, Feb. 25, 1986
A newcomer to the University of Kansas, hoping to grab a hamburger or buy a Jayhawk sweatshirt, now has to search the Kansas Union to discover the Hawk's Nest or the KU Bookstore.
And every semester, during the crush of registration, hundreds of students look first for their textbooks in the Oread Bookstore.
The bookstores would also be combined. The Oread would be moved to Level 2, adjacent to the KU Bookstore.
Best of all, the renovation includes plans for a late-night food service. This would satisfy those who have long been frustrated by the unavailability of a sandwich or a cup of coffee on campus after 7 p.m.
All food service would go on Level 3, and the often frustrating food lines would be replaced with a "scramble system," where customers could go straight to the food or drink of their choice.
The Union has suffered from piecemeal attempts over the years to meet students' changing needs. But now a comprehensive vision of what the Union should be is guiding the plans for its renovation.
Although this would be more convenient than the current separation of the bookstores,
planners must be careful to maintain the special atmosphere of the Oread. The quiet retreat offered by the Oread could suffer from too close contact with frenzied textbook shoppers.
The level is now a labyrinth, where only the adept can find some of its hidden offerings. Few know, for example, where to find Alderson Auditorium or the Student Organizations and Activities Center.
The planned renovation would change all that. Walls would be removed and the entrance widened so that the level would be more like a modern shopping center, with all its services clearly visible.
The most ambitious part of the plan is the attempt to open up the main level, Level 4, so that all the services offered on that floor are easy to see and to find.
The Kansas House of Representatives would have us believe otherwise.
To help finance the renovation, the Union's governing board intends to ask for a $5 increase in student fees. This seems a modest request in light of the proposed improvements.
Throughout its 59 years the Union has been the center of activity for students. Any changes must continue and enhance that role, and not sacrifice its special character for the sake of some architectural ideal.
Contradiction in House
A horse is a horse, and gambling is gambling.
The House last week passed a resolution that would put pari-mutuel betting before the voters in November. Just two days earlier, the House voted down a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would have allowed voters to decide whether to establish a state-run lottery.
One possible explanation for this confusing move is offered by the Rev. Richard Taylor, director of Kansans for Life at Its Best! Taylor opposes both forms of gambling in Kansas, but said if he had to choose, he would pick pari-mutuel betting.
"With pari-mutuel you have to go to the track to lose your paycheck or look up the illegal bookie," Taylor said. "But with the lottery, you lose your
Unfortunately, arguments about the social differences between pari-mutuel and the lottery don't hold water.
paycheck at the local grocery store, where everybody has to go."
The real answer to the House's actions lies just a furlong or two down the road in the direction of the nearest racehorse or racing breed operation. The Legislature is acknowledging that parimutuel involves two significant segments of the Kansas economy.
But this concern for Kansas' economy should dictate that the Legislature adopt both resolutions. The lottery and pari-mutuel both would pump much-needed revenue into Kansas' faltering economy.
The Legislature's distinction between the two amounts to hypocrisy. Gambling is gambling, no matter where it takes place.
Problem beyond Tylenol
A New York woman died of cyanide poisoning after taking Tylenol. Another bottle of poisoned capsules was found.
Although Tylenol poisonings and other cases of medication tampering have yet to touch this part of the country, the problem should be of nationwide concern.
Johnson & Johnson has stopped producing capsules. A report yesterday of Panadol capsule tampering turned out to be a false alarm caused by factory damage.
But the hysteria that is sending drugstores and consumers scrambling to inspect their medications may not be
all bad. If all of us are suspicious, the chance of accidentally taking a medication which has been tampered with is reduced.
Johnson & Johnson's decision to discontinue capsule manufacturing was a good one. Although capsules can pack more medicine in, they are easier to tamper with than other medication forms.
But the wise consumer will remain on his toes when dealing with drugstore medications of any kind. The removal of Tylenol from drugstore shelves by no means removes the danger.
News staff
News staff
Michael Totty ... Editor
Lauretta McMillen ... Managing editor
Chris Barber ... Editorial editor
Cindy McCurry ... Campus editor
David Giles ... Sports editor
Brice Waddill ... Photo editor
Susanne Shaw ... General manager, news adviser
Business staff
Brett McCabe ... Business manager
David Nixon ... Retail sales manager
Jim Williamson ... Campus manager
Lori Eckart ... Classified manager
Carolina Innes ... Production manager
Pallen Lee ... National manager
John Oberzan ... Sales and marketing adviser
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Corruption will always be with us
My parents raised their children under a rigid code of respect for the rules and for the representatives of authority. Even though they reserved their greatest esteem for religious authority, they nonetheless would brook no breach of civil authority by their children.
