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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (June 14, 1979)
Viewpoint The Battalion Texas A&M University Thursday June 14, 1979 Wake up! We have a contest Beware the yawns of June. When school ends in College Station, life ends in College Station. It’s not that the town is boring, it’s just that it’s... As the man in “West Side Story” said, “He’s depraved on account of he’s de prived.” And what we re deprived of is excitement in the big Bryan-College Station metroplex. For example, we at the Batt have spent endless hours since the end of spring watching the faceless employees of some construction company destroy most of our already small parking lot behind the office. Ho-hum. Yawn. Other than that, our biggest thrill of the summer so far has been the arrival of The Grove movie calender. That’s it, folks. We’ve even tried putting out a paper. The worst part of all this boredom is that it’s more exciting in this town than it used to be. My God, summer in College Station was so boring days of yore, Ags volunteered to go to Correigidor — even after Japan surrendered! So what if the METROPLEX is boring? It’s the home of the Fightin’ Texas Aggies (rah, rah), isn’t it? And where Ags are, excitment is sure to follow, right? Wrong. With all the research and ultra-brainpower at this university, surely we “Good Ags” can come up with something. Of course, there are the old stand-bys we have to fall back on — Dixie Chicken, the Grove, Lakeview, the Rocky Horror Picture Show, Sambo’s(?). One can even stoop to the lowest levels of depravation and be a “bootiful” person, frequenting some of the various “imitation” discos in town. Not us though. We know there’s a tremendous fire hazard whenever 89 varieties of perfume, cologne and after-shave are mixed together in a room filled with cigerette-smokers. But even such venerable bastions of tomfoolery as these get boring eventually. The result of this discussion about the social life-after-death in College Station is that we on the Batt staff got together and came up with some ideas of our own to while away those long, hot summer days. The list follows: —Count the construction workers falling off the yet-uncompleted Kyle Field. —Crash a DC-10 on the MSC grass. —Paint yourself purple, glue antennae to your head and go to downtown Bryar and mingle with the winos. —Mail yourself a letter bomb and then forget when it’s supposed to arrive. —Streak through a nursing home. —Hang-glide off the top of Rudder Tower wearing lead Adidas. —Figure out a use for C.T.’s —Send Dr. Jarvis Miller a letter in an HEW envelope. —Go to Jack-in-the-Box and order quiche. Or order three tacos and ask for extra grease. —Mail a box of Rice-a-roni to China. —Walk through the campus, occasionally pointing to the sky and screaming LOOK OUT! SKYLAB!” —Go to a local bar and hold a wet tea-bag contest. We could go on forever, but we’ve decided to challenge our readers to top our ideas. We’re holding an unofficial contest to collect the weirdest ideas to kill time in College Station. Send your suggestions to us: Room 216, Reed McDonald Building. The winners will receive something. We don’t exactly know what, but we re liable to think of something soon. It’ll give us something to do. , .. ’ Battalion staff effort Both have purpose Rules like flies By IRA R. ALLEN United Press International WASHINGTON — Federal regulations — and the bureaucrats who make them — are about as welcome these days as poison ivy in a nudist camp. Yet amid the hubbub for deregulating many of the industries supposedly hamstrung by a plethora of confusing and costly rules is a muffled voice reminding that regulations, like houseflies, were put on Earth for a purpose. For every silly regulation by the Occu pational Health and Safety Administration — like the one on the shape of toilet seats — there are dozens aimed at protecting the lungs of workers in asbestos factories or cotton mills. Perhaps two recent incidents might turn the demagogic tide running against gov ernment regulation — for is there anyone who would claim there was “overregula tion” in the Nuclear Regulatory Commis sion or in the Federal Aviation Adminis tration? When it comes to broad brush deregula tion of whole industries, there is much to be said in favor of getting the government out of price-fixing for airlines and truckers — which can provide immedidate price benefits for the little guy. A good case can be made for injecting competition into the broadcast industry as well, although there is concern about the amount of public affairs programming and political fairness that would result. Frank Greer, a spokesman for the much-maligned OS HA, says: “The vast majority of people defend government regulations when you ask if they are for clean air, clean water, a safe workplace and whether they want their father’s or husband’s life protected.” Citing the Interstate Commerce Com mission’s pricefixing for truckers, the Fed eral Communications Commission’s pro