The Battalion OPINION Monday, August 28, 1989 The US. doesn’t Kn ow where its hostages are located... |A driftei the beating A&M grad i as an i nwiiwnf/nnniiiiu IMUMH l'!*HU| ,,,,, 1 But at least WE know precisely Y/here our frozen assets are held... I'here is something ugly and trou bling going on in the news media’s pre sentation and discussion of one of our worst national nightmares. The bur geoning horrors of addiction to crack cocaine are being reported and dis cussed in the press and on television with a deep and subtle but unmistakable racism. is racist newspaper teinber. ■ At the ( ■Inch trial 28-year-old Syndicated Columnist Mo J I £ ^ Ivins ■ Mail Call Got the parking blues EDITOR: The TAMU parking lots are shrinking and the garage is off limits to students housed off campus. Many students may get a little irritated with the Department of Parking, Transit and Traffic Services and their decision allocating any future reserved spaces to dorm students, but this decision affects only one Aggie at a time. Nay one off-campus Aggie that thinks he or she will get a Park-n-Ride permit, but they had better hustle over and get one quick. The P-n-R spaces have been cut by approximately half. I understand that the Department of Parking, Transit and Traffic Services is slowly eliminating the less expensive Park-n-Ride to increase ridership on the off-campus shuttles and to increase revenues from the more expensive parking permits. I guess I’m writing this letter because I am one student who is frustrated at seeing the hundreds of yellow parking tickets sticking to all those windshields, at hearing of inane parking policy changes, and at feeling like I’m driving an expensive Ford around in the Neiman Marcus selection of parking lots. The majority of TAMU students live off campus, so there should be several thousand one's looking for a parking space. No problem — we’re all friendly Aggies and help each other out, right? President Mobley, can one friendly Aggie park in your driveway this semester? Ginger M. Berry Graduate Student Letters to the editor should not exceed 30U words in length. The editorial staff reserves the right to edit letters for style and length, but will make every effort to maintain the author's intent. Each letter must be signed and must include the classification, address and telephone number of the writer. The easiest way to recognize it is through the historical similarities be tween this outbreak of fear-and-horror stories and those that accompanied ear lier waves of drug hysteria: In this coun try, hysteria over drugs is always asso ciated with a feared racial minority. At the turn of the century, the astonishing hysteria over opium stemmed not so much from widespread effects of the drug, which were in fact quite limited, as from its association with Chinese immi grants, who had been brought over to work on the Western railroads. In the ’20s and ’30s, there was a wave of hyste ria about cocaine because it was asso ciated with blacks, although the sophisti cates of the era such as Cole Porter were the ones using it. “Cocainized blacks” were said to have superhuman strength, and the drug supposedly made them in sanely aggressive. There was such a wave of propaganda centered on this thesis that every Southern police de partment went from using .32-caliber revolvers to .38s because it was believed that a .32 couldn’t stop a cocainized black. lenis, crime problems andsoi problems that staggers the imaginad It’s like all the old inner-city probi squared. But the exaggeration isi] in the lack of historical context inti porting, always a problem for thd torical American press. The peren habit we have of blaming the vie (“Well if she didn’t want togeti she shouldn’t have been walkingin part of town at night”) surfacesinsi after story. Discussion of the“theb tegration of the black family,"at scapegoat since Sen. Patrick M first wrote about it in 1965, is beingui as an all-purpose rationalization, supposed to explain the causeofc addiction, why there’s no cure foro addiction and why there’s no trying to do anything about crackadel tion and why it’s all their faultanywavj l ^ Keep this for future reference! This summer was a hot one for The Battalion’s opinion page and I expect the fall to be even hotter. Save the whales. Save the trees (the trees in the way of the Memorial Stu dent Center’s expansion). Nuke the trees. Add a crossword puzzle to the page. Tell the drill team girls to find some place else to prance. One letter writer, after becoming slightly peeved that an ad for a memorial service for Khomeini ran in the paper, even sug gested that we at The Battalion go to Iran and run ads for terrorists. I heard it all this summer. We were bombarded with so many flag-burning letters that I had to sort through and burn some of them. But all the letters and feedback are certainly greatly ap preciated — after all these are the con troversial issues and opposing view points that make people turn to page two. Now that’s my opinion. Not the opin ion of the entire Battalion staff, not the opinion of the editorial board and cer tainly not the opinion of the entire Uni versity. It’s mine. All mine and, accord ing to the first amendment. I’m entitled to such opinions. And some of these be long on the page — after all, isn’t opin ion the stuff of which page two is made? I am writing this column to clarify some things for the readers of page two. A common reader misconception is that the opinions on the page are the opin ions of everyone who works for the pa per. I have received several letters to the editor that have said similar things, namely that the “narrow-minded, emo tional rather than reasonable” views of The Battalion staff and its editorial board are reflected in the columns and editorial cartoons we run on the page. One letter clearly suggested that the en tire editorial board is in favor of abor tion on demand. This is a matter of opinion. Let me Juliette Kizzo Opinion Page Editor make it clear early in the semester that I, as an editor, do not let my opinions ap pear on the page unless I express them in a column under my byline; nor do I let my personal views affect the daily de cision of what to print. And as for the joint opinions of the editorial board, which is composed of nine editors, in cluding myself, they are designated on the page as such and are not usually voiced daily, only when a situation arises about which we feel strongly