Such an upbringing did not prepare me for my first encounter with a New York City policeman right after I bought my first used car. It was a wreck of an old Volkswagen beetle. I had all the things wrong with it you might expect in the costing $400. Tooling up Riverside Drive in Manhattan on my first Saturday night date, I couldn't believe the siren I heard was intended for me to pull over. I handed over my driver's license to a big, burly cop who could have come out of a recruiting poster for New York's finest, as we called the men in blue in those days.
"Robert," the officer began in a solemn voice as he studied my license, "we have a serious violation here. You have no working tailights. Theoretically, I should not permit you to proceed. Who's the pretty girl in the car, your wife? . . . Girlfriend?" This could be embarrassing if I have to pull you in. You don't want that, do you?
Robert C.
Maynard
Oakland Tribune
I stood stock still in amazement. I
was being shaken down in the very shadow of Riverside Church, one of the great edifices of the town. I fished out $5, about half of all the cash I had. The officer palmed it defyed and gave me a mern warning about getting my taillights repaired.
Ever since, whenever a big urban corruption scandal breaks out in the newspapers, I think with a certain cynicism that no great expose is likely to scratch the surface of big city corruption. I am afraid the corrupt we will have with us always.
I am confirmed in that view after spending several hours with one of the most remarkable books I have ever read on the subject of corruption. It is called "Bribes" by John T. Noonan, who has taken the trouble to trace the bribe through 2,000 years of recorded history.
In ancient times, the bribe was synonymous with the corrupt and the unclean, but it somehow managed to seep its way into virtually every culture. Each society's highest ideals have been thwarted by examples of
people who perverted the system through cash.
Lately, the newspapers of New York, Washington and Chicago, to name just a few, have been filled with stories of officials who violated their trust in one way or another for cash.
In New York and Chicago, it is the cash from parking violation fees that somehow wound up in the pockets of public officials. In Washington, a prominent official pleaded guilty to a kickback scheme.
Even though, as Noan points out, the bribe has been universally condemned throughout time, it is still very much with us. The reason, I suspect, is that we are ambiguous in our feelings about bribery. We abhor it, but not so much that we are prepared to punish it with the severity we reserve for other offenses.
The pimp, the pusher and the murdered are not people with whom decent society readily identifies, so we have less difficulty punishing such offenders to the full extent of the law.
The bribe taker, on the other hand, is all too often someone with whom most decent people in the community can identify to some extent because he tends to be like everyone else.
Furthermore, to a greater degree
than we realize, we are affected by the defense that "everybody does it"
For example, there was a huge scandal at the turn of the century in San Francisco in which virtually the whole board of supervisors was up for sale to the railroads, the telephone company, the trolley lines and just about every other monied interest in the city.
It was a newspaper, the Bulletin, that blew the whistle. When the dust settled, one notorious fixer went to San Quentin. The very newspaper that set off the scandal worked for his release. The reasoning of the editor was that the fixer was really just a victim of a corrupt environment.
Ever since my youth, I have thought about the officer who shoot me down. I have wondered what would have happened and I refused to pay him off. Or, I wonder, what would have happened if I had turned him in? I som show doubt justice in New York woul, I have been improved by my act of rectitude.
The reason I say so is this: I am sure bribery is universally abhorred, but I think we have managed to ingest white collar crime into our cultural corpus whenever it is convenient in our reasoning to do so. That is why we will have corruption with us always.
TV creates an intellectual wasteland
Bill rolls over in his bed, staring groggily at his alarm clock. He instinctively reaches for a cigarette and fumbles for a lighter. It is 7:30 a.m., and before the day is over, Bill will have smoked three packs of cigarettes.
R. J. Reynolds, manufacturer of the cigarette, says there is no causal link between smoking and lung cancer. We know better.
Andria is an alcoholic. She can't go more than a few days without a drink. She often gets drunk. Her college friends can't see a problem; they think she is the life of the party. Andria does not comprehend that alcohol is slowly eating her liver. She says everything is under control. We know better.
Mary sits in front of the television and stares into the screen. "All My
Joe is a miner in West Virginia. Mining is the only thing he has ever known. Like his father and his grandfather, Joe spends his day mining the rich black coal far below the earth. Everything down below is permeated with fine black coal dust. It's in the machines, it's in the rafters and it's in the lungs. The owners of these mines deny black lung's effects. We know better.
