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4 • The Red and Black • Wednesday, October 24, 1990
OPINIONS
"Yes, It's true. No broccoli."
— First lady Barbara Bush in reference to media hoopla over
her husband's eating habits.
The Red & Black
Established 1893—Incorporated 1980
An independent ttudent newspaper not affiliated with the University of Georgia
Robert Todd/Editor-in-Chief
Jennifer Rampey/Managing Editor
David Johnston/Opinions Editor
■ EDITORIALS
Good job
Congratulations are in order for two University art
professors who each recieved $20,000 grants from the
National Endowment for the Arts.
Glen Kaufman, professor of fabric design, recieved
a grant of $20,000, the maximum amount awarded by
the NEA, which he is using in Japan to silkscreen gold
and silver images on handwoven silk. He plans to
return to the University winter quarter.
Gary Noffke, professor of jewelry and metalwork,
also recieved $20,000 which he will use to buy
materials and equipment to do large scale pieces.
The grant recipients are selected by a panel of
artists and critics in the visual arts. Noffke and
Kaufman are two out of only 81 people to receive
$20,000 grants.
The fact that two University professors received the
maximum grant also reflects very well on our
Department of Art.
These awards should underscore the value of the
NEA. It has come under repeated attack by right-wing
zealots like Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC) who would have
politicians judge the value of an artwork.
Artists are trained professionals who work as hard
as anyone else to achieve in their field.
While universities all over the country, including
ours, are being forced to cut their budgets because of
failing state economies, the NEA provides artists like
Kaufman and Noffke the opportunity to continue their
work. At a minimum cost to the taxpayers, art
educators are able to continue to provide training for
future American artists.
Great art is at the root of every great civilization. It
provokes thought, stirs emotions and becomes a symbol
for its place and time.
Let the NEA and artists like Kaufman and Noffke
continue to do their jobs.
Tough talk
"I'm tough on crime and I want to put criminals
behind bars.”
— any political candidate for any office, at any time.
How many times do we have to hear politicos
broach serious, in-depth issues with cheap lip service?
Ask either of the state’s gubernatorial candidates
where they’ll put all these criminals or where they’ll
get the money to do all their reforms, and they’ll give
you a blank stare, flash a cheesy grin and change the
subject.
Experts predict that in 11 years the state’s prisons
will have to hold 64,000 inmates. However, even with
projected construction projects, state prisons will only
be able to hold 35,000 inmates. Yet every political
candidate continues to roll down the tunnel vision-
track of stiffer sentences, no options.
There are alternative and viable solutions that
should not be automatically disregarded.
• County work camps, home confinement
programs, probation and low-security (low cost)
detention centers for first-time, non-violent offenders.
Experts say these programs are effective in reducing
prison crowding and promoting criminal reform.
Similar programs in other states have been successful.
• Cutting back the amenities in prisons would help
reduce the overwhelming costs associated with the day-
to-day operation of prisons. It seems somewhat warped
that the state does more to ensure the confort and
luxury of its criminals that its elderly.
• Put prisoners to work on some constructive
projects. For example, prisoners could raise their own
food in a farm environment, work to restore
playgrounds for schools, etc.
The point is to end the tough talk and give this
problem some thorough thought.
STAFF
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RIGHTS ACT OF 1990.
Contemporary Concerts changes focus
“Have you bought your Bob Dylan tickets
yet?” a friend asked me the other day while I
was riding a bus on campus. I mumbled “No”
and my bus stop came up before I could offer a
more articulate response.
As I walked to my car I thought about what I
should have said. I should have pointed out
that I wouldn’t see Bob Dylan in the UGA col
iseum, if I was his most ardent fan. Which I’m
not.
Before all the many people walking this
campus who wish they were living in 1967 in
stead of 1990 lynch me with their lengthy
tresses, let me explain.
I used to work on Contemporary Concerts,
the division of the University Union that’s re
sponsible for arranging the Dylan show. I
worked the Beach Boys concert a couple of
years ago at the same UGA coliseum. Yes, the
show that lasted for five minutes after the band
left the stage because of all the echo in that
building — meant for a basketball showcase not
a musical concert.
