The Rice Thresher (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 66, No. 27, Ed. 1 Thursday, March 15, 1979 Page: 3 of 16
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The Rice Thresher, March 15, 1979, Page 3
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Letters to the editor
To the Editor:
Mrs. Max Freund wishes to say
thank you to President Dr. N.
Hackerman, to our provost Dr. Frank
Vandiver, to the Board of Trustees,
as well as to our many friends and
former students who helped her
husband celebrate such a glorious
100th birthday. The beautifulartistic
scroll with its meaningful wording is
deeply appreciated and will soon
adorn our home. Thanks too to Mr.
N. Broch and Professor Joe Benjamin
Wilson, who worked hard and
lovingly behind the scene to make
this day one of the greatest days in
our lives. Recognition is due also to
our student paper "The Thresher"
with the photo and the excellent
article about my husband, written by
the Editor, Michelle Heard. And last,
but not least, to our two daughters
Heidi and Grete, who served us
culinary pleasures.
Whether it is the first or 100th
birthday it is:
"Your own personal new year...
your private mark in time
between the past and future...
your own farewell to yesterday,
your welcome to tomorrow!"
Thomas Malloy
Sincerely,
Mrs. Max Freund
An open letter to the members of the
Rice Program Council:
The students of Hanszen College
are very concerned about the
upcoming Beer-Bike Race. The
reason for our concern and anxiety is
the appalling state of the bike track.
We, meaning the entire college, but
especially the bikers, are very angry
that anyone has the gall to expect us
to ride on tjiat track. The condition of
the track has been steadily
deteriorating since before anyone can
remember. There are very large
potholes; the pavement is quite
uneven; there is always sand and
gravel on the lot. Everyone realizes
now dangerous taking turns at high
speeds can be even without gravel --
the risk is increased tenfold when the
biker cannot trust the pavement
beneath his or her tires.
The RPC has not taken effective
action since the mid-February Beer-
Bike captains' meeting to remedy this
hazardous situation. 1 his can only be
seen as a shocking neglect of duties to
supervise one of the largest student
activities of the year.
Well over one hundred students
will be risking their skin — very
literally — by participating as bikers in
the race. Fully aware of the danger,
students' enthusiasm for the Beer-
Bike race has been decreasing rapidly.
Therefore, Hanszen College is
requesting immediate and effective
action by the RPC to provide a safe
track.
Sincerely,
Vicki Raab
Matt Delevoryas
Hanszen Bike Captains
Radical solutions needed
In a world as throughly messed up as ours, radical solutions are clearly
needed. Unfortunately, most self-styled "radicals" aren't radical in the least.
Few radicals have the courage to reject their tradition-sanctioned but outworn
and irrelevant orthodoxy—Marxism.
Karl Marx presented his system as a scientific hypothesis and by 1979 the
empirical results are conclusive enough to persuade anybody but Creationists,
Flat Earthers, and Marxists. Scores of nations have tested one form or another
of Marxism, and exactly how many have succeeded in providing either
material goods or personal liberties as abundantly as their capitalist
neighbors? Still, Marxism retains its nostalgic fascination for Western
intellectuals like Franz Brotzen and Third World dictators.
The most tragic example is probably Fidel Castro. After liberating his people
from a tyrant, he sold them into bondage to the Slavic bureaucrats in the
Kremlin. After years of subsidizing Castro's experiments in political
repression and economic nonsense, the Soviets called due the mortgage on
Cuba. Hence, thousands of young Cubans, instead of building for the future
at home, are dying in the deserts and jungles of Africa, pawns to Marxism's
cancer-like need to conquer more or die.
Dr. Matusow's History of the Sixties makes clear the same sad process was
at work here. Student leftists, after a promising beginning of trying to forge a
radicalism adapted to America's peculiar circumstances: e.g., the SDS's Port
Huron Statement, regressed by the late sixties into competing sects of
doctrinaire Maoists, Trotskyites, and Stalinists. Commonsensically, the
masses of activist students declined to follow their leaders into the fever
swamps of imported Marxism. They were left with no coherent critique of
America and soon lapsed into the current somnolence, while the hardcore few
descended into the violent irrelevancy of the Weather Underground and the
Symbionese Liberation Army.
