Show The Herald Journal Logan Utah Sunday September Our View 27 1987 Distributed by King Features Syndicate fiw Aryan Nations Utah doesn’t want your hate Maybe we in Utah can help focus the unclear picture that the Rev Richard Butler has of this state Contrary to his beliefs Utah is not the right place for a branch office of his Aryan Nations Church We don't want him and we don’t want his followers as our neighbors The reverend has picked the Salt Lake City area as the next place to expand his northern Idaho-base- d white supremacist organization The group has expressed a desire to establish a "homeland" in the Northwest that would exclude blacks Jews and other minorities and Butler feels there is a desire on the part of some Utah residents to make this state a part of that world Butler and his troops have an apocalyptic fantasy somehow tied to religion that a war between the races will destroy the world When the smoke clears however his battalion of white separatists in the Northwest trained in paramilitary tactics and armed for the struggle will survive to preserve the xanthochroids — the whitest of white people But why come to Utah? "I would assume that most of the Mormons would be supporting us he said recently That statement had us baffled so we called Butler and he cleared it up Utah he told us has "some of the best of our genetic racial structure” — “Our” in this case refers to white and “best” means purest or whitest In him he told us we will find a warrior fighting for the “preservation of our race” (“Our” equals white again) Butler is full of “facts” such as this one: During World War II whites made up 30 percent of the world’s population Now the white population is 14 percent of the world’s So 30 minus 14 comes to therefore the white race is in danger of extinction and a racist fortress is necessary in the Northwest to prevent the extermination of white from the earth Funny — like talking to old Uncle Wilbur who never could seem to find the station everyone else was listening to — but not so funny Butler hangs out with some fast ana frightening company For the record this savior of the whites is named in a federal indictment in Fort Smith Ark along with 13 other leaders of white supremacist groups of allegedly plotting to overthrow the United States government by violent 11 means The April indictment alleges that some of the participants planned armed robberies the assassination of a federal judge and an FBI agent bombings counterfeiting destruction of utilities pollution of water supplies construction of guerilla training camps and procurement of false identification It alleges 119 overt acts of sedition were committed Federal investigators accuse the reverend of playing a “godfather” role in the alleged plot They claim he hosted the gathering at which the ideas behind the alleged plot were hatched Also named in the indictment is Robert Miles an invited guest at this year's annual Aryan World Congress in Butler’s Hayden Lake hometown Miles a former Grand Dragon in the Ku Klux Klan spent six years in prison for in Butler's words “conspiring to deprive children of an education” Our United Press International office in Spokane better translators of judicial legalese told us Butler’s friend Miles went to prison for burning empty school buses that were to be used to integrate schools in 1987 Michigan No Utah does not want Butler or his friends In fact maybe we should broaden the message and add that Hayden Lake Idaho is not the right place either for the Aryan Nations Church nor is the United States the Soviet Union or the planet Earth Letters to the editor Highway intersection woes To the editor: I have thought of this problem many times and was going to write this letter some time ago before I became one of the people affected by it This is the intersection of Highway 23 EastWest and Highway 30 NorthSouth on the Valley View Highway south of Cache Junction and north of Mendon It relates to the several people that have to park their vehicles north or south of this intersection to catch rides to various employment including Morton Thiokol and Nucor to name but two This area is necessary and is not improved to say the least Some grading and a few loads of gravel would be a great improvement These narrow shoulders of the road where people park now are a muddy mess in the rainy season and a terrible obstacle when it snows It seems that if Highway 30 is plowed at all it is placed into these parking areas and not cleared out so people can park their vehicles properly and safely On the north side the best area is also posted no parking With no illumination the signs are almost impossible to see in the middle of the night I have seen several tickets on cars when I have returned from work when it was daylight No doubt the person parked there about midnight and not being familiar with the area did not see the signs Since these are both state highways but are in Cache County how can we get some improvements done? Also this area is very dark and poorly marked Day and especially night it is very easy to miss the turnoff to go north or south when headed east or west on the Valley View Highway This area is also noted for the dropping off of stray animals especially dogs The other day as I went to get into my vehicle two stray dogs came barreling out from under a pickup with teeth bared and lunging toward me One of them started to circle behind me I hurriedly unlocked my door and flung it open to jump in and I swung back around with my arms like pointing a gun and the attackers fled They no doubt had been confronted with a gun before This was very frightening to me and makes me nervous when I return to my vehicle especially at night There is a power pole on the southeast corner of this intersection Could we the “other" citizens of Cache County possibly have a street light installed to light this area and make it safe? There also has been vandalism here that this could help iai ‘Clean up mess in our schools’ - Let me keep pounding away if you will at two stunning reports on the failures of American education They point to problems that are far more serious in the long run than problems of farm policy trade imbalance or the public funding of congressional elections Either we clean up the mess in our schools or come the next century we’ve had it One report “American Memory” comes from the National Endowment for the Humanities The other “What Do Our Know?” is the work of scholars Diane Ravitch and Chester E Finn Jr Both reports rely upon findings of a test administered to nearly 8000 American The students were examined in history and literature It was an easy test They failed abysmally Without rehashing the sorrowful figures suffice it to say that these students as a class proved to be cultural numbskulls They had no sense of when particular events occurred they therefore had no sense of what events came before or why consequences came after In the field of literature they demonstrated shocking ignorance of the cultural inheritance that every high school student should have WASHINGTON llth-grade- rs received As a people we must ask ourselves Why? Why and how did this happen? What has gone so dreadfully wrong? If we can answer those questions perhaps we can move on to What do we do about it? Ravitch and Finn offer some answers to the “why” Fifty years ago the humanities shared equal billing with mathematics and the natural sciences High school courses in English were heavily weighted with literature History was taught in solid chunks from the sixth