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Wednesday, December 8. 1976
University Daily Kansan
Comment
Opinions on this page reflect the view of only the writer.
GOP licks wounds
The Republican party, which many people see as the party of the rich, the special interest and the interstate, has become the permanent center in the United States, it is now being said.
Those saying such horrible things aren't Democrats, but Republicans. They're trying to find out why, when leftist radicalism has all but died—and been replaced by a general favoring of the status quo—they soundly beaten by the Democrats in November.
THIS SOUL searching among the Republicans has split the party into two groups: the moderates, who want to broaden the base of the party, and the conservatives, who want to maintain some kind of "purity" in the nation's conservative party.
"Purity," to the Republican conservatives, means retaining the image of the party as the representative of the rich and the special interests.
To the moderates, broadening the base of the party means trying to include blacks, young people and others who traditionally have been Democrats.
IT WILL be an interesting fight. Those who wish to broaden the Republicans' appeal want to win elections, which is, after all, what political parties are supposed to do.
But those who want a pure ideological party want the party to mean something, to stand for an idea, which is also what political parties are supposed to do.
Just what the Republicans will do can't be answered now, but it should be clearer when the party selects a new chairman to replace him. The vice-president, who is stepping down later this month.
THE CONSERVATIVES will try to get their man elected party chairman, and the moderates will do the same. If neither side prevails, the Republicans may choose a technician," someone who will manage the battle raise money and avoid ideological battle.
Even if neither side wins control of the party, it will present the Democrats with a tough opponent in the next election. They are not going to be saving, they have no place to go up but.
By Carl Young Contributing Writer
Film violence a rip-off
I'm boycotting.
Last week I saw, or was the victim of, the grusome and insulting movie "Carrie!" I was taken aback by the way he hauled the film as a spellbinder, a thriller and a suspenseful horror story. The lead character, they said, was a kid who had been punished undue cruelty at the hands of snobbiish classmates until provoked to unleash her deadly telekinetic powers on an unnatural tactical jokes at a senior prompt.
MY FRIENDS didn't lie. "Carrier" was terrifying. Carrie set the gymnasium on fire, electrified her with a flame, mutilated her physical education teacher and killed the pranksters in a fiery car crash. Even Carrie's mother, a religious fanatic, did her part when she tried to stab Carrie in the back with a strophrum "to give her back to God."
These violent scenes aren't the sole reason why I hated "Carrier" or why I'm boycoting any especially violent film that may come out in the thunderstorms, but don't want to be among the dupes who pay good money, and lots of it, to two hours of blood and gore.
There was no strong plot and no effective characterization or noticeable theme in "Carrie," as in so many of today's violent films. All "Carlie" was, really, horribly bad, and loosely put together in a high school setting. But even the setting was lost, and all I vividly
tributes for "outstanding" special effects, direction or screeplay.
Lately, the film industry has seemed to be obsessed with mass-producing films based on violence, destruction or disaster. Of course, tragedy has its place. Tragedy, something
Mary Ann Daugberty Contributing Writer
remember was the technicolor blood and the screams from the "spellbound" audience.
IT'S HYPOCRITICAL for us to talk about the atrocities that took place in Vietnam or Nazi Germany and then flock, like sparrows after a crust of bread, into homes where they exist. Violence. It's mystifying to know that people bury their eyes in their hands during especially frightening scenes and then are first in line to buy tickets for the next night's disgusting for violent films to be eligible for awards where such violence can be recognized with
everyone experiences at one time or another, elicits emotion and appeals to an audience's sensitivities. It's been at the heart of many good books and movies.
Until recently, filmmakers weren't so graphic in their portrayals of tragic or suspenseful situations. Alfred Hitchcock, the asserted master of film suspense, packed the theaters with "Psycho" and "Citizen Kane," while nature, were violent films, but they had characters, plots and other positive qualities that separated them from exhibitions of brutality. Films
used to draw audiences because superb actors dramatized super stories. Now, audiences go to see superb violence, never before seen. Superstars do the acting or whether acting is being done at all.
FILMMAKERS are businessmen, and if audiences crave violence, they're content to give it to them by the bucketful. They aren't to blame as much as the people who say at the box office that graphic violence is what they want to see on the screen. As long as they can convince backs they will continue to mass-produce stories of mass execution.
Just when it seemed the public would tire of the graphic violence in the many disaster movies that began coming out a few years ago, filmmakers added a new twist. They began producing violent movies with the theme of exploiting the formula worked, and the long lines at the box office remained. It used to be that religion, especially Christianity, deserved benevolent portrays. But now, religion of all types has taken on grusome and sadistic characteristics, as in "The Exorcist," in which a young girl is transformed into a vomiting fiend and in "The Omen," in which a young boy wipes out his family and their acquaintances; "Carrie," more than any other character, the religion. The heroine doesn't finish her rampage until she's "crucified" by her mother, who uses daggers to pin her to the wall.
