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Wednesday, November 29, 1989 / University Daily Kansan
Opinion
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
El Salvador needs support when standing up to rebels
The conservatives in Congress can now say, "I told you so." The recent crash of a plane loaded with Soviet weapons, the discovery of explosives and 80,000 rounds of ammunition and yesterday's murder of right wing politician Francisco Jose Guerrero by leftist rebels reaffirms the fact that political infiltration of El Salvador remains high on the wish list of a number of leftist world leaders. Soviet arms are finding their way to the rebels, perhaps through Nicaragua, and political influence is the goal of the suppliers.
More than 1,000 people have died since guerrillas of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front began an offensive on Nov. 11. The government has been unsuccessful in its attempt to defeat the guerrillas despite the $3.5 billion dollars in aid mustered by conservatives in the U.S. Congress. These recent developments should silence at least some of the criticism from liberals in Congress who have claimed that domination of Central America is no longer on the communist agenda. The rebels in El Salvador are receiving outside support, possibly from Cuba, probably from Nicaragua and at least indirectly from the Soviet Union.
Now that communism is failing worldwide, and leftist leaders in Eastern Europe are being pressured into resignation, a country in our own back yard is in danger of falling because of the complacency of U.S. lawmakers. It should now be obvious that the leftist threat in Central America has international backing. The last few hard-line communist leaders, namely Fidel Castro and Daniel Ortega, are intent on exporting their form of government. If it were simply a local insurrection, a little U.S. aid would have ended the war years ago.
ago U.S. lawmakers should re-evaluate the U.S. role in Central America and be consistent. The government of El Savador shouldn't have to face the Soviet-supplied leftist rebels alone.
Stan Diel for the editorial board
Basketball team deserves AP ranking, fan support
Everyone believed it, except for those who mattered.
Sports announcers, sports writers and even avid KU fans doubted that the 1989-90 Kansas Jayhawk basketball team could beat the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, the No. 1 ranked team in the country, and Louisiana State University, the second-ranked team. The Jayhawks didn't listen, and they won the Dodge National Invitational Tournament during Thanksgiving break.
The lack of enthusiasm on can be attributed to the fact that the Jayhawks weren't ranked in the AP's preseason poll. Attendance has been less than impressive at the preseason games. Had the team been ranked, attendance probably would have been better.
As loyal fans, we should not quit going to games when the outlook for victory seems dim. We need to support the basketball team and ignore the pessimism of sports authorities across the country. It shouldn't take an incentive, such as a ranking in the AP's poll, to get basketball fans to the games. But if an incentive is necessary, the Jayhawks have given it to us.
The Jayhawks have vaulted into the No. 4 spot in this week's AP rankings. Only Syracuse, Arizona and Georgetown are ranked higher than KU.
Even more promising is the report in yesterday's Kansas City Times that "Kansas was No. 1 on 16 ballots, more than any other team except for Syracuse." So why aren't we No. 2?
Well, it looks like sports authorities across the country are starting to accept the fact that KU is good. We are back, better than ever. We're entering this season with the momentum it takes to be No. 1. Let's give our team the support they deserve
The Jayhawks will play Idaho at 7:35 p.m. Thursday in Allen Field House.
Kathy Walsh for the editorial board
Members of the editorial board are David Stewart, Stan Diei, Brett Brenner, Ric Brack, Daniel Nieml, Craig Welch, Kathy Walsh, Thom Clark, Tiffany Harness and Scott Patty.
News staff
David Stewart ... Editor
Ric Brack ... Managing editor
Daniel Niemann ... News editor
Candy Niemann ... Planning editor
Daniel Dion ... Editorial editor
Jennifer Corser ... Campus editor
Elaine Sung ... Sports editor
Leura Husar ... Photo editor
Kristine Winnier ... Artist/Fan fiction
Tom Eblen ... General manager, news advisor
Business staff
Linda Prokop ...Business manager
Debra Martin ...Local advertising sales director
Jerre Medford ...National/regional sales director
Jill Lowe ...Marketing director
Tami Rank ...Production manager
Carrie Slatinik ...Assistant production manager
Margaret Townsend ...Co-op manager
Elwidge Wright ...Credit manager
Christi Dool ...Classified manager
Jeff Meesey ...Teenagers manager
Jennée Hines ...Sales and marketing adviser
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Stalinosaurus
Beware of Lawrence's chilly perils
The holidays mark the onset of winter weather around here, and this is a good time to provide the following public service piece concerning winter travel in Lawrence. This is a university town with many residents who have come from states or countries where snow and ice storms happen rarely or not at all. Although the first heavy snowfall makes driving troublesome for Lawrence natives, its effect upon those from warmer climates is so appalling as to bring about a kind of drastic "natural selection" that winnow out the unrenewed and unlikely.
