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Show i ay nana lygi ajjji ay naai hm say? ljry'l''J"1llP ay 'nj '"muf 'any y ---"iiy j---- ( IHInw Atotmit Iltt? In last Sunday's issue, Parade Magazine listed its nominations for the worlds's worst leaders. Who gets your nomination? TXddyWaters, Michigan State University football coach. PageA2 Thursday, January 13, 1983 IEcMtoinicmll gAyncEWipaDnMj; j 1 - J Ir L, Controlling cable television is one step from burning books Unfortunately, the Mormon Church continues to try to tell us all how we should live our lives. We are impressionable babes, overwhelmed by a world of darkness and corruption, church leaders tell us. A world where pornography and all sorts of vile mind pollution invades in-vades our homes every day via the tube. The solution? Why, it's up to the Mormon Church to save us from cable TV. Yes, with all the international political and social crises on the loose in this muddled world, the LDS hierarchy can only furrow their brows and wring their hands over the x-rated x-rated fare we may or may not be watching on cable TV in the privacy of our own homes. The Mormon Church would rather that we didn't even have the choice to watch T and A, S and M (or maybe more) on our tubes. The Mormon Church, in their condescending paternal zeal to protect us, would take away freedom of choice, a prime underpinning of the Constitution of the United States, a document church leaders claim they cherish almost as much as the Bible and Book of Mormon. Any organization which would take freedom of choice away from Americans is an organization which should be viewed as highly suspect. And LDS leaders leave no doubt thai when it comes to watching pornography on cable TV, they're too busy to care about protecting the First Amendment. Amend-ment. Take for example the editorial in the "LDS Church News" which was published last weekend. (Incidentally, such editorials are generally taken by members of the flock as messages from the church president, who is considered to be a prophet. Follow that logic far enough, and you would have to believe that such editorials are written by God. ) The editorial called on church members to stop the "invasion "in-vasion of purification into homes," i.e. cable TV pornography. Also given were instructions on "how to battle bat-tle porn on city and state levels." Hmmm. Mormon Church leaders may be well intentioned in their actions. They may even think that they are doing the work of Christ in their ongoing campaign of media suppression and censorship. But before they get too carried away in their self righteous efforts as "latter day saints," perhaps they should review some of the scriptural mandates left behind by the one they worship. For wasn't it Christ, after all, who said that the most important im-portant ethical canon of all was the Golden Rule? Treat your neighbor as you would have him treat you. How many Mormons would actually enjoy an intrusion of their gentile neighbors into their homes to tell them what to watch on their TVs? Finally, in a perhaps more poignant and relevant incident, in-cident, wasn't it Jesus who rebuffed the Biblical mob that was on the verge of stoning to death a young harlot on charges of adultery? Wasn't it Christ who told that unruly mob, "Let you who is without sin cast the first stone?" Perhaps LDS church leaders should put away their stones before the break somebody's picture tube. -JH V oKie& reflexes HP WeMy gpeensan Kjg Reagan's Pentagon pick has shady business past Washington President Reagan's new selection for the No. 2 post at the Pentagon is a businessman named Paul Thayer. He is supposed to be the cleanup man who will cut out waste in military spending and put the Defense Department's fouled-up weapons programs back on course. In corporate circles, Thayer is regarded as a Renaissance Man. He's as much at home in the cockpit of a stuntplane as he is at the head of a boardroom table. But court records and documents in the files of the Securities and Exchange Ex-change Commission paint an entirely different picture of the Pentagon's "Mr. Clean." The records, reviewed by our reporter Jack Hatfield, refer to Thayer's tenure as executive director and board chairman of the LTV Corporation. Cor-poration. They show that the companyunder com-panyunder Thayer's leadershiphas leader-shiphas been linked repeatedly to charges of fraud, mismanagement, deception and violation of federal securities laws. Thayer himself has never been indicted in-dicted for misbehavior. He is technically clean. In the peculiar phrase once used to describe CIA chief William Casey, Thayer may be "not unfit" to bold an important job in the government. It is curious, however, that the White House apparently had little knowledge of the shady aspects of Thayer's career before the nomination was sent to the Senate for confirmation. The information should have been turned up in the routine FBI investigation that all presidential appointees must undergo. But, according to White House Deputy Counsel Richard Ha user, most of Thayer's previous problems with the government went undetected. "We were unaware of any SEC matters involving in-volving Mr. Thayer," said Hauser. "We were not aware of any problem which would bear on Mr. Thayer's future performance." As a result, the Senate Armed Services Ser-vices Committee, which "advised and consented" on the nomination, had limited knowledge of the negative information about Thayer's background before it passed on his appointment ap-pointment last month. Here are some of the items that the senators might have wanted to investigate: in-vestigate: In 1973, Thayer was charged with illegally "dumping" 2,400 shares of LTV stock in violation of a written agreement. The agreement was required by federal law, which forbids executives from speculating in their own company's stock. Thayer was cleared when the court found that he had sold the stock to pay off gambling debts and loans, not to cash in on inside information. In 1978, the government charged LTV and its directors Thayer was not mentioned by name with overvaluing the inventories of a subsidiary by $26 million. Investors who purchased the stock sued and won a $7.75 million out-of-court settlement. SEC investigators recently concluded that LTV's management did not enforce "the standards of ethics that a properly managed company should maintain in its accounting practices." In 1978, Thayer's conglomerate was convicted on 48 counts of conspiracy con-spiracy and fraud in its operation of a subsidiary business-school chain. It seems that LTV kept tuition money from students who had federally insured in-sured loans but who dropped out of the schools. The prepaid money should have