tection of broadcast station owners and the farm price support program, Greer argues: “A lot of politicians say we’ve got to con trol regulations but actually it’s a few politicians and businesses who enjoy the benefits of regulation.” According to Mark Green, head of the Congress Watch public interest lobby, there are about 200,000 Americans wbo would be dead were it not for federal highway safety regulations. And some regulations, contrary to what industry would have you believe, promote technical innovation and cost savings, Green says. He cites the ban on fluorocarbon spray cans that led to the healthier and cheaper pump sprays now on the market. The re quirement for stronger auto bumpers led auto engineers to develop them — lighter in weight and cheaper in cost. Anthony Roisman and Jonathan Lash of the Natural Resources Defense Council said in recent Senate testimony the “pub lic interest community” wants reform that will “better regulate the profit-motivated segment of the society to assure that health, safety, civil rights and liberties, environmental and other non-economic public values are incorporated into the profit-making activities of business.” That is not so un-American as the or ganized business lobbies would have you believe. For were it up to industry, the United States might still have child labor, six-day weeks, more dead coal miners than we now have, radiation-spewing nuclear power plants and cracked planes flying. Whenever the urge comes to condemn the “faceless” bureaucrats who bring you busing regulations, painful income tax rul ings or bans on your favorite food additives, stop a moment and consider they are not acting on their own whim. They are merely writing regulations Congress required them to in order to enforce vague laws members didn’t have the time or desire to flesh out themselves. And the congressman you can blame for that may be your own. Blame thrower — next Vatican, Washington similar in politics government weapon? By DICK WEST United Press International By DAVID BRODER WASHINGTON — Every so often, it dawns on even the dimmest American political reporter that there are forces and personalities at work in this world which are even bigger than the giants of states manship it is his lot to cover. Meaning no disrespect to the wonderful people who move up and down Pennsyl- vannia Avenue, they all looked like pyg mies this week, when measured against Pope John Paul II’s procession through Po land. The spectacle of the leader of the Roman Catholic Church visiting his Communist homeland, with all that it symbolized in the complex testing of val ues and cultures, overwhelmed the petty concerns that are the center of our politics. But, in another sense, there is no escape from politics, whether it be on the historic scale of the papal visit or mini-steps of the minuet of energy-inflation-and-SALT that occupies Washington at the moment. A timely reminder of that fact arrived in the mail, in the form of Andrew M. Greeley’s new book on the two papal elec tions of 1978. There is nothing particularly subtle about the approach of Father Greeley, the Chicago-based priest-sociologist-com mentator. The title, “The Making of The Popes 1978,” is designed to remind readers of Theodore H. White’s series on “The Making of the President.” The subtitle is even less obscure: “The Politics of Intrigue in the Vatican.” Let me confess, at once, that I am as ill-equipped to judge the accuracy or fair ness of Father Greeley’s account as I am beguiled by his utterly non-awed approach to what most of us would find an intimidat ing subject. Woodward and Berstein are discreet in their treatment of the White House, com pared to Father Greeley’s dissection of Vatican politics, which includes the de scription of one cardinal as “the H.R. Haldeman of Rome.” Early in his diary of the three months in which the two popes were chosen, he writes: “I had a drink with an American who works in the Curia. His view of the upcoming papal election was somewhat different from those I heard earlier. He does not think the Roman vote is nearly as powerful or as well-organized as some of my other sources suggested. There are 25 Italian cardinals and they are badly disor ganized ... and they have lots of grudges to settle with the current top brass in the Vat- The Romans will have to get a lot of but who is voting for whom, who is likely to change, and what kind of arrangements need to be made.” To test their thesis that the college of cardinals really did operate as a political body. Father Greeley and his academic colleagues back in Chicago developed a computer simulation of that group, and asked it to produce the probable winner. In the interim after the funeral of Pope John Paul I, the computer picked Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Cracow as the man most likely to hold together the coalition of sup port that had elected the previous pope. And Father Greeley — like a lot of other political reporters who put their own wis dom above any computer — said to his diary: “Sure, but he’s not a candidate.” Wrong again. Threating matters of such majesty in this sometimes flip and sometimes cynical fashion may offend many of the faithful. For myself, there is a great comfort to be drawn from Father Greeley’s book. His account reminds us that political processes do not necessarily demean those who emerge from them as leaders of im portant institutions. It reminds us that there may be a greater wisdom at work in such political maneuvering than any indi vidual plotter can know. WASHINGTON — The Federal Trade Commission tells Congress it is joining the hunt for someone to blame for the gasoline shortage. The next step, if all goes according to form, will be for someone in Congress to blame the FTC. What this country needs, obviously, is a new, improved blame thrower. The current model, which has been in use since the Vietnam war, proved woe fully ambiguous in the Three Mile Island and the DC-10 investigations, and has been rendered completely ambivalent by the gasoline shortage. These deficiencies are hardly suprising, however. The dam thing never did work very well. During the Vietnam fighting, you’ll re call, the blame thrower developed a bad malfunction in its retrospector. Kept throwing the blame backwards. Blamed by Jane Fonda for America’s in volvement, the Nixon administration blamed the Johnson administration, which threw it on the Kennedy administration, which threw it on the Eisenhower admin istration. At one point, the blame thrower was re- trospecting all the way back to Millard Fillmore, during whose administration Commodore Perry “opened” the Far East to U.S. interests. That should have been the signal to re call it. But it was kept in service, which explains why it took so long to throw the blame for Watergat^ in the right place. Now, with the advent of the gasoline shortage, the blame thrower’s disperal nozzle has gone absolutely haywire and has started throwing blame in all direc tions. The trouble is that when you have blame spewing out every which way — falling on OPEC, Iran, Carter, Congress, consumers, oil companies and I don’t know what all — you can’t be sure which is the proper target. This country sorely needs a new narrow gauge blame thrower that can zero in on a single gas shortage perpetrator and cover it with culpability. The big dread is that the blame thrower now in service will become overheated and start retrospecting again. In that type of accident, known as “The Vietnam Syn drome,” is could start throwing blame all the way back to 1893, which was when the first American gas-powered car was built. Up to then, Americans not only had a surplus of gasoline, most of it was shown away as a useless by-product of kerosene. Recrimination experts say the key to developing a blame thrower capable of getting to the bottom of the gasoline short age lies in improving the guidance system. “You can’t aim blame with any degree of accuracy unless you have a reliable finger pointing mechanism,” a FTC source told “The blame throwers we have now couldn’t hit a scapegoat in the tail with a broad canard.” votes from the outlanders to gurarantee the election for one of their number.” “The papal election seems to operate on the same political dynamics as any elec tion,” Father Greeley observes to his di ary. “The same processes are at work as in American political conventions ... It is quite easy, despite all the rules and all the emphasis on secrecy, for the electors to know, not only how the votes are going. Thotz By Doug Graham Top of the News CAMPUS Overdue books may draw fines Texas A&M University faculty and staff members who have books overdue 80 days or more from the Sterling Evans Library may be billed for them if the books are not renewed or returned, said staff members of the library. Each bill contains a non-returnable process ing fee. A copy of the bill will be sent to the respective department heads of persons with books out. The library will be mailing letters about the books this week. Books may be returned by contacting the Circulation Department of the library at 845-3733. Services for Churchwell today Dr. Marlene Churchwell, coordinator of undergraduate programs in the Biology Department, died June 12 in a Houston hospital. She has been on the staff since 1976. There will be a memorial service at the All Faith’s Chapel at 1:45 p.m. June 14. She will be buried in Del Rio. NATION DC-10 death toll lowered to 273 Hijacker was Cuban defector WORLD Somoza asks for U.S. influence Nicaraguan President Anastasio Somoza said again Wednesday he would not resign and claimed that despite continuing fighting in major cities including the capital, “the country in general terms is at peace.” Speaking from his tightly secure compound in Managua known as “the bunker,” Somoza said the opposition was not well- enough organized to take over power and added that even if he resigned there would not be peace in Nicaragua. “The people who have the arms are not controlled by the moderate opposition,” he