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Show "We ore medicated to the public interest, to fairness to the I restless pursuit of excellence." Pulitzer rnbtioa statement J OPINIONS and accuracy, to innovation ami growth, and EDITOR: DONALD W. MEYERS Olympics bribery, corruption didn't begin in Salt Late City No word yet on whether judges at the 2002 Winter ' Olympics will be commanding top dollar but it's say, $98 for a 9.8 clear the Games in Salt Lake City Obviously, members of the Salt Lake will be something out of the ordinary. bid committee must have been involved That is, if there is a Salt Lake City Two top officials in in the Olympics in three years. The corruphave that group resigned. But it hardly tion scandal surrounding alleged seems likely that a bribes to secure gaggle of honest the Games for the members of the Utah capital has The International International some prompted Olympic talk that the event Olympic Committee Committee landed should be moved. could move, the 2002 in Utah and were Hundreds of suddenly thousands of dolcorrupted to Winter Olympics in that noted den lars in gifts, cash until the orgaof vice. No, it looks Mars, and other favors like some of the apparently were nization purges itself of folks came to IOC to slipped Salt Lake with International the corruption in its own their hands out. A Olympic body, the Games will be Committee memdozen IOC members in an effort to tainted. And a bers have been purge is rig the selection. implicated in the IOC members got likely to be suspect as scandal. Stories are cut in on land surfacing of IOC deals, scholarships long as IOC President members seeking and jobs. money and favors Juan Antonio Should Salt Lake from other cities lose the Games over Samaranch, who acceptthat bid on recent X" FRIDAY, JANUARY 22, 1999 THE DAILY HERALD J44-25- DIO The 2002 Olympic mascot, SLOB, .) 3 performs figure-skatin- g - I i deal-makin- but the scandal? There's a precedent of sorts. In 1972 the Republican Party abruptly dumped San Diego as the site for its national convention after it ed $2,000 worth of firearms from Salt Lake Olympic Games. City, is running the show. Olympic Committee could move the 2002 Winter Olympics iame out that Attorney General John Mitchell had arranged the settlement of an antitrust suit against ITT Corp. in exchange for $400,000 to underwrite the San Diego Convention. To erase the taint, the convention was moved to Miami. ! But a more apt precedent might be what happened in 1976, when the Olympics were switched from Denver to Innsbruck because the people of Denver simply didn't want the Games. The people of Salt Lake City would have every reason in the world to tell the International Olympic Committee to take their Games and shove off. The International to Mars, but until the organization purges itself of the corruption in its own body, the Games will be tainted. And a purge is likely to be suspect as long as IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch, who accepted $2,000 worth of firearms from Salt Lake City, is running the show. Salt Lake may yet lose the games if corporate sponsors grow wary and the city can't meet its budget. One wonders if anybody in town would shed a tear. This editorial recently appeared in the Chicago Tribune. Remember children in RG. school proposal To Alpine Assistant Superintendent Jack Reid regarding new Pleasant Grove Elementary School: We do not think that some of the decisions concerning the opening of the new elementary school in Pleasant Grove are based on what is in the children's best interests. On Dec. 1, 1998, The Daily Herald quoted you as saying, "Our goal is to balance enrollment, depending on building capacity. We also want to minimize future disruptions and minimize the distance students need to travel." If part of the "goal" is to minimize distance students need to travel please explain why one year ago our children were moved from Grovecrest (310 of a mile from our home) to Manila (910 of a mile from our home). Our children are now assigned to go to the new school, which is miles from our home. If they do not ride a bus, they have a couple of ways they could walk. First, lf Lamb a better they could walk several more blocks down 1100 North, without sidewalks, to 1300 West, without sidewalks and with open irrigation ditches. The other easiest route is out State Street, over the railroad tracks and up 1300 West, again without side- mascot BYU BYU has a member of the cat family as their mascot, a cougar. It was selected years ago for the purpose, I'm sure, to inspire along with grace and beauty, an aggressive, skilled-in-the-hu- instinct. The scriptures select another member of the cat family, the lion, to represent the predatory instinct that rules this world as suggested in the walks. lamb and the lion story. Let's alk about double sessions. We For the BYU student, the question have not talked to anyone who wants becomes, do I pray or prey for or on ' to do double sessions. In short, we've the weak? y and we don't At BYU, I would suggest a lamb to want to do it again. be the mascot because it would As you prepare to vote Tuesday, inspire the student body to principles of peace, cooperation, gentleness, and concerning the new school bound' aries, double sessions, and most purity. This would distinguish BYU from and to schools in of the the from the rest importantly safety world. This would be a more perfect school, please remember who the the children. school is for and "peculiar" way. Helen Adams Rick and Doris Heilbut Provo Pleasant Grove t" i Scholars disregard facts for a good story, "I, Rigoberta Menchu" is a famous 1983 book, "the cornerstone of the multicultural canon," as