A few true radicals exist. The most visible is Teng Hsiao-Ping, who removed
the ideological scales from his eyes, observed that the common people of
Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan live far better than the Chinese,
and drew the obvious conclusion.
It is particularly ironic that the Chinese themselves have exposed the idiocy
of all those lies Americans told each other about how glorious life in China was
under Mao. Maoist China was culturally and agriculturally famished,
totalitarian, and irrational, but thousands of right-thinking Americans given
the tour of China strove mightily not to notice, since the People's Republic
seemed the last chance for the Marxist dream to come true. Cuba, of course,
has taken over China's role. After the inevitable disillusionment sets in, one
expects some completely inaccessable dictatorship—maybe Albania or South
Yemen—to become the new Shangri-La for the chic.
There are other encouraging signs of actual radicalism. In France the long
tradition of parlor revolutionaries has been disrupted by the emergence of the
"New Intellectuals" who have read Solzhenitsyn and know the Gulag was not
a fluke of Stalin's personality but a direct result of Lenin's attempt to
institutionalize Marxism. They also note that the more completely
regimes try to remake their populations in the Marxist mold, the higher the
bodies are piled—I would like to call Cambodia the ultimate example of this,
but I fear it won't be, as long as it remains fashionable to take on faith an
antique but murderous mythology.
Steve Sailer
I agree with much of what you say. That Marxist societies have, in practice,
become some of the most totalitarian and repressive in modern history is
beyond question. Yet I feel you have misconstrued a few of my admittedly
vague points. My contention was that communism is just as conservative as
capitalism, if not more so. I advocated radical alternatives, and by that I
certainly didn't mean Marxism.
Franz Brotzen
With creation ends equality
David Dow
Many people consider the things which
government does for them to be social
progress, but they consider the things
government does for others as socialism.
Chief Justice Earl Warren
Man's imagination lacks the
dimension to experience poverty
through abstraction. Poverty's
effects—delinquency, drug-abuse,
directionless lives—pervade our
world, yet they often oecome mere
statistics. A crime rate. The number
of overdose deaths. Unemployment
figures. Presumably sympathetic
leaders compile more numbers; the
abstractions continue.
Let's think in terms of individuals:
people with the same inherent value
of even the brightest "Rice scholar.
But the sad fact is that Peter Poor
encounters insuperable obstacles in
his quest to enter Rice, or any higher
institution. We aren't dealing with
lower class incomes, folks. This is
poverty. Hard core. One room
tenements; chronic unemployment,
occasional running water; rats in the
cupboard; abject lives. Get the
f'icture? If not, do what a group of us
rom Baker did last weekend. Be Big
Brothers or Big Sisters. Not only will
you enjoy the self-satisfaction of
giving a disadvantaged youth an
infrequent pleasure, but you will
also, upon picking the child up at his
home, witness squalid living
conditions impossible to imagine.
Multiply that disparaging scene by
millions, and the immorality of
ignoring the cancer grows obvious.
Still there are some—most likely
wealthy—who laud the virtues of
poverty. It breed tough, American
character. Causes one to make the
best of what he's got. You know, rags
to riches. Wasn't Richard Nixon
poor? He made it.
Even when the likes of those who
first sought a cease-fire in the War on
Poverty concede that John Garner
was right when he lamented, "For
every talent that poverty has
stimulated it has blighted a hundred,"
the same every-man-for-himself
Americans justify ignoring the poor
by criticizing what we all recognize as
typical traits of the poor man:
slothfulness and drunken sprees, to
name a couple. Melville's conclusion
demonstrates far more insight. "Of
all the preposterous assumptions of
humanity over humanity, nothing
exceeds most of the criticisms made
on the habits of the poor by the well-
housed, well-warmed, and well-fed."
The call for social revolution is not
yet being sounded. The plea is for
compassion and understanding.
Steinbeck worried that only an
explosion would induce action. "Must
the. hunger become anger and the
anger fury before anything will be
done?" Smug outsiders just can't
seem to muster the empathy to
devise an effective solution. So
pretend for a minute that you're the
starving youth in a fatherless home
with an overworked, underpaid
mother. Now how does a little
socialism sound?
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Heard, Michelle Leigh. The Rice Thresher (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 66, No. 27, Ed. 1 Thursday, March 15, 1979, newspaper, March 15, 1979; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth245399/m1/3/: accessed July 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting Rice University Woodson Research Center.