A former housemate, or "communard" in the parlance of the times, from Texas exemplified this years ago, when she gave me a ride to campus during an evening snow storm. The trip, normally a 10-minute trek even in good weather, lasted 45 harrowing minutes. She drove a Volkswagen Beetle, which unfortunately provided superb driving traction and the temporary illusion of conventional road conditions. Her conventional drying technique, which I have since observed in countless other Texas natives, was to accelerate steadily under full throttle until the vehicle reached its maximum velocity. This helped clear off any impedesments to her progress, such as other vehicles, pedestrians and the few stop signs or lights she acknowledged, might necessitate her other techniques of pressing the brake hard with both feet, or rapidly evolving the steering wheel, or both at once.
So that evening she sped down Kentucky and Ninth and Iowa and 19th and then Kentucky again and again, doing the usual 10 miles per hour over the posted speed limit in six inches of snow. At the first corner she attempted, she stomped on the brakes as usual and spun the steering wheel. This had no effect on our speed or direction, so at the next corner she eschewed the brakes altogether, with the same acceleration for most of the trip contained in her slower laps around campus until she could finally negotiate turns by sliding broadside into them and caroming off the curbs. I begged to be let out, this was close enough, thanks, but she wouldn't stop or even slow down enough for me to safety helpump.
Another driving episode showed me that this determination came not from bulldressedness but
Stuart
Beals
Staff columnist
from her cheerful Texan "can-do" outlook on everything she attempted with a car. A couple of years later she returned from a summer job in New England with a passenger hitchhiking to school at Kansas State University. One morning she bounced into the house with a "Hi, yi'all!" and a deep, blood-caked gash on her knee. Behind her came the rider, a young man who was ashen, staring vacantly and clearly in shock but otherwise unhurt. Outside sat the hulk that had been her graduation present, a new powder-blue Toyota. All of its sheet metal wasashed in the window glass was missing and the top of the car was crushed down to a few inches above the door all.
From the passenger we heard that she had been driving on I-70 when she was confronted with smooth, straight, clearly marked pavement devoid of other vehicles. She responded by flipping the car end over end, landing upright and still proceeding westerly. This she continued to do, lurching along for hundreds of miles, hunched down with the oncoming wind whipping window fragments around the car interior.
But, we digress. Normal care will avail drivers on snow until they try to go down one of the streets leading east from Oread Avenue. Police put barricades at the top and bottom of the hill, but some drivers inevitably believe that it is possible to crawl down with the steady application of brakes. They are always mistaken. Once the tires lose their grip, only light poles or trees can prevent them from being damaged out into traffic on Tennessee Street. Under the circumstances, most drivers voluntarily release the brakes to voluntarily seek the trees' embrace high up the hill.
Thus do the unwary or impetuous abandon their vehicles in a near-vertical limbo, to await the thaw and the tow truck. At times, though, the forsaken cars get loose again to amble driverless through
the student ghetto. I once was distracted from a televised Kansas-Kansas State basketball game by the spectacle of a car spinning clockwise down 13th Street in pursuit of its former driver. He scrambled and fell but could not get out of the street. Going by, he emitted that pathetic plaintive cry that may be termed the "Mount Oread yodel."
If you can't drive, then what to do? Go traying, of course. For the uninitiated among you, this is a form of recreation involving purloined cafeteria trays upon which one slides down any of the precipitous slopes for which campus has come to be called The Hill. The favorite site is the steep bowl surrounding Potter Lake. With its north exposure and bitter channelled winds the area remains snow-covered longer than most other sites and soon becomes virtually glazed ice.