one journal reported, and a book that helped its writer win the Nobel Peace Prize. But in 1999 the book presents us with two problems: (1) huge portions of it are untrue, and (2) a lot of professors who teach it on our campuses don't want to hear about the falsity, or they just say that the truth doesn't matter. "Whether the book is true or not, I don't care," said Marjorie Agosin, head of the Spanish Department at Wellesley College. Menchu's book told the harrowing story of oppression of Mayan Indian landownpeasants by ers in Guatemala. It tells how the author joined the guerrilla movement that flourished in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The book has strong appeal because it stresses indigenous rights, feminism, identity politics, Marxist class analysis virtually the entire bundle of concerns of the campus left. The author won the Nobel in 1992 as a sort of prize given to an of the Americas on native oppressed the 500th anniversary of Columbus' landing. But Menchu's version of events has been picked apart in a new book by David Stoll, a Middlebury College Anthropologist who interviewed 120 people in Menchu's hometown. Menchu says she was an illiterate and monolingual girl whose father refused to send her to school. Stoll light-skinne- d anti-Columb- found that she had attended two elite boarding schools run by nuns and knew Spanish as well as Mayan. Stoll discovered that Menchu's black-and-whi- CfK i ; "P. ?3i John Leo s. According to Stall's book, "Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans," Menchu was right about the savagery of the Guatemalan military. But people in the village were just as terrified of the guerrillas, who introduced political assassination to the area. One of Menchu's brothers was killed by the army, but villagers said he was not burned alive as she writes in her book. In chapter after chapter, Stoll claims, Menchu describes "experiences she never had herself." Stoll writes that she consistently altered facts and stories and "achieved coherence by omitting features of the situation that contradicted the ideology of her new organization, then substituting appropriate revolutionary themes." Stall's account is unusually con- - A growing number of professors accept the postmodern notion that there is no such thing as . distinctions between history and literature, fact and fiction, honesty and dishonesty. ous landowners and virtuous oppressed peasants was too simple the landowners often cooperated with the peasants. The great land struggle described in the book between Menchu's father and the landowners was actually between her father and his Though described as poor and oppressed, her father actually had title to 6,800 acres of land. vincing because, he says, "I'm a lefty myself" and his book often seems to bend over backward to give Menchu the benefit of any doubt or ambiguity. He says he is astounded by the reaction of professors who dismiss his book as a right-winattack or who insist that truth is irrelevant to emotionally authentic testimony from the oppressed. "When I began to talk about my findings," he wrote, "some of my colleagues regarded them as sacrilegious. I had put myself beyond the pale of decency." "Sacrilegious" is a good word, because it captures Menchu's current status as a semireligious political icon. Besides, the oppressed are never supposed to be analyzed or criticized by professors representing the oppressor cultures of the West. (Stoll has an interesting take on this: If the job of Western professors is to listen g in silence to the authentic voices from by the strict rules of veracity that we the Third World, what happens to the take for granted in autobiography." And Magdalena Garcia Pinto, direcother authentic voices in Menchu's stories who different tell tor of women's studies at the village, very about what happened there?) University of Missouri, says what Listen to some of the statements Menchu is offering "is not mendacity. Rather it is a narrative about how coming from the campus. Michael Berube of the University of Illinois, large communities in the region a star professor of the campus left, arehave been oppressed." will continue he teaching Why is it not mendacity? Because says our campus culture puts more Menchu's autobiography just as he will continue teaching the autobiogemphasis on voice, narrative and story than it does on truth. A growraphy of Benjamin Franklin. (No two the ing number of professors accept the explanation. Apparently books are equally reliable or unrelipostmodern notion that there is no such thing as truth, only rhetoric. Joanne Rappaport, president able.) .The result is the blurring of distincof the Society for Latin American tions between history and literature, Anthropology, told a reporter that fact and fiction, honesty and dishojir disStall's book is "an attempt to esty. One outraged professor wrote of credit one the only spokespersons in an Internet message that "The of Guatemala's indigenous moveMenchu controversy, like the Clinton ment." Another school of thought seems to controversy, reveals the depth of academic disregard for truth in the , suggest that lies by the oppressed to Sounds era." ; right postmodern don't matter. John Peeler, a professor me. of political science at Bucknell, says that "the Latin American tradition of John Leo is a columnist with Universal the testimonial has never been bound Press Syndicate. , , Mallard Fillmore By Bruce Tinsley WRANP agy debate reveals truth, only rhetoric. The result is the blurring of By Garry Trudeau UM..YOUSUB J depiction of villain- Doonesbury mzsooeucKUim 41 V ky tu:i booEt fTV loom ft 7 5f MS? ill M jCT wrsoes-to- to 1 - AflPI am 3 ire U . |
