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)
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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
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<§>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!