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Show A 1 4 A The Salt Lake Tribune, Sunday, August Lights Sounds Prove Irrepressible Lure Pac-Ma- ns 9 By Ward Sinclair he had taken the first steps toward bondage. He had become a slave to the Pac-MaThe pain began in the right elbow, and it worried him. He was, after all, a man of middling age, and discomfort of this kind was not unexpected. But this was a new and different hurt. n. Washington Post Writer Innocence was lost cleanly and quickly in a college hangout in the South. It was a slow Saturday, and the place was empty. Students were away at the Kentucky Derby. A platoon of electronic video-gam- e machines stood idle along the walls. Their lights blipped aimlessly, invitingly. He put a quarter in a slot. A computer calliope played joyous music in 12-- 8 time. A smiling little yellow face popped up on the screen. He took the joystick, guided the little yellow face through a maze. Whucka-whuckglomp-glomsaid the machine. Colored monsters darted from a cage. An orange ogre menaced. A red monster ate him. Whucka-whucksaid the machine. He put in a second quarter and a third. Whucka-whuckglomp-glomThe little yellow man zipped up and down the maze. He Monsters ate him each time. Glomp-glompoured more quarters into the slot. The idea was to avoid the monsters and nm up the score. There was no knowing it then, but a, p, a, a, 1, 1982' p. p. Arthritis, he thought. Bursitis, his friends said. See a doctor, they advised. It was his tyring elbow, his tennis elbow, important g his elbow. But he fear 1 a doctors probing, and he ignored his friends. Then the light of dawn appeared. jump-shootin- A woman who dabbled told him, That is what happens. You get these pains, and your hands get sore. Youll get a callus on your My arm has hurt so finger from the bad I couldnt sleep nights. Had to sleep with it stretched out on a pillow. . . A bit later an editor handed him a article. Doctors were finding similar elbow and shoulder maladies among video-gam- e devotees. It was an ailment of the times. Another, more reassuring story landed on his joy-stic- k. wire-servi- desk. It said the military was using video d coordinagames to improve recruits tion. it showed a social That was soothing but by now the pain had moved to purpose his shoulder. His sleep was interrupted. He would toss restlessly, trying to ease the pulsations. There was no shaking it. It was the price of his addiction. He had fallen alone; he would whip it alone, he told himself. The mania did not make him proud. Adults played the game, but it seemed a childs diversion. So he played, but he didnt tell his friends. Something else he didnt talk about: He resented kids who easily outscored him ; even resented their presence in the video arcades. eye-han- He was drawn by the lights and the sound. He glomp-glomliked the noises, whucka-whuckthe calliope. He especially liked the bonus fruits that popped onto the screen as a score increased: cherries, berries, peaches, apples, grapes. He laughed aloud when he got his first apple. Hot-lic- k players could get bells, th underbills and keys. He once watched a boy, maybe 12, line the bottom of the screen with keys. He was incredulous, and he began disliking the kid. a, p, He became furtive. He arranged cash purchases to assure he got quarters in change. He put $5 bills in the subway ticket machines, knowing an avalanche of quarters would come back. He would step out to the drugstore for a soda (even when the refrigerator was full of them) and drop a quarter into the Pac-MaAlways, he had quarters. His pockets bulged, and coins clinked when he walked. Lunch hours, he tramped theSstreets, looking for an idle Pac-Ma- n machine. He came to know the location of every downtown Pac-MaNot all of this was in vain. His score improved as he became more adroit with the joystick. But he pondered the mania, juggled it, rationalized it, cursed himself. Finally he decided it was the challenge that gratified. He wrote a good news article, he got little feedback. He bettered his score, he was pleased. Nods of approval from other players had meaning. He drew another analogy. Anew personal high score (they came slowly) rushed the adrenalin. He became an aging Jim Palmer a creaking Elvin Hayes throwing a He was a going up for one more slam-dunplayer! He was the human spirit putting technology to rout. Now he was pushing 30,000 consistently, and n. n. he felt good about it. At the dentists he read a magazine istory about a celebrity Pac-Ma- n tournament The winner had 59,000 points, and he got his own machine as first prize. Good Lt,rd, he thought, he was reaching tournament class. Then he read the rest of the story. It said the world record was in the millions. He was crushed. He got a bock that told how to win at Pac-MaIt laid out patterns that promised higher scores. He tried to memorize the patterns, intricate steps tor outwitting the computer. The night he memorized his first pattern he dreamed about it. The patterns worked, and his scores increased. But the book warned that technicians would add computer chips to alter patterns and outwit players. He began to sense it was a plot to wrench more quarters from him. Another story said that Americans were putting $5 n. ... Pac-Ma- arent great but he n! Hoare Humiliation Lesson T o Outdated Buccaneers Peer Nugent to Special the Los Angeles Times white Last November, 50 South Africa-base- d mercenaries with birthplaces ranging from Austria to Zimbabwe made an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the Socialist government in the Seychelles, a sleepy string of island pearls in the Indian Ocean. By John Three weeks ago, in the islands capitol, Victoria, four of the captured mercenaries were sentenced to death by hanging. In Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, those