grade through the James i Kilpatrick A Conservative View 12th But 25 years ago when the Soviets' Sputnik shocked the Western world the balance abruptly shifted The important literacy became computer literacy History and literature were shunted aside The traditional curriculum in literature fell into disarray Relatively few schools continued to demand that students read the “hard books” The old tradition died and in its stead the students were fed “merely cafeteria-styl- e literature in- cluding the written equivalent of junk food’’ It became educationally fashionable to teach “skills” or “concepts” The educational establishment scorned the teaching of mere “facts and dates” If a high school graduate could not say when Columbus discovered the New World no matter “He will know how to look it up” That won’t do The “concept” of equal rights surely is important to any understanding of American political history but to teacn a concept without facts is to attach a kind of cotton candy history The nationwide test disclosed that half of the know little or nothing of nullification the Missouri compromise secession the Civil War or Reconstruction of these students dimwittedly supposed that Jim Crow laws were intended to improve the lot of black citizens The students were generally ignorant of Plessy v Ferguson and Brown v Board of Education llth-grade- rs Two-thir- Listen for a moment to Ravitch and Finn: “To the extent that we — educators and citizens — allow cultural Barents to wane and to be reduced only to knowledge of celebrities from People magazine and the electronic media then the audience for genuine literature will shrink material written or produced for a literate public will dwindle and the quality our of public discourse and debate society will suffer It is a tragic downward spiral that can only erode the culture trivialize the intellect and in time pauperize our civic life” What can be done about the situation? The recommendations offered by the NEH study and by Ravitch and Finn call for no radical reforms They urge merely that our schools restore the humanities to the important position they once occupied History should be taught from the early elementary grades ugh schools should require at least two years of world history in addition to a solid grounding in u American history Greater emphasis should be placed upon geography Reading assignments should deal with important literary works None of this is the stuff of revolution Will anything be done about the situation? The nonest but pessimistic answer is no nothing significant will be done The entrenched educational establishment supported by timorous textbook publishers and by intimidated school boards has no enthusiasm for such values Fifty years hence the student who is asked about the Greeks and the Trojans will be mystified “Fraternity men? Football players? Sorry Gramps it beats the heck out of me” 0 1W7 Universal Press Syndicate Judge Bork and law and justice Robert Bork seems to have got stuck in the unisex bathroom He was on television the other day telling the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee how he came to grow that beard that makes him look like Admiral von Terpitz or some other d hero of the late Kaiser's Imperial Navy It appears that Bork on a vacation boat trip shared toilet facilities with the other members of his family both male and female The little room though adequate for most functions proved too small to y permit the jurist to shave Thus the genesis of the beard and apparently the flash of lightning that made this worthy judge and professor of law realize that the world cannot come completely under the Constitution's equal protection provisions It’s bathrooms you see Equal status for women would inevitably bring in its wake unisex bathrooms in public places something now confined to the privacy of the home How private the American home’s privacy is the learned judge hasn't yet figured out He was sure that Connecticut did have a right to prohibit married couples from using birth control such Nicholas Un Hoffman Syndicated columnist colloquy between Judge Bork and Republican members of the committee like Wyoming's Alan Simpson revealed that the strategy of the maniacal right is to suggest that should a right to privacy be admitted as fundamental it would be tantamount to licensing homosexuals Given the number of well known right wingers who have accidentally fallen out of the closet these past few years you would think that Senator Simpson might want to ease off on his Nevertheless his point has to be conceded — if the home is to be construed as a castle what goes on there may Kxson's homosexual activity but it's not the government's business to be poking around trying to find out Bork wants this job so badly he has been willing to forswear his entire past life He explained that by quoting from Benjamin Franklin to the effect that a wise man is one humble enough to change one's mind legislation ProfessorJudge Bork True But is it a wise man or a duplicitious one who in pursuit of an important job was constitutional although explained daffy and he didn't recommend it but if denies almost everything he has said or done in the past 35 years? To change on Connecticut insists on passing such laws two or three major issues shows flexibilino court has grounds for overturning them prevent He gave the impression that in some ty to announce a new personal value As one of the concerned taxpaying citizens that help support vague way he regretted there was no right system to get on the Supreme Court Cache County and the State of Utah I would like some response of privacy to be inferred from the suggests a knave to this Please anyone that is likewise concerned or knows who I Constitution Point by point many of the things that but what is a judge to do? If the judge is Robert Bork it Is to uphold the Bork has said have considerable merit See LETTERS on page 29 most intrusive kind of law making The The abortion decision was a poorly thought block-heade- roly-pol- gay-baiti- out intellectually discreditable piece of work the public accommodations act was mischievious in what it promised in the way of future government intervention a reading of our history will quickly persuade a student that the Founding Fathers would never have subscribed to n the rule The evidence supports him in asserting that courts were to attempt to outlaw capital punishment when sentiment in the country was not ready for such a change Bork good high school debater that he is correctly seized on these arguing points but when asked what he would do after he's thrown such laws and court decisions out he’s next to speechless He sat in that hearing room and said that new legal theories would be needed to justify such measures as outlawing lynching he didn't know what those theories might be he’d heard people were working on a legal rationale for permitting abortion for example and he would be open to being persuaded by it if it should be perfected Statistics are trotted out which prove that more than 80 percent of Judge Bork's decisions haven't been off the wall The remaining 20 percent they’re not talking about To give him his due even in his craziest articles his looniest locutions his history is usually factually correct his reasoning logical But he has yet to look up and see that taken together he has canceled the 20th century and is having ants in his pants about the one before This is a jurist who knows much law and little justice 1917 King Future Syndicate Inc one-ma- ed one-vo- te |