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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (June 17, 1986)
v\‘V ■: ■ v 1 --.; Page 2AThe Battalion/Tuesday, June 17, 1986 Opinion Advertising not to blame for tobacco-related illnei Horace Gree ley defined the cigarette as “a fire at one end and a fool at the other.” A more accurate definition never has been written. Nothing an noys me more than having a nice dinner out ruined from the by-prod- bility to see that all customers — smok ers and nonsmokers — are able to eat in peace. If they don’t, one or both of us may take our appetites elsewhere. But sometimes the smoker-non- smoker conflict cannot be moderated so easily. Synar’s figures are powerful, but they don’t justify an across-the-board adver tising ban. If Synar and the six other bill sponsors are so concerned with tobacco products’ threat to life, then their statis tics make a stronger argument for a ban on the products themselves than on the advertising. to curtail cigarette consumption. The removal of cigarette ads from radio and television, which actually had the bles sing of the tobacco industry, also had little ef fect on sales. Loren Steffy uct of that fire-and-fool combination. I’m always tempted to ask the nearby smoker to stop, but I never can. It’s a battle of rights. My right to clean air ver sus the smoker’s right to blackened lungs. His smoke is infringing on my rights, and my request for an unpol luted eating environment is infringing on his. A bill has been introduced to Con gress that, if passed, would ban all forms of tobacco advertising. The bill applies to newspaper and magazine ads, athletic sponsorships, billboards, posters, matchbook covers and store displays. The proposed ban would affect man ufacturers, distributors and retailers al ike. The referee in this situation should be the restaurant, which has a responsi- Rep. Mike Synar, D-Okla., the princi pal sponsor of the bill, claims that to bacco use is of great governmental con cern because it is responsible for the loss of 350,000 lives annually. Synar also claims that treating these illnesses cost Americans $22 billion last year. Proposing anti-tobacco legislation would, of course, be political suicide. The congressmen are saying that al though the tobacco industry represents a sizeable threat to life and taxpayers’ money, they don’t want to prohibit its use or sale. Instead, they suggest we ban tobacco product advertising and hope that if people don’t hear about ciga rettes, they’ll forget about them and live longer, healthier lives. But smoking is an addiction, and smokers aren’t going to kick the habit just because cancer stick ads disappear. Years of surgeon general’s warnings about tobacco dangers have done little The tobacco industry represents a lot of jobs and money for smokers and non- smokers. It’s not just going to go away. And while many nonsmokers complain about having a nice meal ruined, few are going to actively lobby for anti-to bacco legislation. Most have a passive disgruntlement with smokers (“1 just want to enjoy my meal. .. ”). Synar is trying to put the blame for tobacco-related illnesses on the promo tion of the products, rather than on the products themselves. Following the PAC depends on name There’s more to starting a polit ical action com mittee than rais ing money. After all, a successful Donald M. Rothberg News Analysis There’s the Fund for America’s Fu ture, the Fund for Future Committee and the Committee for the Future of America. PAC must sound upbeat, have a name that inspires people to write checks. A name like the Jimmy Carter Com mittee for a Greater America. The former president isn’t the draw he once was. His PAC, dormant for some time, doesn’t rank as one of the big money committees registered with the Federal Election Commission. It be gan the year with a bank balance of $6.74 and it went $18.47 in the red when the bank hit it with $25.2 1 in serv ice charges. As PAC names go, it also has some problems. The Carter committee broke a cardi nal rule of the PAC business — don’t name your PAC after yourself . PACs are fund-raising committees set up by politicians and political activists to channel contributions to candidates. Po tential presidential candidates use them to gain favor with other politicians by giving them money collected by their PACs. A look at the names of PACs makes it. clear there are unwritten naming rules most people follow. One of the rules seems to be don’t get too imaginative. As a result there is a deadening similarity among PAC names. One of the newest PACs is a classic example of the naming technique. It’s called the Fund for All Americans. What does that name tell potential donors? First of all, it doesn’t tell them the pol itician behind the committee. Why in stantly turn off all the people who don’t like him? Secondly, it suggests it’s for a77 Ameri cans. Which gives a hint of the all-inclu- sive message of its sponsor, Gov. Thomas H. Kean of New Jersey. A Republican, Kean won a landslide re-election victory in 1985 after a cam paign in which he succeeded in winning support from many traditionally Demo cratic groups, including blacks and la bor. Kean is a leading advocate of the need for Republicans to reach out to such groups. Thus, a Fund for All Americans. of ■' The advertising isn’t reponsible for the illness or the lack of taxpayer money. The smokers themselves make the decision, with full knowledge of the dangers, to light up. No amount of ad vertising, con nteradvertisingoi thereof can alter that decision smokers allow it to. While a ban on tobacco salcai might cut down on cigarette cou tion, it probably would cause a rist legal cigarette-making and requin sive tax dollars to enforce. The best Synar and compam hope for is that local governmeit private establishments willtal greater responsibility in keep® peace between smokers antlairli ers. In this manner individualriti both sides can be respected with i mal amount of animosity. 