Page 2/The Battalion/Wednesday, October 1, 1986 r The Battalion (USPS 045 360) Member of Texas Press Association Southwest journalism Conference The Battalion Editorial Board Cathie Anderson, Editor Kirsten Dietz, Managing Editor Loren Steffy, Opinion Page Editor Frank Smith, City Editor Sue Krenek, News Editor Ken Sury, Sports Editor Editorial Policy The Battalion is a non-profit, self-supporting newspaper oper ated as a community service to Texas A&M and Bryan-College Sta tion. Opinions expressed in The Battalion are those of the editorial board or the author, and do not necessarily represent the opinions of Texas A&M administrators, faculty or the Board of Regents. The Battalion also serves as a laboratory newspaper for students in reporting, editing and photography classes within the Depart ment of Journalism. The Battalion is published Monday through Friday during Texas A&M regular semesters, except for holiday and examination periods. Mail subscriptions are $17.44 per semester, $34.62 per school year and $36.44 per full year. Advertising rates furnished on re quest. Our address: The Battalion, 216 Reed McDonald Building, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843. Second class postage paid at College Station, TX 77843. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to The Battalion, 216 Reed McDonald, Texas A&M University, College Station TX 77843. The missing link Researcher Judith Reisman has completed a three-volume, 1,600-page report that describes and analyzes hundreds of issues of Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler to determine the effects sexual por trayal of children in the magazines have on readers. The study is considered the most extensive ever done on the subject and also is one of the biggest wastes of government money since the $600 toilet seat. Funded by the Justice Department’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Reisman’s study cost $734,371 — nearly 33 percent more than the commission’s original appropria tion of $500,000. The office initially appropriated the money in 1984 and granted Reisman three extensions. But the study drew no conclusions and has been criticized by a peer-review group as not adhering to the grant proposal. The report did not suggest a link between the cartoons and child abuse, as was originally intended. In fact, it failed to explain what significance, if any, these find ings had in relation to its purpose. Even the office funding the pro ject has not rushed out to embrace its results. The study analyzed 2,016 cartoons that depicted children and 3,988 pictures, including advertisements, that showed anyone “from fetal development through age 17.” Some of the study’s “conclusions” include: • Eighty-five percent of the children depicted in the magazines were white, 3 percent black, 1 percent Jewish, 1 percent Asian, 1 per cent Hispanic and 8 percent unspecified. The study never explained what happened to the other 1 percent. • “About one-third of the presentations of the principal child in volved direct eye contact with the camera/reader, and about one- fourth had the child gazing offstage or at someone with the whites visible. About one-sixth had eyes cast downward or closed, with the sclera and iris hidden, and in about the same number of cases the eyes were hidden or otherwise eluded classification.” • The report questioned “the numerous illegal or illicit images” of Santa Claus and other fantasy characters. Reisman was paid almost $750,000 of the taxpayers’ money to look at more than 550 issues of the “three top-selling erotic/porno- graphic magazines” but produced no results. Funding such a costly and useless study puts the Justice Depart ment on a level of fiscal responsibility equal to that of the Pentagon. Reisman, for her part, should stop wasting federal funds with her ambiguous studies and return to her previous vocation — writing songs for “Captain Kangaroo.” Fur industry clothed Opinion OJWAT fclNfr OF ?e~oP<-£=- Pi4Vgfly|\& to I ApcLesceuvs e-NT5 6JWO Buy tr AT Afl.w. AT A TKOLK STttP. THEY DON'T mother with THe Articles. Judith EeismAN, toWoM TWE CJUSTlUr DEPARTMENT PAID than tyooc** AN issue Te, k NOf i^ooK AT M. the Aznues. Teaching of family values not a social miracle cure By Two Texa :al scientists icently disc: NF can exp ciuse the urg ANF, whi< liretic facto :ria of the f to the bloo en d by a Car It is belies langes in bl ig ANF, wh xrete salt a le amount o alls, the gre pioduced. 