6The Daily Tar HeelMonday. January 21. 1985
Jeff Hid ay. Editor
Joel Broadway, Managing. FJitor
MARK STINNEFORD. Associate FJitor
BEN PERKOWSKI. Associate FJitor
Kelly Simmons. University FJitor
VANCE TREFETHEN. State and National FJitor
MELANIE WELLS. City Editor
DAN TILLMAN. Business Editor
Lynn Davis. New Editor
Frank Kennedy, sports Editor
Jeff Grove. Am Editor
Sharon Sheridan. Features Editor
JEFF NEUVILLE, Photography Editor
A finer land, a better people
Few American statesmen are at the
same time remembered with such rev
erence and contempt as Martin Luther
King Jr. He inspired the best in his
countrymen, refusing to use violence as
a way to fight for his cause of racial
harmony. Too, he inspired the worst
blind contempt for having close friends
who were believed to be high-level
communists.
For the most part, though, time has
worn well with the Rev. King. His
prominent place in history is justly
celebrated for more than the obligatory
one day per year. As William T. Small,
assistant dean of the School of Public
Health, put it last week, "People honor
Dr. King from his birthday until
February."
Having just passed what would have
been King's 56th birthday, last Tuesday,
the University today has a unique
opportunity to pay tribute to this slain
civil rights leader. Tonight at 8 in
Memorial Hall, former Chapel Hill
mayor Howard Lee will speak at the
fourth annual Martin Luther King Jr.
birthday celebration. Tomorrow, at 3
p.m. in the Rosenau Hall auditorium,
the executive director of Transafrica of
Washington, D.C., will speak at the
seventh annual Martin Luther King Jr.
Memorial Ceremony.
It's enough to make one think that
Nature's balancing act
There are some who believe that
nature has a way of balancing things out.
Evidence over the weekend indicates
they just might be right. Tar Heel fans
went to bed with deflated spirits Sat
urday night after a rare loss in Carmi
chael to Duke. They awoke to find the
pain of defeat softened by a dazzling coat
of snow that blanketed the state early
Sunday.
A North Carolina snow, a creature
that rarely appears more than two or
three times a year, puts residents in a
festive mood as almost all but essential
businesses (hospitals, sellers of spirits
and the like) close their doors for the
event. Long-time North Carolinians
know that the snow is best enjoyed at
home. Some are even tempted to put
up guard rails around their yards to
protect against the most dangerous of
Tar Heels those who claim they can
drive in snow. Owners of tow trucks and
other four-wheel-drive vehicles do a
thriving business pulling such "sea
soned" drivers out of ditches.
Besides getting stranded in their autos,
UNC students could be seen yesterday
partaking in those activities unique to
a day of snowfall. Some of the more
obnoxious members of the student body
woke up their late-sleeping roommates
with a volley of snowballs. A hearty
bunch on Carmichael Field engaged in
snow football, a game particularly hard
on the exposed fingers and faces of the
The Daily Tar Heel
Assistant News Editor: Steve Ferguson
Editorial Writers: Dick Anderson and Karen Youngblood
Assistant Managing Editor: Amy Styers
News: Mike Allen, Crystal Baity, Lisa Brantley, Tim Brown, James Cameron, Matt Campbell,
Joan Clifford, Tom Conlon, Katy Fridl, Mike Gunzenhauser, Beth Houk, Sallie Krawcheck,
Genie Lindberg, Guy Lucas, Georgia Ann Martin, Dora McAlpin, Andy Miller, Marjorie Morris,
Kathy Nanney, Janet Olson, Beth Ownley, Ruthie Pipkin, Mark Powell, Karen Rogers, David
Schmidt, Devi Sen, Rachel Stiffler, Kevin Sullivan, Jim Suroweicki, Lisa Swicegood, Andy
Trincia, Jennifer Trotter, Laura Van Sant, Kevin Washington, Scott Wharton, Leigh Williams,
Lorry Williams, and Laurie Willis.
Sports: Scott Fowler and Lee Roberts, assistant sports editors. Tim Brown, Scott Canterberry,
Tim Crothers, Mark Davis, Paris Goodnight, David McCullough, Mike Persinger, Kurt
Rosenberg, Mike Schoor, Beth Velliquette, Mike Waters and Bob Young.
Features: Marymelda Hall, assistant features editor. Mike Altieri, Nancy Atkinson, Tom
Camacho, Vicki Daughtry, Loretta Grantham, Jennifer Keller, Anjetta McQueen, Mary
Mulvihill, Tom Rose, Liz Saylor, Sonya Terrell and Lori Thomas.
