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Show ake tribune gait Tuesday Morning, July 1. 19HO Section Cage I Primary Lacks Impact In Utahs 1980 Election StateAvide At the statewide Utahs level, political season is shaping up as a merger. Following the Republican state convention in Salt Lake City last weekend, prospects for a separate, brisk Utah-wid- e primary campaign dimmed. The primary line-u- p was partial from the start. For statewide, U.S. Senate and House races, neither Republicans, Democrats or the splinter parties fielded full internal challenges when filing deadline passed in As usual, when such circumstances develop, the question voting beconcerning cross-ovcomes more pointed. Would, for instance, voters from one party participate in the other mid-Ma- y. er GOPs attorney general nomination. The Democrats need only do a similar job on the U.S. Senate and Lieutenant Governor races. However, while one of the Democrats Lieutenant Governor candidates might win a 70 percent delegate count in convention, thats not considered as likely in the U.S. Senate between face-of- f Ogden Mayor Stephen Dirks and Salt Lake City lawyer Daniel L. Berman. Both, as far as the general election is concerned, might, when one is finally chosen, benefit from another old political theory which claims a comparative unknown, running against strong opposition, gains valuable additional attention during a Saturday, select at their July state nominating convention unity candidates. Their task in this regard isnt as large as was the GOPs, although it may be more demanding. primary. If neither Mr. Berman nor Mayor Dirks eliminates the other in convention. Utah Republicans and Democrats will definitely have at least one statewide primary election to discourage the sort of crossing over designed to eliminate stronger contenders. Also, there are local county and legislative primaries capable of keeping partisan voters at home." Party leaders normally discount interthe effectiveness of cross-ove- r ference. Perhaps it doesnt occur in The Republicans, in trimming the governor, state treasurer and First Congressional representative entries down to one man each, left just incumbent Robert B. Hansen and David L. Wilkinson contending for the nary voting under any circumstances. Nonetheless, Utahs 1980 statewide primary campaign is a slim edition. Its fated to be overshadowed by general election campaigning from start to finish. partys primary, deliberately sup- porting candidates considered less able to win in the general election? Since Utah does not require residents to register political affliation for voting purposes, all manner of crossover balloting is possible. The tactic is even more probable this year, especially if the Democrats, as did the Republicans last 10-1-2 Utahs loosely-constructe- d prelimi- Some Soviet troops no longer needed are leing withdrawn from Afghanistan. Peter A. Jay Could Officer Wait Before Drawing Gun? The Baltimore Sun BALTIMORE There is a little park near where I live, and for years, on summer nights, local youths have gathered there. The kids say theyre being sociable and bothering no one. The neighbors, many of whom are elderly, say they make enough noise to wake the dead. Its a controversy that never ends. The police, as always, find themselves right In Lie middle. If the park Is to be closed, as the elected authorities have now decreed it must be from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. Its the police who have to close it When they come by at 10 o'clock and tell the kids to move on, the kids go grudgingly and blame the police for ending the party. Vivid Illustration But when the movable feast reconvenes elsewhere, as such adolescent congregations naturally do, a new set of neighbors is offended and blames the police. For the n situation. If they keep police, its a order, theyre fascist bullies. If they dont, theyre weak or inept. Another, more vivid illustration of the police officers dilemma is the tragic case of Detective Stephen MeCown. Baltimore City McGee. Police Department, and n no-wi- Ja-Wa- Congressional Wonderland Every once in a while Congress does something, or several somethings, that must leave a sizable segment of the American population convinced that, collectively, those 535 men and women (100 in the Senate and 435 in the House) dont have their heads screwed on correctly or tightly. On June 19 the national legislature finalized passage of the Synthetic Fuels Corp. bill which, over the next 12 or so years, would help create a synfuels industry capable, in theory, of producing 2 million barrels a day by 1992. To reach that theoretical objective it would be necessary to facilitate construction of various plants to distill oil shales, convert coal to gas or oil, or process tar sands. This facilitating role was the planned purpose of the Energy Mobilization Board; to provide the means of speeding up the bureaucatic processes currently hamstringing construction, financing and operation of synfuel plants, along with the acceler- ated production of convention fuels, like coal and oil. But the House rejected the energy d board, killing it by the of This was an margin unexpected and preplexing result; after all, the House had passed its version of the EMB legislation a year ago, by an equally lopsided vote, 250 one-side- 232-13- to 1. 153. What happened in the interim, while the House version and its Senate counterpart were undergoing redrafting in a conference committee, has triggered considerable speculation to explain the Houses about face. Included are: Republicans out to embarass the president in an election year, conser- vatives concerned about states rights (the legislation would have permitted a limited overriding of state laws), liberals concerned with threats to environmental laws, and representatives from Rocky Mountain states concerned with water supplies. The combination of causes not only defeated the Energy Mobilization Board, but it left the Synthetic Fuels Corp. to slash its way through the thicket of bureaucratic red tape just as any other corporation, public or private, must. In turn, one must wonder if the U.S. Congress is properly concerned about Americas stark dependence on foreign produced energy. If the mem- bers of Congress were sufficiently million distressed about the barrels of oil this country