1 "When yoi lushed fron lour chest,” enjamin saic “The blood iur heart, m much bloc acts by mak 'to urinate.” Benjamin a in are resea o! ANF at nor bdy. Benjamin larch has be< INF has on t Did members of the Reagan ad ministration ever go to school? How about some poli ticians, columnists or teachers who seem to think that the teaching of va lues in schools will remedy much of what ails the na tion? My school- day recollections sa taught values. Richard Cohen otherwise. I was The day began with a prayer. We pledged allegiance to the flag and sang “My Country Tis of Thee,” including the more religious of the verses. Once a week we had assemblies that began with a color guard (I carried the flag) and more singing of patriotic songs. The boys wore ties, the girls white blouses and blue skirts, and we were segregated by sex to be taught shop) or cooking. We were given no classes in sex edu cation. We were told to shun drugs be- in cruelty cause they were always addictive and usually fatal, an admonition that in cluded marijuana. Patriotism was drilled into us and we had a class called “civics” in which we learned, among other things, about the communist men ace and the wonders of our own democ racy. We were graded for conduct, neat ness and even citizenship. We were taught, as 1 said, values. And yet we were the generation that first turned to drugs in a big way, that broke all kinds of barriers when it came to sex, that provided the foot soldiers for the army that secured abortion as a right, that overturned laws banning the sale of contraceptives in various states, that lived together without benefit of marriage and that now contribute to those awful statistics on divorce and ex tramarital sex. None of this is necessarily proof that teaching values is worthless. The best that can be said for my anecdotal evi dence is that teaching values did not make a significant difference — that greater, countervailing forces were at work. For instance, it may make us all feel warm and nostalgic to talk about the traditional family, but it was economic factors — not a lack of values — that sent women out of the home to work. You cannot set values down on the table at dinner time. ture in which the instant gratilicatioi drugs (or a child) may aniounitoik only gratification. Nancy Reagan it cently extended the American dreairn these children in a sincere and mom; television speech, but their livesproiid contradictory lessons on a daily basis. Eras take names, sometimes fret popular culture (Jazz), sometimesfroi economic conditions (the Depression Ours should be called the Placebofe eration. To fight everything fromdn| to premarital p»regnancies, we chooi antiquated weapons and battleonaM of nostalgia. For the economic and so cial forces that are ripping the fami apart, that have helped produce boti the feminist revolution and the disinif gration of the poor family, we prescA the nostrums of yesterday insteadtf programs that could meet theneedst' today. Qi ByS Republican landidate I uesday nigl in headquar mce the state iceds of Tex; Davidson, usinessman ;y University igainst Lt. G Surely values are important.Theydt- fine who we are as a people. But if it lues are not in consonance with ikt times, they become neglectedad wither. Our appalling divorce rate (in world’s highest) was not produced fee cause we, of all the world’s peoples,lad values, hut by economic and socialoi- cumstances that rendered those value less relevant. Many of the marriedccti' pies of yesteryear would have divoretd if women had had recourse to the la* The bell has " “—TTV , tolled for the lux- Richard ury fur industry, a Adams contemptible busi- Guest Columnist ness constituting a major moral stigma on the face of West ern civilization. While the trade en dures, society is not entitled to any sense of collective self-respect. All that has prevented universal con demnation is, first, that most people are too busy earning their own livings to no tice what is involved and, secondly, the greed and dishonesty of those control ling the so-called industry. The furriers, however, are no more to blame than prostitutes (which is what they are: to prostitute being ‘to surren der to an infamous use’). There remains a demand, so these men supply it, being the sort of people who could not make so much money in any decent way. The public is the real culprit. When we stop buying, the animals will stop be ing tortured to death. A favorite weapon of the fur indus try, the leghold trap, invented during the first half of the 19th century, has in flicted unsurpassed carnage and agony on fur-bearing animals. More than a century later, however, the number of fur-bearing animals trapped in these torture-machines has greatly increased. A conservative esti mate of the total annual Figure for Can ada and the United States is 20 million — far more than the number of Jews murdered by the Nazis. If such a comparison seems tasteless or inappropriate, remember that, the question under consideration is not “Can these animals reason or articulate?” The question is, “Can they suffer?” There can never have been any greater suffering. To understand what an animal en dures while struggling in a leghold trap is to be Filled with horror, and with shame for the human species as a whole. The pain alone, of course, is terrible. The animal is held for 24 hours, 48 hours or even longer, by spring-locked metal jaws crushing a broken leg (or even the pelvis). In addition, there is the torment of hunger and the worse tor ment of thirst. The blood attracts flies and preda tors. The shock, constraint and panic terror, acting upon the instincts of a wild animal, are most distressing to con template. Some trapped animals bite off their own legs in order to escape — sever flesh, sinew and bone. The pain in volved does not differ from that felt by a human being. Such animals are known to trappers as “wringers.” To forestall wringing-off, some traps are