enough to take a stance. The remainder of the page is a ran dom sampling of opinions from readers whose interest to respond is sparked by issues addressed both on and off the page. Guest columns, which are always welcomed, are just that — they are writ ten by someone other than a Battalion staff member. And our letters column, Mail Call, is, as Paul LaRocque of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram once said, the readers’ soapbox. To dispel this myth that we sometimes make up letters for the page, let me say that letters to the editor are written by the readers for the readers. And to fill Mail Call, what some say is the most read section of the page (and the paper for that matter), we need all the letters we can get. So don’t be afraid to write one. We don’t bite, and heck, we at The Battalion don’t even answer them back. It’s easy, too. Just write a letter, you don’t even have to type it (that’s just something we journalists do), and hand .... deliver it to a Battalion staff member in room 216 of the Reed McDonald Build ing — the orange and red building next to the Bus Stop Snack Bar. To sum it all up, page two is a forum for individual expression about na tional, international and local events. It’s kind of a combination of every page of The Battalion, including the sports page. (Hey, we even ran a Pete Rose col umn once.) To keep the page interest ing, we need your input. Now I realize that the opinions on the page do not necessarily agree with other people’s opinions. But expressing my one opinion paves the way for others to do the same in the forms of letters to the editor and guest columns. So, if you agree with the opinions on the page, tell us. And if you get hot under the collar from something other than the summer heat, don’t keep your opinions to your self — let them be heard. EXPRESS YOURSELF! A common misconception is that a newspaper’s editorial page is used as a medium of expression for the opinion page staff only. Wrong. Page two is not ours — it’s yours. Juliette Rizzo is a senior journalism major and opinion page editor for The Battalion. In the ’40s and 50s there was an espe cially laughable national snit over mari juana, which was associated with Mexi cans. Marijuana, like cocaine, was said to make its users violently aggressive and to give them unnatural physical powers — to a later generation of dope smokers who had a lot of trouble getting up off tlte sofa to find some Cheetos in the kitchen when stoned, these silly claims w^nre taken as evidence that all warnings about the dangers of drug use were ex- aggerated. There was also an immense lot of rot about the effects of LSD in the straight press during the ’60s because it was associated with hippies, another de spised pariah group. All these false warnings helped set up a widespread so cial acceptance of drug use among the hip in the ’70s and ’80s. So we have had one wave of hysteria, always with racist overtones, after an other — while we largely ignored the ef fects of the most damaging drug of all, alcohol. As I have said before, we have cried, “Wolf’ many a time — and now the damn wolf, the biggest, meanest one there ever was, really is here. Crack is everything all the other drugs were sup posed to have been and kept turning out not to be — as one New York family courtjudge said, “It makes me yearn for the good old days of heroin addiction.” You may think it is impossible for the press to exaggerate the effects of crack addiction — especially since those ef fects are even now snowballing in the in ner cities, an avalanche of health prob- There was only one trouble with! otherwise excellent story — I i myself more than 20 years ago. Antf has every reporter of every era who* ever spent a night in a big-city hospiu emergency room. They were like I before crack and they’ll be like thataflfll crack: There is always an endless I of the detritus of humanity into hospilJ emergency rooms; there are always peat customers — addicts, alcoholic! wives w ho won’t leave their abusive bands, dumb criminals who have betj shot before, the whole sorry paradc| there is always some huge man who cal barely be held down by a dozen peopil — bigh on anything from glue towh: lightning, crazy, afraid, makes nod ference; there are always burned-oil professionals in emergency roomsandil is always hard to decide whether I exhaustion or their dedication is morf| touching. The Battalion (USPS 045 41>0) M»• 1111 > I l' \ 11 N XI! Il w I'M || X I I I l.lil'U >< Ml It XI ( ■ X | I C l C'lK C' The Battalion Editorial Board Scot Walker 1 (inmi Wade See, l.ditoi Juliette Rizzo. ( )|)inii m Page Editor Fiona Soltes. ( ii\ Editor Ellen Hobbs. Chuck Squatriglia. New s l a lu< n s Tom Kehoe. Spoi i> Editor Jay Janner. A i i Direc tor Dean Sueltenfuss. late Editor / he Editorial Policy ' .1 m l|l-|X (llil. M-|f-NII|X> hi in A.VM .mil ih I l he c"'Mril\ i cp- li.inns, tiic- H.m.ili. in r: • »!»cl .Ill'll .1' .1 i . .x-( iilli yi Si.iin in. Opinions 1'\|X I .'I'd ix I Iw li.ill.ilinn .> u I in n ml h< mi <1 "i i hr .nil In ir. aiii I (In in ■! . n -l lil ihi- |||XIXIII|' III 1 rs.i' A\M .Iilinm i \ • n ihi- IW mi <1 i X l. I'l.u s, 7. 11 I'M . I I pel lull x 'I II. i II.lilt il I - •< i C.ille..e SlalK.i, l\ i paid al ( olleei 'ii i . \ilv s:i i.i,L> M lisillli K. Mi I)imaid. i:m mi. Si.iium. | \ I'OSl MAM I k s n in. 111 i Kel t I M > I >' li-vie Malum i \ 77s | addu i.: li I. le' ini. . h.m I In H.ili.il- v. Col- <§>139? HCWN Wf If you’ve been around longenoi you recognize what’s wrong with l stories. I hate to follow the ex AIM and other right-wing propap dists by picking on our best newspap instead of our worst, but some m stories in The New York Times, vh has been giving extensive coverage] the crack problem, are useful exampi of what the press is doing wrong, week the Times ran a story nightmarish night in a hospital en gency room in the ghetto in Oaklarj Calif. The story detailed the end flow of crack addicts into the emergen! room; the large number of repeatt tomers, including gunshot victimsi had been shot before; a huge, black man absolutely berserk on era who could scarcely lie held downt leather straps, several cops and 1 medical personnel irt the room; andil exhaustion and discouragement oh physicians, including a moving quoa from a ’60s liberal who had just burnt out trying to handle the flood oft coming through the place. Wher boon think ; your tising (for th fill tl make nets r the clas!