Arts: Frank Bruni, Steve Carr, Elizabeth Ellen, Ivy Hilliard, Eddie Huffman and Virginia Smith.
Photography: Larry Childress, Nancy London, Jamie Moncrief, Stretch, and Lori Thomas.
Copy Editors: Angela Gunn and Carolyn Wilson.
Business and Advertising: Anne Fulcher, general manager; Paula Brewer, advertising director;
Tammy Martin, student business manager; Angela Booze, accounts receivable clerk; Terry Lee,
student advertising manager; Alicia Susan D'Anna, Greg Goosmann, Patricia Gorry, Melanie
Parlier, Stacey Ramirez, Doug Robinson, Amy Schutz and Scott Whitaker, ad representatives;
Patti Pittman, classified advertising manager, Laura Bowen, assistant; Jim Greenhill, office
manager; and Cathy Davis, secretary.
Distributioncirculation: William Austin, manager.
Production: Brenda Moore and Stacy Wynn. Rita Galloway, assistant.
Printing: Hinton Press, Inc. of Mebane
laiig
92nd year of editorial freedom
King has achieved postmortem superstar
staus. But far from it. Official recogni
tion in the form of a national holiday,
which the nation will celebrate every
third Monday in January beginning next
year, came only after King's name was
dragged through the congressional mud
by ultra-conservatives. The new holiday
did not pass easily through the Senate
chamber, where North Carolina's Sen.
Jesse Helms tried to persuade his
colleagues that King was a communist.
Whether one agrees that the man
deserves recognition in the way of a
national holiday, the degree to which
King made the country aware of its
inherent racism must be seen as remar
kable. And vital. Accepting the Nobel
Prize for Peace in 1964, King said, "Yet
when the years have past . . . men and
women will know and children will be
taught that we have a finer land, a better
people, a more noble civilization
because these humble children of God
were willing to suffer for righteousness'
sake."
That the University and world com
munities devote such substantial energy
this time of year in remembrance of King
is no mystery. Blacks and whites alike
celebrate Martin Luther King with
passion because he represents the highest
principles of this nation.
participants and one in which a com
pleted pass usually signals victory for the
team accomplishing the feat. Lenoir Hall
trays saw their best use in months as
students turned them into makeshift
sleds on a particularly treacherous run
near Kenan Stadium. The gourmet
minded gathered ingredients for snow
cream, a tasty treat, though its nutritive
value has been brought into question by
the increasing acidity of local
precipitation.
Perhaps North Carolinians make the
most of snow because it is usually short
lived. If the past is any guide, the blanket
of snow will be memory by the end of
the week. Unlike stubborn Yankee
snows, a Southern snow doesn't hang
around like bothersome in-laws; it
usually departs well before it has become
blackened with soot and auto emissions.
There is also heartening consistency
in the midst of our unusual weather.
Chancellor Fordham says higher edu
cation in Chapel Hill is likely to go on
despite the frozen precipitation. UNC is
not some wimpy county school system
to close at the drop of the first sno wflake,
though the University did close three
years ago, for the first time in decades,
when successive days of snow and bitter
cold turned streets into glaciers.
If you dare to walk to class this
morning, the best advice we can give is,
watch your footing and dodge those
snowballs!
Rampant redundancies and
By FRANK BR UNI
Two weeks ago or thereabouts, the Unicorn
Hunters at Lake Superior College announced the
items on their 10th annual list of words and
phrases that merit banishment on the grounds
of overuse. The Unicorns, who have been at this
business for a decade and are getting pretty good
at it, are also getting a fair amount of attention
for what they do: The more than 3,000 word
nominations, only a fraction of which made the
list, included suggestions from Japan and Saudi
Arabia. Among those words or phrases deemed
unnecessary or unwanted were "bare naked,"
cited for redundance; "near miss," a less accurate
synonym for "near hit;" and "overcrowded,"
which in reference to such places as prisons and
classrooms is almost always substituted for the
less dramatic "crowded."
With reason, many might first consider the
Unicorns frivolous and their achievements
dubious, but a longer look at the list will convert
more than a few. At spotting worn-thin words
and obsolete idiomatic expressions, these guys
at Lake Superior are peerless. True enough, theirs
is not an especially altruistic task nor does it
promise to better society in any measurable
fashion. They are not from the same mold as
less atypical (and, arguably, more important)
campus organizations; they do not seek to end
world hunger, improve race relations, promote
equal rights for women, or pass resolutions to
conflicts in Central America. But in lightheart
edly mocking the oddities in our vernacular,
perhaps they tell us, unintentionally but
nonetheless effectively, something about our
peculiarities as a people.