who made it back safely to home base on a hastily commandeered Air India jet were convicted on hijacking charges. The misadventure was supposedly the work of Col. Michael Hoare, the legendary Mad John Peer Nugent was for many years Newsweek' bureau chief in Africa. He is now at work on a book about that continent. Mike, who has been soldiering for his fortune in and around Africa for more than 20years. Its failure marks the modem nadir for Common Carrier s. Lets Demand Quality Education By Brooke Hopkins I had a student in one of my classes a few years back, a very bright girl from Murray, who came to the University of Utah wishing to major in elementary education and to become a teacher. And a fine one she would have been. Not only was she bright; she was deeply senstive to the needs of others, dedicated, hardworking, a giver a very beautiful person She still is just the kind of person you would want to become a teacher, to deal with children, to help them grow, to contribute, the way teachers do, to the continuing health of our culture. Well, she lasted two years, and then she switched her major to business . . .why? Well, one reason that she gave me is that she had begun to feel ashamed when people, friends, others began to ask her why on earth Bhe was going into education in the first place. Didnt she realize that there was no future in it, no money, no prestige? She was brighter than that, more ambitious. Only failures go into education. Thus, our culture continues to undermine itself by actively discouraging the gifted from even entering the teaching profession, much less transforming it by their gifts, by their love and concern. This is nothing short of a national tragedy. If education, along with religion and the arts, constitutes a vital part of the nations soul, we are fast on the way to losing a vital part of our soul. Perhaps Ive made too much of the experience of one student from Murray, Utah, who decided to abandon a career in teaching for one in business. But I dont think so. National statistics on the recruitment of new teachers indicate, in fact, that her case is absolutely typical. It is becoming increasingly more difficult to attract bright and gifted teachers into the ranks, and even more difficult to keep them there once they have been attracted. Some of this, of course, is an unfortunate side-effeof one of the most positive social movements in recent American history, the womens movement. Years ago, teaching was one of the only professions gifted women could enter fairly easily. Now, new opportunities in other fields such as business, law, and medicine have opened up as they were never open before, and the teaching profession has failed to compete. 'Hiere is good evidence across the board, moreover, that the quality of those planning on entering the teaching profession has declined steadily over the past decade. Statistics tell at least part of the story. The ct mean SAT score in mathematics for those college-boun- d seniors planning to major in education has declined from 449 in 1972-7- 3 to 418 in 1979-8the lowest of the 12 fields listed. And the mean SAT verbal score declined from 418 in the same year to a shocking 339, 60 points below the next lowest field, business. All this has led Chester Finn to declare in a recent article in Change magazine, that the highest priority of American education in the years ahead must be the recruitment, selection, preparation, and retention of outstanding personnel at every level from kindergarten through graduate school. The declinine quality of those entering and staying in teaching poses the gravest long term threat to the quality of the educational enterprise. Hence whatever steps are necessary to reverse that decline must be taken. At a minimum, these include providing teachers with adequate remuneration, including that which conies from successfully meeting the high standards of teacher performance that necessarily accompany high standards of pupil performance, (emphasis in other words, pride in their own and mine) their students accomplishments. This leads me directly to the main point of my remarks. If the most important key to quality educational instruction is quality instructors, bright and gifted teachers who are unafraid of demanding the highest performance from their students, then the key to quality instructors is public demand for such quality, the willingness to acknowledge and demand its necessity, the willingness to sacrifice for it and above all to support it when it exists. Whose children are at stake anyway? Here, it seems to me is where a considerable rearrangement of priorities will have to take place if the American public wishes to get what I hope it hathe good sense to want, a better education for its children, and the freer, more dynamic society will result. Unfortunately, the current trend in our priorities is in the opposite direction. As the economist Lester Thurow wrote on the Op Ed page of the New York Times last fall, the economic policy of the present administration, is based upon the assumption that society is nothing but a statistical aggregation of private economic actors. From (this perspective), whatever the level of government and whatever the program (with the exception of defense), the public sector should shrink. A completely private economy with minimal government would be a better society, from this point of view. not work But," he continues, Societies unless there is a feeling of mutual obligation and willingness to sacrifice for the common works in good. Sole reliance on some areas of human activity but not all. Regardless of how many weapons are purchased, national defense cannot be achieved unless people are willing to make sacrifices for the welfare of others. Regardless of how privately wealthy we are, a good life cannot be had in the midst of