imports every day it would be reasonable to believe they would have given simultaneous and resounding support to e two pieces of legislation like the Energy Mobilization Board Act and the Synthetic Fuels Corp. Act. Instead, they reject the former and accept the latter; leaving Americans to question w'hether those 535 people, a substantial majority of them, anyway, really know what theyre doing. More distressing, or whether they even care what theyre Ja-Wa- Ja-Wa- Ja-Wa- Ja-Wa- better-educate- hand-in-glov- doing. MeCown, off duty and coming home from night classes at Johns Hopkins University, thought he was interrupting an armed robbery. n He shot McGee and left him crippled, n McGee had apparently for life. But all done was pull a cigarette lighter from his pocket. He wasnt a robber, he was just a kid clowning around, out with a friend to buy pizza. Predictably, the case has become a symbol of trigger-happ- y police work. McCowns career is shattered. Yet the outcome of the incident could so easily have been so different. Work Sensitive If he had waited a few seconds longer before drawing his gun, MeCown would have seen the cigarette lighter appear, and everyone could have bought pizza and gone home safely. But if he had waited, and if the young man had n not been innocent but another young gent who really was pulling a gun, it could have been MeCown who died or was crippled. Or if hed shot first and that cigarette lighter had turned out to be a .357 magnum, he would probably be in for a commendation. Because police work is so sensitive, so filled with incidents that, like the shooting of n McGee, can turn from routine to horror through a seconds miscalculation, it has been widely accepted that higher-qualit- y meaning d officers must be recruited. Detective MeCown, going to Hopkins three nights a week in order to get a college degree, is typical of the sort of man every modem police department seeks. But I wonder if more education really is the answer, or whether it really helps at all. A New York City study done in the late 1960s showed that college-educate- d officers are likely to be more cynical about their work, and more sensitive to low pay and difficult working conditions, than those with less education. Moreover, higher educational standards make it more difficult to recruit blacks or other minority-grou- p members for police work, because the pool of applicants is made smaller. Wide Skills Range (Much too much has been made of the fact n McGee is black and Detective that MeCown is white. But without imputing the slightest taint of racial hostility to the officer, its still a reasonable conjecture that a black policeman under the same circumstances might have been sufficiently more relaxed to Ja-Wa- Six terrorist groups are claiming credit for the Mount St. Helens explosion. keep his gun in his pocket a few critical seconds longer.) Obviously, a good police officer must have a wide range of skills, and you cant have too much training. But training isnt the same as education, as the term is used by those who set standards for police recruits. A reasonably intelligent and officer without a diploma ought to be able to perform many police functions as well as or better than a college graduate, especially if he grew up in the community where he is assigned, or among people similar to those he spends his time policing. This isn't to say that there isnt a place for educated men in police work, or that ambitious officers like Detective MeCown shouldnt press on toward college or graduate degrees if they wish. It is to say that by arbitrarily raising the educational requirements for police officers, we may be inadvertently excluding people who could do highly capable work, thereby achieving a result opposite to the intended one. Whatever their preparation, the police are always going to find themselves in the middle, whether the issue is closing little neighborhood parks for the night, or tragic mistakes like the n McGee. We ask a lot of shooting of them. Often, especially by encouraging them to attain educational levels at which they can seldom be adequately compensated either financially or psychologically by police work, we ask too much. well-traine- d high-scho- Ja-Wa- (Copyright) Orbiting Paragraphs small town is a place where you go to the if he cant get to yours. A child has to learn how to walk twice first when hes a little more than a year old and second after he loses his driver license. A doctors house Nowadays they even have to have background music for each moment of silence. The guy down the street says hes so unhandy with tools that even his sawdust turns out crooked. A small town is a place where theres nothing to do and most people are thankful for it. Henrv Fairlie Harpers a Victim of Single -Issue Journalism, Politics The Washington Post The announcement that publication of Harper's magazine has been suspended was received with appropriate expressions of regret and then, the obsequies done, we at once returned to the daily recital of all the real and fake events which are considered to be of such national importance. But the huge financial loss which Harpers has recently incurred, and the failure to find anyone willing to put up the money to save it. ought to be the occasion of more than a passing interest and little wave of regret. It is one of those happenings which are usually put into the footnotes of history, but which the great historians like Gibbon or Macaulay promote from the footnotes as the expression of a whole age. Harper's Isnt Alone It has been observed on all sides that Harpers is only the latest of the general interest magazines to bite the dust in the past two decades. Even in the comparatively short time in which I have known this country. Look. Life and the Saturday Evening Post have all had their heads put on the auctioneers or the executioners block. Those which survive lead precarious lives. Not only Harpers but also the Saturday Review and Atlantic have been on the market in the past year, and no sensible person would today wager much on the survival of the last two. The owner of The New Republic is today bearing losses of the same order as Harper's. It is true that the names of Life and the Saturday Evening Post have reappeared on the newsstands, but sadly on the covers of magazines which are scarcely even pale reflections