WHEN I left "Carrie," I looked around at those who had just been through what I'd been through. Ironically, most were jovial. Many were excited, as if they had just come from a ferris wheel ride. On the lobby walls were advertisements for "Two" and "Three." There was about a sniper who opens fire at a football game. I knew many of those who saw "Carrie" would be back.
Not me. I'm boycotting, at least until they do something same like remake "Oklahoma" or Brides for Seven Brothers."
Prayer book vandalized
On one of the highest elevations in Washington stands one of the noblest buildings in the land. It is known formally as the Cathedral Church of St. Peter and St. Paul. It is better known as the National Cathedral, raise the tomb literally, or Suppose the casket were about to be vandalized? What would the general reaction be?
Work began on the cathedral in 1898. Work has continued patiently, sporadically, ever since. The cathedral is as pure an example of Gothic architecture as one can find in America; the building is a work of surpassing beauty, meant to endure for the ruins and arches and buttresses embody tradition, integrity and permanence.
NOW SUPPOSE, to be supposing, that an activist group of impatient modernizers descended upon the National Cathedral. Suppose, to be supposing, that they ripped a wall so thick that there is too little room to park. Suppose they ordered the buttresses, more archaic remnants of the past, destroyed. Suppose they pulled down the intricately carved door in the church, meaning "Suppose they discarded the rose windows, windowsed the choir loft and organ, and covered the floor with a classy lionel pattern. And suppose to give them every possible favor, that they acted throughout the most intentions--that they meant to do good."
renovators, or revisors. would call them vandals. Cries of outrage would come not from Episcopalians only, but from persons of every faith or no of faith in it; it would be a great injustice that a magnificent work of architecture, had become a priceless part of our national heritage, not to be prefetted or modernized and contentioned advocates of the remodeling art.
We would not call them modernizers, or
The Episcopalians aren't about to van-
James J. Kilpatrick
(c) 1976 Washington Star Syndicate, Inc.
dalize the cathedral, but they are seriously bent on vandalism of another sort. In an act of cultural destruction, they appear determined to remodel one of the great works of English literature, the basic Book of Common Prayer. The revisors are the best-intentioned butchers who ever slashed away with jagged cleavers.
THIS WRETCHED undertaking began 12 years ago, when various well-meaning committees spit on their hands and went to work. Certain passages in the Book of Common Prayer, it was said, were "observe." Certain parts of the Bible, like the revisions pointed out, the book had been changed in 1802 and again in 1928, and time change. The idea was to get with it; man, the idea was to be, like you, know relevant.
ripped out the old arches and shattered the rose windows of language. They yanked the poetry apart. They sought out the lines that sang, and they these destroyed absolutely. In place of cadence, they produced clumsiness. Wise women were resentful pattern of 1922 and 1928. This was the work of a wrecking ball, smashing its way to demolition.
It isn't possible, in the brief span of a newspaper column, to provide specific examples of the vandalism that has been done. Let it suffice to say that most of the beautiful, familiar passages have been savagely, recklessly attacked. And let the prose be filled with "sillie book" the proposed alternative, and view the ugly rams for himself.
So they pulled down the buttresses and
BACK IN September, the Episcopal House of Deputies approved these revisions by a lopsided margin. The House of Bishops voted almost unanimously for them. Unless a powerful, irresistible protest can be mounted before the 1979 convention, the Book of Catechism allotted will be janked. Even among those celebrations who earnestly want to preserve its beauty and tradition, its use will be forbidden.
The Book of Common Prayer, like the cathedral, is an organic whole. In seeking to tear it down and to put a jery-built text in its place, the remodelers have done those things that we cannot not have done. If this isn't a 'saint against God, it most surely is a sin against mankind.
Letters
Information in aviation story wrong, company official says
To the Editor:
I would like to clear up a point brought in to "KU pilots say fly it, you like it" (Kansas, Nov. 30, 1976). The article states that Lawrence Optocap rents four airplanes. Lawrence Optocap Inc. doesn't rent or charter planes, nor do we have the services are available from Lawrence Aviation Inc., the operator of Lawrence Municipal Airport. Lawrence
Optocap Inc. is incorporated under the laws of the state of Kansas solely for the benefit of it's members.