But all matters of musical clarity aside, I’d
like to know why Contemporary Concerts has
suddenly shifted their focus from presenting
new, innovative, or obscure musical acts, to un
derwriting mega-shows with our Student Activ
ities fees. Their rationale so far is that the
Dylan show will attract people from the Atlanta
area since he isn’t playing there. So what? Why
use student fees to back a show that you hope
will attract non-students. Aren’t these shows
for students? Or are they for lining the pockets
of the Student Activities budget? What do you
say Dr. Porter?
From what I’ve heard, Contemporary Con-
World should
I descended to the depths of the Tate Center,
attending a meeting of the University’s Objec-
tivi8t Club; a good friend of mine had been
meaning to visit them for several weeks and I
was happy to escort her. My mood was to sour
quickly, however.
After a videotaped lecture in which an ear
nest disciple of Ayn Rand preached her gospel
of self-interest to a group of bored-looking col
lege students, the meeting shifted to a dis
cussion of current events. One young man
ventured that Mikhail Gorbachev’s receipt of
the Nobel Peace Prize was a travesty.
“Why?” I asked. It seemed to me that Gorba
chev’s refusal to invoke the Brezhnev Doctrine
and send in red army tanks during the “velvet
revolutions" which swept through Eastern Eu
rope last year was reason enough for the prize.
I reckoned that those who remembered the
Prague Spring of 1968 or the Hungarian
uprising of 1956 and the consequences thereof
would agree. Not so.
“He’s the head of the Communist Party,” re
plied my new acquaintance, "he’s part of the
problem - not part of the solution."
When I suggested that the Soviet Union’s re
cent flirtation with the twentieth century
began when Mr. Gorbachev replaced the geri
atric Konstantin Chernenko, I was greeted
with disbelief.
“No,” he said, “no compromises. The prize
should have gone to a dissident, like Sakharov.”
I had stumbled onto a key tenet of Objec
tivism - no compromises. Ms. Rand’s novels are
a strange hybrid of pop-culture trash and
Nietzschean philosophy - lurid rape fantasies
described in purple prose ("He held her as if his
flesh had cut through hers”) mingle with mav
erick architects who refuse to build Colonial
houses for their clients (who should want
Modern). But he was right, Ms. Rand’s charac
ters do refuse any compromise with the evil
forces with which they struggle.
Rutherford
certs will continue to focus on large bands,
large money shows. What that means is that
students will be offered fewer concerts per
quarter and the ones that are offered will cost
more despite the money we already pay each
quarter supposedly for Student Activities.
Instead ot blazing a path of uniqueness by of
fering acts that students might not hove been
saturated with already, Contemporary Con
certs has been sucked into the media/hype
storm, MTV, Poodle Hair Dooed, insipid mu
sical crap that is the life blood of today’s music
industry.
Getting back to the Dylan concert, what will
be gained by the people that attend? Little. The
intimate, club atmosphere that a successful live
show requires will be lost in the behemoth bas
ketball arena.
About five years ago, I decided to stop footing
the bill for places like the Omni or Lakewood
and all the theatrical outfits that play there.
And yes, when you get that big, the music
comes second, the theatrics come first. Not that
I entered those doors on any regular basis.
About 1981 is when the Clash pulled the pro
verbial wool away from my eyes concerning the
Top 40 musical manure pile.
I realized that sitting or standing amid
throngs of people watching a dim figure move,
around an enormous stage was akin to visiting*
a shopping mall. Malls scare, more so since I
once worked in one. I know that underneath all
that shine and glitter, lies the throbbing heart
of corporate greed, slowly beating the march
that America danced to throughout the Reagen
80s — Buy or Die.
A successful live music show requires an inti
mate, close atmosphere. Anything bigger is use
less. After that it becomes unwieldy and
theatrically stupid.
But I shouldn’t be surprised that people flock
to see the lifeless arena shows that Eire the
same exact show each night. The only thing dif
ferent is the name of the city when the poodle
hair dooed singer screams “Atlanta are you
ready to party?”