Take, for instance, their dead-on-target exile
of the suffix "-busters" from the English
language. Has any word appendix ever been so
quickly embraced, so universally applied? We
had, in 1984, "Reagan-busters" as well as
"Mondale-busters," "inflation-busters" along
with "crime-busters." If nothing else, this legacy
of the embarrassingly silly film Ghostbusters
reflects America's love affair with tidy verbal
banners, as well as visual ones, and testifies to
our readiness to reduce any problem, task or
movement into a terse, palatable phrase. It is
much like bur preference for politicians who feed
us symbols instead of soliloquies.
Rendering the complicated, more identifiable
and harmless at the risk of distorting reality also
seems the intention of the phrase "Star Wars."
which earned a prominent place on the Unicorns'
list. Created by some journalist along the line
and unflinchingly adopted by every other, the
phrase romanticizes and trivalizes an important
matter. President Reagan himself has renounced
it, preferring the more suitably formal Strategic
Defense Initiative. When Reagan and his
Pentagon compatriots talk about the ostensibly
impenetrable defense, the issue is the Soviet-U.S.
LETTERS TO THE
Giving up a little privacy for the good of all
To the editor:
Some high school reminiscences
make me disagree with your editor
ial "Search unwarranted" (Jan. 1 7).
My point is that I lived through four
years of something like what you
fear. So relax: some people even
benefitted from the program I'll
describe.
I attended an international school
in Jakarta, Indonesia. The school
administration was very worried
about having students arrested for
possessing drugs, especially after
several kids in Singapore were
Unpatriotic
To the editor:
Every so often we encounter
situations that reflect the apparent
apathetic attitude of various Uni
versity employees. One such situa
tion occured during the final week
of exams in December. While
walking through the Quad we
noticed a University police officer
"retiring the colors." We do not
mean this in the traditional sense,
because in actuality the officer
proceeded to wad the American flag
like a wet dishrag and to shove it
under his armpit.
We feel it is our obligation as
conservative UNC students who still
maintain a high degree of patriotism
to display our outrage at this
disrespectful incident. We were
brought up to respect the American
flag and all that it stands for. At
a time when American patriotism
is supposedly at its highest in recent
years, it appears it is at its lowest
on this campus. What does it all
mean and where will it all end?
Mike Altieri
E.C. Boutwell
Richard Watts
Teague
Wishful thinking won't achieve
To the editor:
Dr. Coulter's claim ("Only
escape: arms control," Jan. 16) that
the American people have a unique
responsibility to save humanity
depends on one of two assumptions:
either one must assume that the
American people can influence both
the American and Soviet govern
ments' policies or one must assume
that the American people can at
least influence the American govern
ment's policies and that the Soviet
Union will respond in kind to a
unilateral nuclear freeze or reduc
tion in nuclear weapons. If neither
of these assumptions is true. Dr.
Coulter's claim is suspect and
possibly dangerous.
It may be fairly easy for someone
to accept the idea that the American
people can influence their govern
WW
mm
k3 J?
arms race, a costly manifestation of mutual
paranoia that already threatens to harm
irreparably both superpowers' economies and
that might only escalate with the preparations
for the SD1. They're not talking R2D2 and
C3PO. Nor, to be fair to the administration, are
they intending "wars" in outer space.
However, these glances into the American
character are not really the main point of the
Unicorns' annual scavanger hunt; fun and
linguistic purity are. In this regard, there is only
one element missing from their list a certain
immediacy. The idioms, catch phrases, buzz
words and convoluted or nonsensical phrases
that receive Unicorn condemnation are neces
sarily national, or even universal, in their use.
But the most peculiar expressions in America
tend to be local. How much poorer might Frank
Zappa be today had it not been for a surburban
valley near Los Angeles where teenage girls
disgustedly chortled, "gag me with a spoon"? To
this end, I nominate the following for banishment
from the University of North Carolina venacular:
The Pit. How unflattering. Here is the
intersection of the two main campus libraries,
the student union and the campus cafeteria, and
we're comparing it to a hole in the ground. Here
is the hub of campus activity, and it bears the
same name as the inedible component of a piece
of fruit. If a tour guide makes a slip of the tongue
and pluralizes the term, he's telling would-be Tar
Heels as they stand in the middle of the vast
campus: "This is the Pits." "Pit" is furthermore
an inaccurate definition of this only slightly
sunken brick area; according to my dictionary,
temporarily thrown in the clink.
(They were nabbed during a raid
on their school and were released
after agreeing to leave the country
with their families. It was a touch-and-go
compromise, and everyone
had the Midnight Express jitters for
a while afterward.) The school
administrators in Jakarta struck a
deal with the Indonesian police
whereby our school wouldn't be
raided if a strict drug abuse prev
ention program was followed.