been refunded LTV was fined $500,000. The fraudulent practice went on from 1968 to 1973; Thayer's tenure as executive director of the company began in 1970. Worst Terrorists: According to internal in-ternal FBI documents, the Puerto Rican terrorist group called FALN is the most active in the United States. This is the pusillanimous gang that claimed responsibility for the New Year's Eve bombing of government buildings in New York City that wounded three policemen. States one FBI report: "Puerto Rican terrorist groups will continue to be the most frequent perpetrators of terrorist incidents in the U.S., as they have been for the past five years." During that period, there were more than 300 incidents of terrorism in the United States, and the FALN is believed to have been responsible for more than a third of them. However, the FBI may be making headway. The group was crippled recently by the arrests of several of its key leaders. Headlines and Footnotes: Beginning last week, the taxpayers are footing the bill for the health-care premiums of t"p-level Postal Service officials. The backdoor pay raise, said spokesmen, was necessary to entice valuable employees to stay on the job. But the move has infuriated lower-level lower-level postal workers who still have to pay for their own insurance. A classified CIA report claims that the Soviet Union's economic woes will result in decreased arms sales to its allies in the Western Hemisphere. The Kremlin is expected to market most of its weapons to its friends in the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa. This means that Russia's allies in Central Cen-tral and South America will get fewer arms. (01983 I'nited Feature Syndicate, Inc. Michael Ballases Adolf Hitler was one of the greatest leaders, yet he had the worst perspective on human rights. . ' is' -i f i - 1 h f V t , i - DougCaya ' v Idi Amin Dada. Between mass murders, secret police, destruc tion of a democratic society and cannibalism, he rates tne worst. Bart Thomas Richard Nixon, because he got caught. i ' rr Bob Macier Margaret Thatcher. She made a big mistake in the Falklands. Steve Smith Ronald Reagan. Too much military spending. f V,.. : , - J H Hlsiipipioit Waaim fflnBiiii You call this English? Given the state of the world, it is probably foolish of me to sit here worrying about the future of the English language. I should be worrying about the sinking economy and how I'm going to get the Christmas punch stains out of that beige rug. Instead, I am wondering how much more abuse our mother tongue can take before we are reduced to communicating in grunts and snarls. A visiting Englishman, upon hearing that America had 25 million illiterates, raised his eyebrows in the superior manner of all visiting Englishmen and asked, "Is that ALL? Listening to them, one feels there must be more." Well, the illiterates among us have an excuse for their sins against the language. Nobody ever taught them otherwise. Their vocabulary is shaped by TV commercials all composed in deliberately debased English and the gibberish of contemporary song lyrics. They also attend movies, most of which offer dialogue couched in heavy breathing, rude grunts, and the all-purpose phrase, " Y'know?" But the illiterates, because they exert less influence, have not done the deep, lasting damage that so distresses grammarians and scholars. No, the real saboteurs are the semiliterates who write government edicts, issue bureaucratic bulletins and uncork a steady flow of misused words on television. In all these effusions we may note one sinister and remorseless trend. That is, a disinclination to call a spade a spade, a horror of using a simple. appropriate word when a long, inappropriate one can be found. This compulsion to "pretty up" the language, lan-guage, to slide around hard truths with soft evasions, may do more harm than the "between you and I" of the illiterate. Some of the new, fancy-talk is clearly intended to deceive. When the president speaks of "revenue enhancement," enhance-ment," we all know he is referring to a tax increase. When the Pentagon generals talk of anti-personnel devices, we all know they mean nuclear bombs. The more preposterous the euphemism, eu-phemism, the more sinister the implication. Sometimes the deliberate distortion of the language has a benevolent intent. But benevolence, when wrongly applied, can produce an opposite effect. The simple, decent English words "blind" and "deaf" apparently strike the scribes in our social agencies as too crude for utterance. And so the blind are now the "unsighted" and the deaf are "hearing impaired." Soon we shall be calling the dead the non-living, the short people will be the untall, and children non-adults. This way lies madness. On two television talk shows recently I heard American Indians referred to as "native Americans." Now, since any person born on American soil is a native American, this effort to remove a stigma can only lead to confusion. What's wrong with the word Indian? Shouldn't the descendants of America's Ameri-ca's only aborigines be made proud of the word that identifies them? Are we not implying something pernicious in the state of being Indian? One could go on and on. Drugs are now being referred to as "substances." Since anything in your kitchen cupboard salt, flour, sugar is also a substance, this makes no more sense than "native American." My octogenarian octogen-arian neighbor says he is damned if he'll refer to himself as a "senior citizen." He wonders what's so shameful about being an old man. As for that wonderful, evocative old English word "gay," one never ceases to wish that homosexuals had not taken it out of general usage and reduced it to one and only one meaning. Never again can we talk of a gay time or buy a gay hat or spend a gay evening without communicating that which we do not mean to communicate at all. It's a sin, this distortion of our beautiful English tongue, and it drains so much beauty and wit and color from our daily discourse. Why have storm warnings become "traveler's advisories"? ad-visories"? Why are the poor now reduced further to the state of "disadvantaged"? And why do people insist on "feeling badly" when "feeling bad" will do? If we can feel badly, then it follows that we must also feel gladly, sadly and madly. Next year we well may... and that's why I sit here with the world cracking up under my feet and worry about the uglification of the noblest and best language the mind of man ever devised. 1983 Harriet Van Home Distributed by Special Features Syndication Sales Corp. Mewspaper- Subscription Rates, $8 a year in Summit County, SIS a year outside Summit County PibUshe4byhk,faK. 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