1 hen, when 1 enter a restaur can say, “Nonsmoking, please smoker behind me can say, “Civet table next to the graveyard"hi can both rest in peace. G a\ Loren Steffy is a senior joumtlis jor and the Opinion Page edi: The Battalion. That sounds a lot more inclusive than Republican Majority Fund or Demo crats for the ’80s. Experienced interpreters of PAC names might read something else in the name of the Kean committee — national ambition. CASEY OF THE CIA DA of a traugl to lea daugl ter sli circus Lis; other High were ' Luroj Riggs “Tl were Riggs When stairs, thing. Me pulm< teachi teen-; she \ when Ric ter’s ; Sund Donald M. Rothberg is chief political writer for The Associated Press. Holocaust doesn’t beloni just to Germans and Jew Occasionally, you get a man who is perfectly matched to the of fice he holds. That will be the case when Kurt Wald heim, allegedly a war criminal and indisputably a liar, officially becomes when reviewing a book about China’s Great Cultural Revolution: “Its effect was to plunge China into a decade and a half of terror that is likely to haunt it for generations, much as the Holocaust haunts Germany and the Jews.” gan’s simplistic version of suited only them. The restoftk'| saw' things largely the same' again, this was something tl concerned Jews. Richard Cohen the president of Austria. It is an empty office for an empty man —a cere monial post that is supposed to rep resent Austria. Never has the country been better represented. The temptation, even the duty, is to lambast Austria for what it has done and to wonder about a country that could elect as a head of state a man whose morality, like his clothes, is trimmed to reflect his times. He was a Nazi when it was popular, not a Nazi when it wasn’t, and now sort of is and sort of isn’t — re flecting the moral ambiguity of the peo ple who elected him. But something within me cheers the election of Waldheim. As president of Austria, he will travel the world as an object lesson —a reminder that the hor rors of the Nazi era were not perpe trated solely by a clique of mad Ger mans, but by ordinary people doing what they thought were ordinary things. Like some clerk out of Kafka, Waldheim may have done nothing more than sign papers. The point, always, was to have a clean desk. From there, a clean con science somehow followed. The tendency in recent years has been to see the Holocaust as something that transpired between Germans and Jews. Germans had their grievances and Jews their peculiar ways. The Holocaust belongs to these two peoples — one as perpetrators, the others as victims. And in this formulation it has almost nothing to do with anyone else. Jonathan Yard- ley, the astute book critic for the Wash ington Post, inadvertently put it this way Yardley says the sentence does not really reflect what he meant — or what he knows. I use it not because 1 believe otherwise, but because it attracted no attention from editors or readers, be cause it seems to be a perfectly reasona ble, noncontroversial statement. But it is wrong. As Waldheim’s own career makes manifest, the Holocaust was not just the work of the Germans. It was also the work of the Austrians — and Latvi ans, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Poles, Hungarians, Rumanians, Russians and other peoples as well. Everywhere Jews or Gypsies, Poles or intellectuals, com munists or clerics died, the Germans had their collaborators. The real horror of the Holocaust is that people killed people for no reason. We all have a difficult time facing up to the Holocaust. Not only are the facts unspeakable, but they say something unspeakable about human beings: In the middle of the 20th century, in the most advanced nations on earth, mil lions were murdered by millions hot be cause they were a threat, but because they were different. It is no wonder that Margaret Thatcher, no ignoramus when it comes to European history, broke down recently after visiting Yad Vashem, the museum-memorial to the Holocaust in Jerusalem. The facts are just too awful to con front. So by and large the world does not. President Reagan certainly did not when, in visiting Bitburg, he ducked the real meaning of the Holocaust. He pre tended Nazism was something foisted on the German nation, that it was im posed totally by a small group of fanat ics. He limited responsibility for the crime to the Nazi leadership and exon erated everyone else. And when pro tests erupted, they came mostly from Jewish organizations — as if the Rea- So here, thanks to Austria,M corrective. Here is Kurt V true perpetrator of the HolocaJ German, but an Austrian; beast, but an ordinary (ohsooflt man. Here is the humanisti past, the internationalistathisn vincial, the intellectual who I books for the lynch mob. He It elected to represent Austria Austrians, as is their wont, ared est. In ways we are reluctant to represents many of us all. Copyright 1986, Washington Group. The Battalion (USPS 045 360) Member of Texas Press Assodation Southwest JournalismConferei* 1 The Battalion Editorial Boak Michelle Powe, Editor Loren Steffy, Opinion Pago ^ Scott Sutherland, ChyEditot Kay Mallett, News Editor Ken Sury, Sports Editor Editorial Policy is ;i non-proFn. se/f-sup/Wti't ■ to To* “ The Battalioi per operated as a community liryan-College Station. Opinions expressed in The Battalion art ® Editorial Board or the author, anddominttP resent the opinions of'Eexas A&Miidniininn l( or the Board of Regents. 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