In purchasing a membership share in the corporation, each member becomes an owner of the organization. This organizational system allows us to operate our airplanes under Part 91 of the Air Transport Act. Each member pays dues and his or her share of the operating
Another point in the article deserves comment. According to the article, Joff Mefet suggested that flying "inches above Kansas wheat fields" is an exciting experience. Besides being, in my opinion, unsafe, this type of operation is illegal
expenses each month. Membership in Lawrence Optocap Inc. is open to all people interested in aviation by application to the board of directors.
under FAR 91.79a. The vast majority of general aviation pilots are safety conscious people who recognize that general aviation airplanes can provide safe, cost effective transportation and sport flying. General aviation is also the aviation are constantly trying to improve an already excellent safety record.
Doug Carlson, vice president,
Lawrence Optocap Inc.
© 1976 NYT SPECIAL FEATURES
"DAMNED FOOLS!"
Freedom for all unreal
Mr. Carter's advance guard in Washington is saying that the new President and his appointees will "hit the ground running" on inauguration day, when he will announce political customs—one dares not call them a system—such that even now, two years after the man began his campaign, we don't know who most likely to be or in what direction their noses will be pointed.
Breznev and the current group of bosses obviously don't share much in the way of beliefs with us. There'll be no loosening up, no democratisation under them. On the other hand the noises they consistently give off indicate they want to move in order to win over those who are disarmament. Is that the direction Mr. Carter will be running after hitting the ground?
In foreign and military affairs good men are mentioned like Sen. Dick Clark, D- Iowa, and frightful men like Nixon's old Secretary of the Dafenne, a number of Democratic bureaucrats and diplomats of the peace-through death school.
SOME AMERICAN president is going to have to try moving that way soon or it's the big problem. The technologies of warning systems against attack get quicker and more sensitive the chances of collective death by fire, from less failable every year. And
MR. CARTER himself, as in his position do, uses the word peace often and with feeling, but in the past peace has turned out to be a synonym for war. There's no way of holding a debate against whether Carter does have some new ideas or whether he is another John Kennedy. It was Kennedy who talked peace as he trified and played it-tty-bright tricks on Krushevski, the one Russian boss since the revolution in 1945, when the West's most important political values. A great chance was lost.
there are other eventualities.
Like China. How long are these two Communist countries going to remain enemies? What do we do if they reunite? Double the constitution and reintroduce consignation?
We're such an overmoralized nation it's hard for us to handle
knows that linking disarmament to any kind of liberalization in Russia is pointless. When men like Senator Scoop Jackson try, you may be wrong. The inner purpose isn't to prolong the arms race. Guns are the only government expenditures
Nicholas Von Hoffman
(c) 1976 King Features Syndicate
the thought we can have peace but we can't liberate the enslaved part of mankind at the same time. The price of peace is baggage. We are bound by bondage. That shouldn't shock us. It has been basic American policy to keep people in bondage to further our military security. We've been wrong over. We don't say boo when allies in South Korea put Christian missionaries in pots. If we can pay that price to preserve and strengthen our we can pay the same price to do away with the need for them.
"Survival in a nuclear age takes precedence over freedom," writes Arthur MacCox, the ex-CIA and State department man now at the Brookings Institution. ("See his 'The Dynamics of Detention' by John Koehler," W.W. Norton & Co, for a touch of realism on this topic). The clamor over American Jewry has obscured the wisdom of Cox's statement. It is even less in the interest of the United States to link peaceful coexistence with the condition of servitude of Soviet Jews than it was in the case of the Hungarians and the Czechs if they rebelled against their master and then let them be slaughtered off.
TWENTY YEARS ago when the Russians were incomparable weaker than they are now, Elsenhower and Dulles chickened out of comfort with their Freedom Fighters. Everybody rememberes they chose peace over freedom, so everybody
Our penchant for liberating peoples oppressed by their own governments had best be directed toward nations without them, for example, Africa or Brazil could serve nicely. Chile would be an especially good one, not because a South American country
that members of both parties unreservedly approve of, and today neither Democrats nor Republicans believe there is a problem with up without such expenditures. Men of the Jackson stripe see munitions as the only politically feasible, large-scale job program. That's how you make a Kentucky out of a Barry Goldwater.
concentration camp or torture chamber is worse than a Russian one, but because re-education freedom is safer in Santiago.
IF BREHNEVN and the present group of bosses are less liberal on internal questions than was Khrushchev, on arms they've signaled that they want to make a deal, a practical quid pro quo deal, a safe enforceable deal. The question is how long they will come after them? Peace-loving, parliamentary, western-style democrats or guys who think the next war is winnable?
Every administration likes to get started with an early rush betokening new and energetic beginnings. The Carter people give it a military-machismo air of ground running. It might be better if they hit the leather seats of their new chair chairs thinking. They should be thinking about this chance to secure peace for mankind, and peace and freedom for our children. We we take it now or do we try for more and end up with less?
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
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