One look at the Top 10 proves what a gullible
audience is willing to listen to, and more than
listen, plunk down $10 for.
Vanilla Ice. That sounds like something
you’d get at Baskin Robbins. You could even get
a double dip with Milli Vanilli. Dino. Wasn’t
that a dinosaur on the Flinstones?
It’s all computer generated pablum for the
masses.
Ill end this rambling narrative with the
words of Chuck D. and Professor Griff from
Public Enemy (I know, their music is computer
generated, but it has some musical validity) —
“Don’t believe the hype.”
I sure don’t.
Jeff Rutherford is a senior journalism major.
be grateful to Gorbachev
John
Hunter
I wondered: what would the world be like
today had Mr. Gorbachev not gone the route he
did?
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was bom in
March of 1931 in the Soviet town of Privolnye,
twenty-four hours by train from Moscow. Two
years later, one-third of his village succumbed
to famine, to which the Kremlin turned a blind
eye, hoping to sap the strength of any potential
rural counter-revolutionaries.
Mikhail’s family had been well-off before the
Revolution, and there was food enough for the
young boy. But those were the years of Stalin,
and wealthy farmers, or kulaks, were deemed
“class enemies,” forced to live in constant fear
of informants who might inherit their land by
turning them in. So also were Christians, like
Mikhail’s grandmother, forced to hide their
faith in the new, atheist state.
When Stalin’s Great Purge reached its peak
in 1937, people began to disappear from even
Gorbachev’s sleepy corner of tne Soviet Union.
Children turned in their parents, brothers their
sisters; every teacher at the local school van
ished, to be replaced by strange, stony faces.
Mikhail’s own grandfather was arrested and
deported.
Mikhail Gorbachev joined the Komsomol, the
national Communist Party youth organization,
in the eighth grade. At age eighteen he became
a full member of the Party and escaped to
Moscow University, where the young provincial
parroted the official line by day and led freew
heeling debates on the evils of Stalinism well
into the night.
Forty years later he is dismantling the
world’s largest totatalitorian empire from
within.
Had he chosen the life of a dissident, he
would in all likelihood have vanished, to perish
in a gulag in Siberia, or simply have been shot
and dumped into an unmarked grave. The days
of his youth were the days before Amnesty In
ternational, before at least some of the Western
academics so enamoured of Marxism had seen
through the utopian dream to the nightmare
which lies at its neart. He did not have the op
tion, as did the intellectuals Aleksandr Solzhe-
nvtsin and Milan Kundera, of fleeing to the
West, nor the public support of a Lech Walesa
or Vaclav Havel.
* * *
I am reminded of a baseball game I listened
to several years ago. In the middle of an other
wise boring contest, Fred Lynn stepped up to
the plate for whichever ballclub he played that
season.
Lynn had been a phenom his rookie year,
taking home both the American League rookie-
of-the-year and most valuable player awards
for the Boston Red Sox. He had since become a
journeyman, however, bouncing from team to
team, never quite able to recapture his old
magic.
The announcer succinctly summed up Lynn’s
problem:
“He still has a world of talent - he just won’t
play smart. Hell run straight into the wall
chasing an obvious home run and miss the next
ten games. If he would save himself for the
really big ones, who knows what he might do?"
* * *
The world should be grateful that Mikhail
Gorbachev saved himself for the biggest game
of all.
John Hunter is a junior English major.
Thanks R&B for rights stand
I would like to thank The Red
and Black for its editorials in sup
port of the addition of a sexual
orientation clause to the Univer
sity’s non-discrimination policy.
This position may not do a very
popular one, considering that there
is still a general atmosphere of ha
tred and prejudice towards homo
sexuals. Don’t believe it?
A gay friend of mine has re
ceived death threats. And reading
some of the letters that come in
and are printed makes me wonder
what the letters too libelous to
print look like.
It takes courage to take this kind
of stand. Thank you Eigain, and
keep up the good work.
Johnny Laska
senior, pyachology major
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