The cornerstone of the effort was
mandatory,, random (and not so
random) urine testing. Hashish was
big on campus, marijuana and
cocaine were common; students
were constantly getting caught. I
was briefly peeing into little bottles,
too, not because I was stoned (too
chicken) but because a friend of a
friend was thought to be a dealer.
My privacy was certainly violated,
and a few civil rights were put on
hold. On the other hand, what
would have happened if the cops
got fed up and marched into home
room? So I submitted to that
(ultimate?) search and seizure.
Drug abuse partly resulted from
poor adjustment to a totally new
WHO fVt I VOTING FO ? rES, AttE
ment's policies. One may be more
hesitant to accept that the American
people can influence the Soviet
government's policies, however. It
would only be necessary to consider
the limited effects of Americans'
outrage and condemnation of
Soviet policies in Afghanistan (the
U.S. government's imposition of a
grain embargo, our boycott 0f the
1980 Summer Olympics and other
countries' reactions notwithstand
ing) to question the influence of the
American people on the Soviet
government's policies.
What about the other possibility
that the Soviet government will
freeze or reduce its nuclear arsenal
"if the U.S. does so first? Although
no exact precedent exists, one might
consider the Soviet and U.S. arms
buildup during an era of "arms
control" in order to get a sense of
U.S. -Soviet interaction. The
number of Soviet strategic war
heads increased from 1,400 in 1970
(the SALT I negotiatiations) to
nearly 5,000 in 1977 (as SALT II
talks neared completion) to 7,900
in 1983-84 (during the START
talks). The number of U.S. strategic
warheads rose from 2.2C0 to 7,400
during the same period. One could
rather simplemindedly decide that
the Soviet government was just
catching up with the United States
during this period of "arms control"
and would respond to a U.S.
stimulus of nuclear freeze in the
same manner as it responded to the
U.S. stimulus of arms buildup
earlier. Still, even Dr. Coulter
acknowledges that the fate of
humanity "cannot be left safely to
the Soviet government."
other beasts
most definitions of "pit" imply a depression
somewhat more abysmal. One definition, "area
for trading in a stock or grain exchange," might
pertain to the kind of scoping that occurs between
the sexes in this brick area and thus explain the
origin of the label.
Greek (as an adjective for anything or anyone
connected to a fraternity or sorority). How
flattering to students living and playing on
Rosemary Street. How unfair to Homer,
Socrates and friends.
Fast Break. So I'm a little late on this one:
It closed recently and promises to reopen with
a new name. Indeed, it should be renamed.
Hearkening back to busier days, I ask: When
did you not have to stand in line or wait a
significant amount of time for this "fast" food?
If the new food stop in this area follows this
tradition, let it be called, "Head Ache."
Free flicks. We pay student fees and tuition
before receiving the I.D. that admits us to these.
They're a bargain, but they're not free.
Stranger mixer. As in an innovative addition
to rum, gin or vodka?
The Lodge. Are there slopes nearby?
Frank Winstead. After seeing Frank speak
at forums for Daily Tar Heel editor, student body
president. Residence Hall Association president
(Have I missed anything?), the name (not to
mention face and voice) is all too familiar. Let
it henceforth be scrawled in University annals
as Crank instead.
Frank Bruni, a junior English major from La
Jolla, Calif, is a staff writer and part-time
lexicographer for The Daily Tar Heel.
EDITOR
culture, not forgetting low cost and
easy access. For me and many
American and European teen-agers,
Jakarta was sometimes a hard place
to live in. Some students with drug
problems were helped sooner than
they might otherwise have been, and
more quietly and constructively
than if the government had inter
vened. On balance, then, the pro
gram was a good idea and worth
the brief suspension of our right to
privacy.
Doug Brower
Chapel Hill
I3ir MUVlMo- &n ELEcTvOrt ?
arms control
If one decides that the American
people cannot influence the Soviet
government's policies and doubts
whether the Soviet government
simply responds in kind to a U.S.
stimulus, what next? A reasonable
response is suggested by Dr. Coulter
himself: "We must do all we can
to know more about the Soviet
Union and the Soviet people." If one
does investigate the history of the
Bolshevik revolution and its evolu
tion through the Stalinist era into
the modern period, one might arrive
at the opinion that the responsibility
of the American people is not to
demand that the U.S. government
unilaterally take positions which the
Soviet Union favors just to achieve
"a relationship of 'live and let live."'
Paul Killebrew
Department of Economics