Febryj
dnesday • February 4, 1998
The Battalion
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njofjite House Under
^ t” coverage, an-
u r story passed
. igh the AP wire
I ‘ out hype, with-
Beverly
Mireles
columnist
ixtsei
ew E:
Has.
fact:
iproar, and
out notice.
Tiile newscasters were luridly talking
it “semen stains,” a story was being
?d out that universally concerns the
1 " dng public sector that uses an Inter-
ervice.
^ involves the Navy, one of its men, a ca-
sailor named Timotliy McVeigh (no re-
|U n to the convicted Oklahoma City
her), and a possible breach of the
se YtAsk, Don’t Tell, Don’t Pursue” policy.
he story in brief: Senior Chief Petty Of-
h McVeigh sent a non self-identifying e-
concerning a toy drive to the wife of a
3S. w crewman. When the woman re
nt edit, she noticed the return address of
ia:, /srch” on e-mail.
jseUsing the America Online member di-
ory, the woman looked up the profile
w,; his address and saw that it listed
I'ttfcr” under marital status and under
ed bies listed “boy watching.”
he mentioned this to her husband,
i reported it to a commanding officer,
f|> sent it further up the chain of com-
iiid.
rom that point, a Navy investigator un-
..ully, by AO Us account, obtained the full
)(ie and address of McVeigh from AOL.
'resently the Navy is attempting to dis-
s McVeigh by using the information,
Mc\feigh is charging that the Navy vio-
^ d the 1986 Electronic Communications
111 acyfAct by procuring the information
uthim without a warrant.
co: Jow the question is where the wrong
ig originated.
cv ' tnaginably, at the Navy’s irresponsi-
y in ignoring its own policies. The
f e,! n’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Pursue” poli-
.rould presumably dictate the Navy’s
duct on such matters,
dowever, that policy was disregarded
jjjflurried attempt to deny a 17-year
)r his career and pension in the so-
jd name of procedure,
i the ir endeavor to force a man out of
fob by means of a basically anony-
is e-mail, the Navy has allowed ho-
''phobia to rear its ugly head. Only one
[Li'lcVeigh’s five profiles even mentioned
— McVeigh told “Good Morning
erica” that he only put “gay” in the
file to “get to see who he could talk to.”
’hough his response is somewhat dubi-
, the fact of the matter is that the Navy
rstepped its bounds by pursuing the
rmation.
[f AOL had not wrongly given out the
fidential information, the Navy never
ild have been able to confirm that the
file was McVeigh’s.
’herefore, no one else would have
wn it was McVeigh either, unless he an-
nced his sexual preference more pub-
', and the Navy has yet to show proof
occurred.
lut more importantly, one must won-
why in the world AOL submitted this
rmation to the Navy investigator, who
ttified herself as only “a friend or ac-
intance” of McVeigh’s,
s confidential information really that
sssible? These are worrisome questions
n age that is increasingly technologi-
y oriented. AOL, and other such Inter
providers, are supposed to be “safe.”
’eople hand over their personal infor-
tion, as well as their credit card num-
s, and they should be able to exact a
:ain amount of anonymity,
bionymity is one of the main draws of
J and its 11 million subscribers rein-
:e that point. People enjoy to tiying out
erent personality facets under the pro-
ive guise of a screen name. Their full
itities should be protected, not just be-
se they are paying customers, but be-
se it is the law, and should be upheld
ess a warrant says otherwise.
Though AOL has now promised to “in-
ite additional measures” and to “rein-
:e [their] privacy policies and proce-
es,” the system has been jarred.
J eople now know that somewhere
tg the lines personal privacy was
iched, and that knowledge will re-
id long after McVeigh’s case is gone
i the courts.
Beverly Mireles is a freshman
microbiology major.
LONE STAR LOWDOWN
Where's the beef?
Texas charges when Winfrey brands meat thumbs down
Caleb
McDaniel
columnist
O n April 15,
1996,vege
tarian ac
tivist Howard Ly
man appeared on
“The Oprah Win
frey Show.” Lyman
told a national
viewing audience
that common cat
tle-ranching tech
niques in the Unit
ed States could
introduce danger
ous diseases to American consumers.
With a reaction that she would later
regret, Winfrey turned to the camera and
had this to say about Lyman’s report: “It
has just stopped me cold from eating an
other hamburger.” The studio audience
chuckled. But leaders in the beef industry
were not in a laughing mood.
They were in a lawsuit mood. And they
are hoping that they will be laughing all the
way to the bank. Cattlemen from Amarillo
and the Texas panhandle are arguing that
Winfrey’s burger belittlement was directly
responsible for a sharp decline in cattle
prices in the summer of 1996.
The price for bad-mouthing the beef?