social disintegration. TTie teaching profession is obviously a part of that "public sector. Teachers, it has been pointed out, do not enrr their profession to make a lot of money. Of course, they want to be financially rewarded for their work; they dont want to nold down two jobs to keep their families fed. But money, or to use Thurows is not the primary word, motivation. Working with childreris, seeing them develop intellectually and emotionally is, being part of an ongoing cultural process is, serving the community is. And the society that denigrates such service, the society that demeans the kind of love and concern that goes into successful teaching, that makes people ashamed of it, the society that turns its back on those who wish to serve ib that society will pay pay a terrible price, not merely a terrible financial price, but a terrible emotional one as well. It will cease to be a society. 0, self-intere- st self-intere- Brooke Hopkins U.of U. English Professor ' To quote Thurow again Municipal services clean streets, an efficient transport system, good schools, effective police and fire protection are important in their own right: They make life easier to live. But they play an even more important role in binding us together and reminding us that we depend on each other for survival. They are the means by which each of us learns that we belong to a society in which our actions and the actions of others are important. In short, a community, not a statistical aggregation of economic actors.a That way, it seems to me, disintegration lies. I realize that I am begging lots of questions here. How do we pay for more and better teachers, especially in Utah, with our rapidly growing population? How do we make the profession more attractive, worth entering and staying in? And so on. But my remarks are of a more general nature. I simply do not believe that we will ever significantly improve the quality of educasome of our basic tion until we priorities as a nation, where we are heading, whq$ we wish to be. And that is going to take hrtWi a kind of psychic revolution in our lives ana the lives of our leaders and an economic revolution in this country as well. A nation whose so called defense spending is projected to be between $1.5 and $1.6 trillion over the next five years, has, I believe, a very serious emotional and spiritual problem. To put even a tenth of that money, much less a quarter or a half, into educating our children, into encouraging quality teachers to enter the profession, into reducing class size, into upgrading facilities, into scholarships ana so on, would, I believe, begin to create the sort of genuine security we need to be able to florish over the coming decades. It is life that we ought to be concerned with now, not death,- not extermination. The future of this nation lies with our children and our childrens children. Their education should be our number one priority. We must stop this madness now. re-thi- - He lost all grip the day they put two Pac-Ma- n machines in the company cafeteria, Employees hed never before seen queued up at the machines. He made friends with some of them. Collegial nods of approval became important. He arranged odd lunch hours to avoid the queue, but so did others. He wondered when they did their work. He came in early (only for coffee, of course), and he played the machine. Others did, too, and he wondered how they explained late arrivals at their desks (missed the bus? babysitter ill?). It had become a mass mania. There was no point in even naming the company. It would He only hurt solid people. Glomp-glomwanted to stop talking about it. Glomp . . . (Copyright) Seychelles Fiasco two-hitte- r; his grades Hey, this guy from UCLA has a lot of drive made over 3 million points playing billion a year into video machines. His theory made more sense. Actually, it has been dog days lately for the dogs of war; there have been few takers for their reputed, certainly now discredited, talents. For one thing, the real pros are getting old. Mad Mike is 63. The lads, as he calls his veterans, have been forced to scrape the barrel for young amateurs who do not seem to find the smell of cordite so exhilirating once they whiff it in action. I have been observing mercenariesever since I first raninto Hoare in Katanga in 1961 during the Congo troubles. Then he was fighting communism, insisted the Irishman who served in the British army in India and Burma during World War II. He was also fighting the sedentary life of being a public accountant in London. After the allegedly glorious years in the Congo of the 1960s, where Hoare was much Editors Note: Todays Common Carrier article was written by Brooke Hopkins, University of Utah associate professor of English, Department of English, Salt Lake City, Utah 84112. The authors views are his own. Opinions expressed in Common Carrier do not necessarily reflect those of The Salt Lake Tribune or the Common Carrier board of lay editors. Articles in this department are determined by the lay board of editors which operates independently of Tribune editorial and reportorial policies. The Common Carrier board, n of the representing a of is James community, composed E. Dooley, Salt Lake County coordinator of equal employment opportunity; Paul A. Mogren, Univer respected even by U.N. adversaries for his professionalism in battle, things went downhill for him. He once planned to go to Elba or Corsica, holding myself ready for anything which might arise in the Middle Sast. So he wrote me. During the 1970s, some of his men tried Libya and Yemen and various islands in the Indian Ocean anyplace where they saw a chance for a good go at the communists. Not much came of it. They were reduced to an occasional reunion at a Mercenary Ball in Durban, South Africa, where many of them either lived or visited