not pegged down, but attatched to a grapnel on a wire. As long as the animal can limp about, drag ging the grapnel, it will not bite off its paw. It cannot go far and the tra : pper will find it. Many people have said to me, “Don’t tell me: I don’t want to know.” Yet we are all collectively re sponsible. In Canada and in most of the United States, anyone can become a trapper. Children, adolescents and adults alike can enroll in training courses. Traps can be bought over the counter. The fur industry exists not for any human need, such as hunger or phar macology, but solely for luxury, vanity and adornment. There is not even any valid argument for protection against cold. In 1981 I made a voyage through the Antarctic in temperatures often reaching 40 degrees below zero. No one — passengers or crew — wore fur gar ments. There recently has been much Ca nadian propaganda about fur constitut ing the livelihood of indigenous people. In fact, the great majority of trans-At lantic trappers are part-time amateurs. But even conceding some truth to the claim, why should we be obliged on that account to buy fur? If someone says his livelihood is selling onions, you have no moral obligation to buy them. The slave trade, in its day, was the livelihood of thousands. What moral justification can there be for a man who lives by the in fliction of agony or misery on his fellow creatures? The fur industry has been unable to advance any valid or convincing justifi cation of this institution. The past two centuries have seen the destruction of many evils: black slavery, child labor facto ries, public execu tion, flogging and restriction of the vote to males. The destruction of the obsolete and discredited fur in dustry, which con sists, in essence, of the barbarous ex ploitation of warm blooded, senitent mammals for no better reason than vanity and adorn ment, lies in the logic of social and moral progress. When the majority of people realize the truth and no longer want to buy or wear fur, the evil will end. The process — as with smoking — will be gradual, but we should see a great change by the end of the century. In the words of Pope John Paul II, speaking in 1984, “It is necessary and urgent ... to abandon inconsiderate forms of domination, capture and cus tody with respect to all creatures.” In no sphere is the necessity and urgency greater than that of the fur industry. Richard Adams is the bestselling au thor of Watership Down and The Girl in the Swing. Nonetheless, from the four corners of the land comes a cry for the teaching of values. No one is quite sure what that would mean in a pluralistic society, but we all seem to want it. We believe some how that the teaching of values will set right much of what ails us. Among other things, we want prayer in the schools, as if words alone are a remedy. We forget, for instance, that many of the pregnant teen-agers of our recent but brief con cern were mostly raised as churchgoers — or by churchgoers. The same thing holds for the drug problem. Drugs are a problem, but for the addict, not the only one. So is help lessness, despair, poverty — a bleak fu- r- Mail and the job market. Our country ist dergoing these and other changes,)!' government policy ignores tlieunderl' ing causes and instead exhorts peopled act as if there were no problems. My generation was taught values' values we still cherish. We want to iff married, but many of us don’t, We wan 1 to supervise our kids, but often we can' We want a drug-free environment,bn we create one in which a white powita sometimes provides the only high. As* ciety that talks one way and actsanolbt' is obligated to answer a question fro® the very kids we want taught values 1 What, exactly, are our own? Copyright 1986, Washington Post WritersG0! Call 1 What senior privileges? EDITOR: Senior. Derived from the Latin “senex,” meaning old. Webster’s Dictionary defines this term as “above others in rank or length of service ” or “having precedence in making certain decisions.” In the Orient, the seniors of the population are treated with dignity and respect. In fact, being a senior in most any society today can be marked with a sense of accomplishinentand responsibility .. . except at Texas A&M. I can remember, as a freshman, dreaming of the day when 1 could invoke my senior privileges by sitting at a reasonable level (second deck) and between the 30-yard lines for home football games. Nothing less, ticket wise, was given on the first day. Ticket distribution certainly has taken a turn for the worse. A senior at A&M will not be difficult to find this weekend. Just look inside the ten yard lines. We’ll be the ones sitting down during the game, wearing our hats dur ing the yells and standing on the timber during the war hymn so we can see what is happening in the middle of the field! Steve Luckemeyer ’86 Gordon Sefolk ’87 Rhonda McMurry ’87 Tami Preston ’86 PRIZES Letters to the editor should not exceed 300 words in length. The editorial staff reserves tlie riglu to edit letters for style and length, but will make every effort to maintain the author’s inteni Each letter must be signed and must include the classification, address and telephone numberof the writer.