A $10.3 million lawsuit. The case is based
on Texas’ food libel laws, which make it a
crime to say mean things about meat.
Yes, these laws really do exist. Really.
Because of Oprah’s misfortune, it will
be some time before Ricki Lake takes a
shot at poultry products, and it is safe to
say that Maury Povich will keep his feel
ings about beef to himself. Talk show
hosts have gotten the message — taking
on the beef industry could mean $ 10 mil
lion less in their pocketbooks.
But the real lesson to be learned from
this brouhaha has nothing to do with
beef. It has to do with common sense.
The most disturbing thing about the case
is the claim that enough people order
their diets on the authority of Oprah Win-
WORLD ORDER
frey’s talk show to significantly damage
an entire industry.
The fact that the cattlemen have been
taken seriously is what should scare peo
ple the most. Think about it. The allega
tion is that Oprah Winfrey has enough in
fluence to trample agricultural markets
underfoot with one careless remark
about Big Macs. Be afraid. Be veiy afraid.
Even if Oprah wins this case, the fact
that she was credibly sued should con
cern us. The lawsuit implies that there are
people out there who base their world
views on Winfrey. These people might live
next door to you.
If the beef industry is right, then peo
ple have forgotten that talk shows should
not be mistaken for news shows. Celebri
ties like Oprah Winfrey are not paid to
present well-balanced views and well-
reasoned arguments.
They are paid to entertain. So it ought
to be a given that the information provid
ed by talk shows should be approached
with suspicion.
Interestingly, in an article published
just one month before Oprah’s fateful
April episode, sociologist Dr. Vicki Abt of
Penn State University cautioned talk
show viewers.
“TV talk shows offer us a world of
blurred boundaries,” Dr. Abt said. Distinc
tions between “credible and incredible wit
nesses [and] truth and falseness” are often
“manipulated and erased for our distrac
tion and entertainment.” Consequently,
Abt urges talk show viewers to be “screen
smart” about what tliey watch on TV
In other words, do not believe every
thing you hear. More specifically, do not
believe everything you hear on “The
Oprah Winfrey Show.” Oprah is not an au
thority on beef, and vegetarian activists
like Lyman are not likely to provide objec
tive facts about their carnivorous enemies.
The moral of the story is this: take
everything that you hear on a talk show
with a grain of salt. And if you think that
advice is so self-evident that it goes with
out saying, I have four words for you —
“twelve million dollar lawsuit.”
In a critical article on talk shows, soci
ologist Clay Steinman confesses that if
the leaders of “the talk show genre deter
mine knowledge and tell us how the
world exists, I must be honest — I am
scared.” And if Oprah Winfrey can turn an
entire industry on its head with a wave of
her hand — I am scared,too.
Caleb McDaniel is a freshman
history major.
Hussein’s popularity due to ‘image’ problems
JL JL •/ JL
Stewart
Patton
columnist
S addam Hussein lost the Per
sian Gulf War in 1991, and
now he is losing again be
cause of what Americans call an
“image problem”. The Image War
between the United States and
Iraq is a ‘90s version of the Cold
War fought with gestures and
words rather than massive
weapons programs and military
intelligence.
The United States is fighting
the Image War by stacking the
U.N. Security Council’s weapons
inspection teams with Americans. In their latest move,
the United States appointed William Scott Ritter Jr., an
American Marine in charge of military intelligence in
the GulfWar, to lead the newest inspection team.
No wonder Iraq has branded him a spy. With his
prior military service against Iraq, Ritter is the Image
War version of Eisenhower, storming sites where the
United States believes weapons are being hidden.
Another front in the United States image attack is
the manner in which some of the inspections are con
ducted. While most inspections involve die inspectors
driving to the selected site at an appointed time, some
of the inspections more resemble Delta Force Com
mando raids. Most notably, inspectors in black uni
forms and full combat gear stole into one of Hussein’s
presidential palaces, ostensibly to look for weapons of
mass destruction.
With these raids, the United States is furthering its
image as the only world superpower that holds the
right to ignore the sovereignty of other nations in pur
suit of their own goals.
Since the Image War is fought with posturing and
positioning rather than specific policies, if Hussein
were to cease hindering the weapons inspections and
allow the inspectors complete autonomy, the conflict
between the United States and Iraq would not end.
Rather, the Image War would only escalate to a higher
and more dangerous level because Hussein’s compli
ance would enhance the image of the United States.
The Image War is a zero-sum game — there are no
winners or losers. The participants only have the
choice to end the war or to perpetuate it. Hussein can
end the Image War by changing his image to match
that ofWestern political leaders, thus effectively elimi
nating any opposition to the United States, causing
the War to stop in its tracks.