often. Most of those who attended found themselves talking about their children, moaning about being improvident adventurers, yet still dreaming about one more big moment of glorious action. They also talked about their losses to age, infirmity and alimony. One could surmise that, for Hoare, the Seychelles was to be a last hurrah. But the years of mostly inaction had taken their toll on planning, reflexes and discipline. Imagine a younger Hoare allowing one of his men to automatic rifle fall accidentally let his AK-4out of a duffle bag marked RUGBY BALLS at the Seychelles Airport customs. Wearing proclaiming themselves Members of Foam Blowers, they said that they were en route to a drinking and sports convention. What probably hurt Hoare the most, as he awaited the South African court judgment, was the memory of his frequent boast in better years: that with 50 trained mercenaries he could overthrow just about any black African government around. In the end, he could not crack one with 64,000 mostly Creole citizens that does not even have an army. I have a certain understanding of, if not respect for, some of the men who have soldiered for causes that they believed in, as Hoare did, although I absolutely reject their racist reasons for doing battle. Still, I hope that this present humiliation of perhaps the worlds best known soldier of fortune is a lesson for that breed of outdated buccaneers whose primary contribution to the world has been to make it a more violent place. sity of Utah reference librarian; Tim Rice, public relations director, Utah AFL-CIO- ; John F. Stephens, a retired Army colonel; and Mrs. Gwen Hovey, a civic worker and League of Women Voters member. The board seeks articles from all segments of the community. Articles need not be professionally prepared, but should be less than four pages of double-space- d type copy. They should pertain to the economic, political or social wellbeing of the Intermountian Area. Articles should be timely, have unity of purpose, a central theme, promote dialogue and be chal- 9 9 C J Ji 4 - lenging. cross-sectio- Material should be mailed to Common Carrier, The Salt Lake Tribune, P.O. Box 867, Salt Lake City, Utah 84110. ft it Bob Walton M t All About Surgery to Kemove Cataracts Universal Press Syndicate According to the American Optometric Association, the older one becomes, the more ones eyes change, with possible sweeping consequences for ones whole life. I can attest to the truth of that statement. Having just recently had a cataract removed from my right eye, my eyesight has never been so good. That operation followed by six years the tame surgery on my left eye. Of course, one has such surgery only when absolutely necessary. My first operation took place 12 years after my optometrist told me a cataract was forming in my left eye. Actually, it is the cataract itself that determines the date of surgery. The second operation came six years later. During each operation the natural lens in each eye was removed and an artificial lens implanted. Both surgeries were performed by the same doctor. After the first one, the eye was inspected every other day for a few weeks, then weekly and eventually monthly. With the surgery I had just recently, I spent the night after the surgery in the hospital, returned home the next morning after an examination and didnt see the doctor again for more than a month. In each instance a local anesthetic was used during surgery. I felt no pain, yet was able to know what was happening. Many acquaintances asked me how I happened to go to the doctor again or, in other words, did I feel certain the operation was necessary? The answer was affirmative, because for some weeks I had noted that the sight in my right eye was failing. The next question is usually about glasses. Do I have new ones and are they satisfactory? No, I wear the same glasses I have had since before operation No. 1. I need them for distance-seein- g only and continue to read without glasses. My sight is better than it has ever been, I tell friends. I know I was lucky. Since so many older people have trouble with their eyes they should realize that while no surgery is inexpensive today, due to recent changes Medicare coverage now includes most of the fee for an optometrist's eye examination plus care following cataract surgery. Theres another plus to cataract surgery most people do not know about. While looking into an eye for signs of eye disease, a doctor of optometry is also directly observing the bloca vessels iq ones eyes. Early signs of such things f as diabetes or high blood pressure are often I; detected. Few also realize the surgery will shed some on their life, and that is important. The Optometric Association says an average i needs seven times more light than the average to perform an identical task. extra light If any reader has any doubts about his vision, f he should see an eye doctor, for an eye r examination now may prevent or minimize later problems. f Q. My husband, who passes away in January was an overseas Navy veteran of World War II. At the time arrangements for the funeral were being made, the undertaker applied for a Navy plaque for the grave. The form was completely filled out, and I signed it. To this day I have heard nothing, evtn though both the undertaker and I wrote to the Veterans Administration. I hope you can tell me what I Mrs. H. M., LaPorte, Ind. should do. A. I suggest you write your congressman at once and tell him the whole story. This is an election year, and if he is running for another term he will be delighted to come to your aid. 1980, (If you have Questions you would like to have discussed, write Bob Walton, care of Mils newspaper. For a personal reply, please enclose a envelope. Questions of general Interest will be answered In this colunn.) (Copyright) I J I t J J f 'r |