Other voices
Although trays are the most common vehicle, car hoods, inner tubes, even one's feet will do on the essentially flawless hard surface. Once a party commits itself to gravity, the event becomes virtually a free fall, and simple ballistics determine the outcome. Other siliers, haplers spectators or ducks are all swept away before the onslaught. Unless one of the larger and more durable trees on the slope happens to coincide with the trajectory, the participants converge upon the lake, shooting off its bank two or three feet above its imaged, implacable ice.
This is dangerous. A few years ago a young man was paralyzed by injuries he sustained while traying. His family sued the University and the State of Kansas, holding that the University was responsible for preventing people from understanding such dangerous stunts on its premises. The court ruled in favor of the University, after finding that the campus hills, where students were parked very real and nearly deadly do. The court held that the plaintiff, and presumably all who would imitate his activity, should be able to perceive the danger inherent in screening out of control down these hills.
so, uns winter, if you must drive in the snow, beware of drivers from warmer climates, as well as their cars, which may or may not accompany them, and by all means tray with care, if at all. □ Stuart Beals is a Lawrence graduate student in journalism.
The Observer, La Grande, Ore., on Aquino-Marcos;
accompanying the dictator in an unassuming manner in Philippine soil would help end the matter for Marcos' loyalists. They would come to
That does not mean that a lavish funeral should accompany the body's arrival.
military President Corazon Aquino should listen to the demands of thousands of her countrymen and allow the remains of former President Ferdinand Marcos to be buried there soon.
About 25,000 Marcos supporters rallied .. to protest Aquino's refusal to allow the ex-leader to be buried in his homeland. Several thousand more amassed .. to denounce Aquino.
But denying Marces' burial will only continue to inflame the opposition. Allowing the burial in the Philippines would be viewed as a compassionate act
understand that their leader has passed on and that it is necessary to build for the future.
In the end, Aquino may gain more support by allowing the burial than by continuing to resist the pleas of so many of her countrymen.
The News-Sentinel, Fort Wayne, Ind., on Quave:
Have you heard the joke about Dan Quayle?
Of course you have. Whatever the joke is, you've probably heard it. The production of Dan Quayle becomes a cottage industry in this country.
There have always been ways for the progressive, sophisticated individuals among us to send out little signals and let each other know they were members of the same elite.
That signal today is the Dana Quayle joke. Say something hysterically insulting about the vice
intelligence*.
This is not to suggest that to denigrate the officeholder is to show disrespect for the office. The vice president, after all, was described by John Adams as "the most insignificant office that the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived." John Nance Garner said the office wasn't "worth a bucket of warm spit."
president, and you're automatically accepted as a member in good standing of the politically aware intelligentsia.
nor as it to suggest that we shouldn't sometimes display a bit of irreverence toward politicians in general or Vice President Quayle in particular.
But now that President Bush has said Quayle will stay on the ticket in 1982, it is time to start judging the vice president by his performance in office, what he actually does and how he matures and how he serves the president, rather than how many laughs his name generates.
CAMP UHNEELY
BUDIG CALLS FOR DISMISSAL
FOR DISMISS
USE WILFORD BRANLEY? SNS
"I ALSO LIKE
BUDG. I WOULDN'T BE THERE
MICHAEL LANDON. THAT
SULTED
MICHAEL
CARTOONIST INSULTED
Too Many
BOTH TOO MANY
THEM BOTH TOO MANY TIMES. THEN WHEN HER COMPARED JUDITH RANAL TO ALICE OF THE BRADY BUNCH, IT HAD MAD FACE.
BY SCOTT PATTY
"I HAD TO PRINT THE STUFF,
SMS EDITOR," I KNEW IT WAS
LIEBLUE; THAT WEED END UP
GETTN' SUED, BUT WE HAD
TO USE IT TO FILL THE
SPACE."
EDITOR SAYS CARTOONIST
MEANWHILE, THE DEPENDANT
STRUGGLES FRANTICALLY FOR
SUPPORTERS.
GEE, I
DON'T READ
THE CARTOON.
I JUST READ
WELL, WILL
YOU TERTIFY
FOR ME
ANYWAY?
THE
PERSONALS
HELP
SUPPORT
AMAZING
UNKNOWN!
DOMINICAL
HEARING
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