To become a more U.S.-friendly figure, Hussein
should start by abandoning his military uniforms and
berets and donning the black or navy “power suit”
popular among Westerners.
A military uniform is the costume of those who
fight with tanks and artillery. The Image War demands
a new outfit that shows the world that Hussein is a
nice, conforming gentleman like everyone else.
The next step in Hussein’s daytime-talk-show
make over is to shave his mustache. A hairy upper lip
is almost non-existent on Capitol Hill, as U.S. law
makers opt for the clean-cut all-American look.
The worst action Hussein could take, resulting in
image suicide, would be to grow a full beard. A Mid
dle Eastern man with a beard strikes fear into the
hearts of most Americans because of the popular
notion of Muslim terrorists bent on destroying
buildings and hijacking planes.
The final stage in Hussein’s transformation is the
Image War equivalent of a long-range thermonuclear
device: the smile. Americans smile at everyone from
their best friend to the stray dog they just met on the
street. Most other countries are more reserved in their
show of affection.
More effective than all the SCUD missiles fired during
the Persian GulfWar, a plastic smile is able to destroy any
Image War foe by showing that its wearer is a wann per
son who just wants to feed his people and would not
dream of creating weapons of mass destmetion.
An effective image change to thwart a foe would
not be without precedent. When Chinese President
Jiang Xemin paid a formal visit to the United States,
he wore a suit, shook hands with eveiyone and smiled
incessantly. Because of these many image victories,
the United States mentioned the 1989 massacre of
students in Tienanmen Square only in passing.
Xemin was let off the hook with a non-committal
admission that the countless human rights violations
in China were probably a bad thing, but the United
States made no plans for future action against China if
they do not clean up their act.
Hussein, you have the power to end this nonsense by
depriving the United States of an enemy, causing the
Image War to backfire. You have the power to get the
United States off your back, not by changing your poli
cies, but by the painless but powerful process of chang
ing your image, for in America, image is all that matters.
Stewart Patton is a junior sociology major.
MAIL CALL
Football, illegal parking
cause problems, not PITS
For once, the parking problems on
campus are not caused by Parking, Traf
fic and Transportation Services. They
are caused by a combination of two fac
tors: the football program and illegal
use of off-campus parking tags by on-
campus students.
Let’s face it. The football program’s
expansion has become an unstoppable
monster on campus. First they took the
Reveille gravesite with as little publicity as
possible, then the 12th Man memorial,
then Mt. Aggie and now a much-needed
parking lot, which conveniently disap
peared over the winter break, when no one
would have the chance to notice.
Additionally, the on-campus students
who have difficulty getting good parking
spaces seem to have set up a black market
in blue (and probably other) parking tags. I
get to campus at 6:00 a.m. every morning,
and I park in the blue lot between Kyle
Field and KAMU. Every day, I see the same
cars parked in the same spaces in the rows
closest to the southside residential area. I
would be willing to bet that other parking lots
have similar permanent residents.
Since the earliest I have ever seen
PTTS out patrolling is 7:30 a.m., I would
imagine they are unaware of this prob
lem, since the traffic flow onto campus is
picking up by then.
For those of you who use this lot during
the day, I would advise you not to use the fa
miliar tactic of waiting in line for a space to
open up in the first three or four rows of
that lot. Those cars do not move, and like
ly will not change much until the end of
the semester.
Hopefully PTTS will devise some way
to monitor turnover of parking spaces to
prevent more on-campus students from
using the off-campus spaces illegally.
Travis Lull
Class of’98
Column overlooked talent,
achievements of faculty
It is reassuring to know that Czelusta has
taken such a keen interest in the world-class
status of our University. Finally, after seeing
this term bandied about for quite some time,
someone has informed us of the actual stan
dards required in achieving this distin
guished endorsement. Please tell us the
name of the institution responsible for this
accreditation. When are we up for review?
A university as large as this one cannot
be deemed inferior simply because not
every college or department is among the
very best in the nation. I have yet to see
the evidence for our professors’ “intellec
tual underachievement,” but I’m certain
such a blanket insult is misguided.The
College ofVeterinary Medicine is, in fact,
regarded as being among the very best.
The new Bush School has already brought
world leaders to discuss important politi
cal issues. Additionally, members of our
talented faculty, some in departments not
recognized for outstanding achievements,
convinced me that hard work would truly
be worth my time. Are these characteris
tics of a subpar university?
I have tried to recall my conversations
in the past week as suggested. They don’t
seem to be as daft as he said they might.
From this, I concluded that Czelusta is
indeed “uniquely surrounded by buf
foons.” I realize, however, I have no busi
ness calling anyone a buffoon. The most
clever response I could come up with re
garding to his column had something to
do with the direction Highway 6 runs.
/. Rhodes Murphy
Class of’96