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"No new Penthouse till next week."
That red-letter announcement was put up at the
Nebraska Union Bookstore this week after bookstore
crshiers were asked by about eight people if they
could buy the Penthouse with the de-frocked and
de-crowned Miss America Vanessa Williams.
Besides the demand at the university, the presi
dent of the Lincoln New3 Agency, Ken Pocras, said
he had received 15 to 20 calls Monday asking about
the magazines.
Lincoln will have to drool and lick its chops in
anticipation a little while longer. Lincoln won't get
the new Penthouse until Tuesday.
But Omaha is another story. According to the
Lincoln Star, one Om&ha newsstand sold 1 97 of 200
new Penthouses on Monday alone. And 60 percent
of the magazines bought all over Omaha were
bought by guess who. Men? No. Women.
It seems that women would have more sense than
that. It's hard enough to choke down the Miss
America pageant itself, with its slim, firm, flesh
flashing contestants who talk about world peace
and harmony between all people.
But for women to rush to the stands to buy a
magazine that does nothing but degrade women is
amazing. No, embarrassing. By buying magazines
that show women as nothing but sex-starved, passive
objects who like to run naked through the dew and
eat red popsicles (a fictional example), women
support the image that others have been fighting for
so long.
Both beauty pageants and magazines like Pent
house do nothing but display women as objects.
Both show the women as less than intelligent. How
much skill does a red-popsicle-eating hobby take?
How much intelligence does it take to say you want
harmony between all people without saying how
that can be accomplished?
Harmony between all people won't be accomplish
ed by treating half the population like mere objects
to oogle and drool over. Harmony between people
will be accompllished when everyone wakes up and
rejects the kind of degradation and inequality
women face as long as the Penthouse mentality
exists.
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amily theme
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u.
The convention was the week the Democratic
Party went back to every root in its genealogy.
The pilgrimage began in St. Paul, Minn., where
Geraldine Ferraro told the nation that, "My father
came from a little town in Italy called Marcianise." It
ended in San Francisco, when Mondale said in his
acceptance speech, "My dad was a preacher and my
mom taught music. We never had a dime."
In between, the Democrats, assembled in one of
the more rootless cities in the Western Hemisphere,
bared their personal tales of humble origins.
It wasn't just Jesse Jackson who turned his lowly
past into his speech prologue. George McGovern
described himself as "a small-town lad from the
South Dakota Prairies." Rep. Barbara Mikulski spoke
of herself as the "grocer's daughter from East
Baltimore." Texas State Treasurer Ann Richards
talked to and about her "mamma and daddy back in
Waco, Texas." The governor of New Mexico, Tony
Ellen Goodman
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ALL MATERIAL COPYFUGHT1S34 DAILY NEERMKAM
Anaya, referred to his "adobe house with a dirt floor
and no utilities." Washington Mayor Marion Barry
reminded us he was the son of a sharecropper, and
New York Gov. Mario Cuomo spoke as the son of an
immigrant.
Democrats seemed intent on telling the country
where they were coming from and not in the
California sense. The issue wasn't where your head
was, but where your roots were. The parade of poor
parentage induced even the private Gary Hart to
talk about Kansas hardscrabble with the Hart
pences. If there was a son of a doctor or daughter of a
lawyer on the podium, we shall never know. The
convention didn't boast the class origins of Franklin
Delano Roosevelt or John F. Kennedy. There wa3
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Daily Nebraskan
8. empathy '
little ado about economic genes from Democrats
like West Virginia Gov. Jay Rockefeller.
The refrain finally led one Ted Kennedy aide to
muse over the vision of the senator opening his
speech with the words, "I am the son of a million
aire." There was nothing unique about the political
cache of humble origins. It's worked for politicians
since William Henry Harrison was scornfully accused
of coming from a log cabin. Harrison turned that
into a campaign plus and Lincoln made history with
it.
The log cabins of today are sharecropper huts and
urban ghettos and immigrant ships. Americans may
have mixed feelings about the people in those huts
and ghettos and ships, but they have respect for
those who rose out of them. The simple invocation of
the All-American story still works.
But if roots are the rage this year, there's an
additional reason. The Democrats are staking out
one side of the class struggle. The biggest applause
lines in Moscone Center had to do with Reagan and
the rich.
As Texan Jim Hightower expressed the generic
Democratic attack on Reagan: "In just three years
Ronald Reagan has turned the people's house the
White House into a private club for a bunch of
Gucci-wearing, Cabernet-sipping, globe-hopping
Hollywood plutocrats." The Democrats are trying to
woo a wider "us" from the Reagan them."
This approach is full of risks, especially in pursuit
of the much-heralded Yuppie vote. Yuppies do like a
bit of Cabernet with their Camembert. They are less
likely to hark back to ethnic roots. Baby-boomers
weren't born in neighborhoods; they were born in
suburbs. They didn't; like Mario Cuomo, see their
father's feet bleed; they say their fathers mowing
lawns. They don't all swoon for the hard-working
people ethic; some prefer tennis.
What the Democrats are counting orj is that our
sense of roots and family go beyond one generation
or one blood line. As Ferraro said in her acceptance
speech, "What separates the two parties is whether
we use the gift of life for others or just ourselves."
TheY aje counting on Cucmo's definition of family,
mutuality ... the sharing of benefits and burdens
for the good of all. Feeling one another's pain.
Sharing one another's blessings."
Finally, this litany of roots,thh chorus of humble
origins, was more than a series of private memories.
It was an appeal to America's collective empathy.
1S34, Th Boston GWm Nswtpsper Ccmpsny'
Washington Post Writers Group
Friday. July 27. 1934
Page 4