Tim Erickson Staff columnist
Children" is on and Sam has just learned he's pregnant. If Mary is typical, she will continue to watch TV well into the night. She may exceed the national average of seven hours of viewing a day.
Mary says she doesn't believe much of what she watches. She says it doesn't affect her. We know better. Don't we? Don't we?
TV is a wasteland, and we have allowed it to inundate our society. It is teaching us things we'd be horrified to learn if we saw them on a printed page. We watch death, horror, chain-saw massacres, adultery, rape and murders in front of our eyes nightly. Many can't, discern the difference between Dan Rather describing a murder and seeing a dozen murders on "Miami Vice."
It is easier for us to cry for Erica than for the human race. We are continually manipulated by screen writers and producers to feel some counterfeit emotion. But when a real
person comes to us for healing, many of us would rather turn his channel.
We can't figure out why we have a 50 percent divorce rate in this country. Maybe it's because marriage looks so easy on TV. All those happy TV couples hold hands and drink wine by the fire.
And when TV does show divorce, it's mostly with black and white clarity. The lines and demarcations of real life divorce are seldom as clear and defined as portrayed by the tube.
If you want to know about divorce, go talk to somebody who has joint custody of a child or two. Go talk to the kids, many of whom are wielded about like swords. Let them tell you about the manipulation and guilt they feel.
We absorb these TV images every day and say it does not affect our behavior or outlook. I can't believe it. Would you drink gasoline? Would you eat dirt? Would you breathe carbon monoxide? We clearly recognize the overt ramifications of feeding our body trash, but feign naive when it comes to what we put in our brains.
TV is the great unifier. It has spanned this nation in a way no other medium ever could. But it has done
so by appealing to the lowest common denominator. There is a term in the TV industry called LOP. It stands for least objectionable programming.
Most network programming fails in line with LOP. TV producers want you to continue watching their station throughout the night. They will feed you mush rather than something that might cause you to switch channels.
And don't fool yourself into thinking that TV serves any higher social good. TV executives are not concerned with morality. What they care about is money. They want ratings and shares and demographics. These things impress advertisers.
ABC's great rise from the cellar was not accomplished by appealing to intellect, but with down-and-dirty T-and-A shows like "Charlie's Angels."
The only thing I can think of worse than TV in general is "MTV" and its equally squail clones.
The best thing I could suggest you do with your TV is to waste it. Sell it, burn it or give it to somebody too far gone to realize the damage it does. The stakes here are high; your mental sanity is on the line.
Well levels reflect game's popularity
The way I figure it, using one of the rating formulas, television sets in more than 41 million homes were tuned to this year's Super Bowl game.
According to another rating service reporting last week, the audience totaled 127 million viewers, give or take a couple of kids who were channel-hopping at the time. That figure amounts to about half the nation's population, making it the largest TV audience in history, despite the lopsided score.
If these statistics don't impress you, you might prefer some approximations made by Jay Lehr of Worthington, Ohio, executive director of the National Water Well Association.
He estimates the water level in many of the nation's 13.5 million wells dropped as much as 11 inches, the length of football, during the halftime break in the game.
Dick West United Press International
United Press International
Talk about complicated! The water well method of judging the relative popularity of TV shows is even more complex than the techniques used by conventional rating systems.
Lehr conceded it was only an educated guess to say that up to 50 million gallons of water were consumed by stay-at-home football fans in just two minutes during halftime.
He also guessed that more well water was used for drinking and flushing during halftime than during the minute of silence observed by a pre-game show.
Only the U.S. Geological Survey maintains a continuous monitor on
many municipal water supplies, he told me. But orthodox rating systems tended to bear out his supposition.
The latter happenstance would be improbable even during the halftime of such an important game as Super Bowl XX between the Chicago Bears and New England Patriots.
Once a month, the spokesman explained, district engineers submit reports, but nothing unusual was
After talking with Lehr, I called the Geological Survey and learned that there are constant fluctuations in the 6,500 surface and underground water sources it monitors.
A spokesman said one day's measurements would be meaningless unless all of the taps were turned on simultaneously.
noted on Super Bowl Sunday.
Lehr agreed it was unlikely the engineers would have noticed anything. He said it would take an awful lot of money to check municipal water tables at a specific time on a specific day.
However, his estimates were close to rating system calculations that about half of the population saw it least part of the game, making it the most-watched sporting event of all time.
You can, of course, draw your own conclusions from these estimates. One of my deductions is that professional football televisioners have camel-like bodily mechanisms that enable them to wait until halftime before going to the bathroom for a drink of water.