said. “They are controlled by Marxist-Leninists from Havana.” He charged again that Costa Rica, Venezuela, and Panama had supplied the Sandinista guerrillas with large quantities of arms. Somoza, inter viewed on the ABC television program “Good Morning America”, said he did not need military aid from the United States but asked that American influence be used to stop the fighting. “I would like to have the backing of the United States to stop the guerrilla warfare, to stop the arms smuggling from Costa Rica,’ he said) The United States plans a second emergency evacuation of its citizens from battle-tom Managua today and the Spanish Embassy also readied for a massive withdrawal of its nationals. The Battalion in f United J LUBBOC jthe Texas T jment several fto learn h ra United I IRVING - Euforcemen Wednesday ; bating illeg documenting illegal drug The death toll from the May 25 crash of American Airlines DC-10 flight 191 has been revised from 275 to 273, the Cook County Medical Examiners Office announced Wednesday. Cook County Medical Ex aminer Robert J. Stein said the remains of two persons thought to be on the ground when the plane crashed have been identified as two of the 171 persons on board the plane. Stein said 258 persons and 13 crew members were on the plane when it took off from O’Hare International Airport and that only two persons on the ground were killed in the crash. Authorities originally suspected that a 3-year-old boy whose body was found at the crash site was too young to have had a ticket for the trip. However, Stein said today the parents of the youth, Ahmed-Swaliem, had purchased a ticket for him. Remains found near a hanger at the crash site which Stein originally suspected to be those of a person on the ground also have been identified as those of a passenger, he said. Investigators also have found the bones of two dogs that were aboard the plane, Stein said. One had been traveling with a passenger and the other was in the cargo hold. Havana radio Wednesday confirmed that the man who hijacked a Delta Airlines jumbo jet to Cuba Monday was Eduardo Guerra Jiminez, a former Cuban Air Force lieutenant who stole a MiG jet fighter and defected to the United States in 1969. “The hijacker was arrested by the Cuban authorities and is subject to investigation and legal procedures,” said the brief broadcast, monitored in Miami. His name is Eduardo Guerra Jiminez,” the state radio system reported. “He deserted from the Cuban Air Force on October 1969, when he was in charge of a plane, MiG 17, to the United States where he received asylum. The Cuban government had branded Guerra a traitor and a spy after he flew the 700-mph jet into the hands of the U.S. Air Force in 1969. 2Havana Radio said in a broadcast Oct. 16, 1969: “He gave up the honorable distinction of defending the father- land to become a salaried agent of the enemy.” Guerra had lived mostly in New York where he drove a cab, washed dishes, was a jeweler’s apprentice and worked in a factory. He was arrested on marijuana possession charges in 1971, robbery charges in 1975 and assault charges in 1976. In Monday night’s hijacking, the suspect took over the New York-to-Fort Lauderdale Delta L-1011, telling the flight deck crew he had a knife and a bomb. It was the first commer cial jetliner to be hijacked to Cuba since 1972. The hijacker was led away in handcuffs and the 194 passengers and 12 crew memben aboard were kept in the terminal for nearly five hours. None of the passengers or crew was injured and the flight was eventually allowed to fly to Miami. Wayne Smith, director of the State Department’s Cuban Affairs Division, said Cuban President Fidel Castro was at the airport when the Delta jet landed. “He went out to ensure expediti ous handling of the incident,” Smith said. Smith said Cuba promised to prosecute the suspect on hijacking charges and the United States has no plans at this time for seeking his extradition. All s All sc LETTERS POLICY Letters to the-editor should not exceed 300 words and are subject to being cut to that length or less if longer. The editorial staff reserves the right to edit such letters and does not guarantee to publish any letter. Each letter must be signed, show the address of the writer and list a telephone number for verification. Address correspondence to Letters to the Editin', The Battalion, Room 216, Reed McDonald Building, College Station, Texas 77843. 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Address: The Battalion, Room 216, Reed MEMBER Texas Press Association Southwest Journalism Congress Editor Karen News Editor Debbie Sports Editor Sa City Editor Royli Campus Editor KeithTs Staff Writers Robin Thomi* Louie Arthur, Carolyn Blosser, Boggan Photo Editor Clay Photographer Lynn Opinions expressed in The Battalion are those of the editor or of the writer of the article and are not necessarily those of the T sic+t'si+inrt Regents. The Battalion is a non-profit supporting enterprise operated by ' as a university and community