of their once sturdy predecessors, just as Esquire has survived only by offering much less strenuous reading than in die past. These general interest magazines are being replaced by special interest magazines. To give but one illustration, not only are there now magazines which cover sports in general, but there a e more and more magazines which are devoted to only a single sport, usually more than one for each of diem. The newsstands today reflect the tastes of a population who as individuals have only the very narrowest interests and concerns. But no one has pointed out that this proliferation of single interest magazines has occurred at the same time as the development of the single issue politics which is today so much bemoaned. The two are related. In both politics and journalism in the past two decades, the person of general interests has been disappearing. People are becoming onedimensional in ways that Herbert Marcuse did not describe. The main reason for this is obvious. Our societies increasingly treat people as no more than consumers. The advertisers like the special interest magazines because advertising in them has at least a calculable impact. Similarly, our politics has become so much a greedy scrambling of individuals for the cut all benefits which state has to distribute federal programs except those that benefit oneself that politicians now appeal to them as if to avaricious consumers in a nation which is becoming one huge shopping mall. The breed of congressmen who began to enter the House of Representatives in 1974 look and sound like and, indeed, are little different from floorwalkers in the boutiques that are today covering the land from the Gallery in Philadelphia to the Galeria in Houston to th Broadway Plaza in Los Angeles. Different Angle But let us return to the suspended publication of Harpers to look at it all from a different angle. Perhaps I should, like a member of Parliament in Britain, declare my Interest. I have spent my life in writing for general interest magazines, on both sides of the Atlantic, which have been able to lay claim to at least some literacy. I have long since grown accustomed to the fact that a career built on such foundations is as shaky as they are themselves. But if the freelancers life has always been one of feast or famine, the decline of the general interest magazine holds forth the prospect only of famine. I am at the But apart from that same time a reader. I now oft jn stand in front of a newsstand and can find no general interest magazine to buy. (I exclude the news magazines, which seem to me paltry publications for anyone who reads newspapers for Urmelf ) Once I have grasped Harpers and the Atlantic and Commentary at the beginning of t, each month, four weeks of a lunar desert is the only landscape which the newsstands offer. They are crowded and gaudy, but with nothing solid to read. I am beginning seriously to wonder and I whether many am not alone in this doubt people can read anymore. By reading I do not here mean the ability to make something out of the printed word, which ought to be, but increasingly is not, taught to it from the time the infant begins to pass into childhood. I mean the ability and willingness of intelligent and persons to follow a supposedly sustained argument in consecutive sentences over an extended number of pages. They as much as others increasingly have an attention span for no more than clippings. well-educat- The magazines which are today in imminent danger of following Harpers tc the graveyard are those which will provide the spaciousness which ideas and argument need. Commentary may survive because it is subsidized by the American Jewish Congress, but Encounter, which is its counterpart in Britain, has had no such sponsor since the Congress for Cultural Freedom (i c., the CIA.) Its editor comes periodically to America as a mendicant, ready to humble himself before the rich for the pittance he needs, and going away with very little, if anything, in his pocket. Yet, Encounter is still one of the few really good magazines left in the English-speakin- g world. (It is worth saying in passing that there was nothing conspiratorial in the CIAs sponsorship of Encounter. The CIA was an idealistic body in those days, its idealism reflecting the idealism of America then, and it brought to life in devastated Europe after the war not only Encounter, but Der Monat in Germany and Les Preuves in France, both magazines of great distinction.) If the American Jewish Congress can keep Commentary going, then why cannot the National Council of Churches, or the Roman Catholic Church in America, or the vast commercial enterprise of its Protestant Churches, do the same for a magazine of such literacy and generally high quality? It is true that the Jesuits in America keep Commonweal going, and a consistently thoughtful and literate periodical it is, but to mention it is merely to illuminate the darkness around it. It appears that a foundation offered to buy Harpers, but a foundation would stifle any magazine. But a lack of suitable and generous sponsors is secondary to the main point. What should concern us is the decline in the audience for magazines which require the ability and willingness to read more than three paragraphs, and so the increase in their financial losses to a level which not even the most saintly patron can be expected to bear. Less Literate Looking at the abysmal deterioration in the quality of popular newspapers in Britain. Auberon Waugh is known to wonder seriously if there has not been a genetic deterioration in the intelligence of the British people. Even if one resists such an explanation, it is hard not to respond to it. The popular newspapers in Britain today are far less literate and serious than they were when many fewer people went to school for as long as most do now. I believe that there is an explanation particular to Bntain: the persistence of a class society which keeps the masses in their place. But it is no less true in the United States that the popular audience today seems capable of less sustained reading than in the last century, when it thought nothing of combing through volumes of long sermons and the equally long speeches of its politicians. I have no doubt that this reading made them a more mature and stable and reflective people than now. (Copyright) |