friday, november 30, 1979
daily nebraskan
nrrnP
n
Decision to reduce Nebraska Unions hours reasonable
The decision Wednesday night by
the Union Board to reduce the
operating hours of both the
Nebraska and East Unions was a wise
move.
In an effort to offset a utility debt
for this fiscal year, the board decided
that, the Nebraska Union should
close at 11:30 p.m. instead of mid
night Friday and Saturday and will
open at 9 a.m. instead of 8 a.m. on
non-football Saturdays. The East
Union will close at 10:30 p.m,
instead of 11 p.m. on Sunday
through Thursday and at U p.m.
instead of midnight on Friday and
Saturday.
There are bound to be some
students, who, burdened with tuition
increases will feel students in general
are being walked on, but it is un
likely that very many students will
actually be affected by the reduced
hours.
The Nebraska Unions on non
football Saturday mornings has the
atmosphere of an indoor graveyard
and the situation is not much better
in the late evenings.
It should be clear that the union
decision cannot be compared to the
debate earlier this semester about the
proposal to close the libraries. The
need for quiet study space is vital for
any university, and that need should
be met regardless of cost.
The unions however provide a
different function at those hours
generally one of entertainment. It is
Ads entertaining violations aren't
Big Oil better than Crooked Oil
WASHINGTON-A massive oil slick washed over the
pages of several of the nation's larger newspapers
earlier this month. The Mobil Corporation took two
full page ads-bombast in one, bluster in the other
to attack CBS Television for its reporting of the oil
company's third quarter profit increase of 131 percent.
Without the noted troubleshooter Red Adair jetting
in to cap this blowout of Mobile press, readers were on
their own. They were like beached seagulls trying to
survive a gooey blackening, except that in the news
papers it was globs of snake oil, not tanker oil, that had
to be stepped over,
The nimble who did step well had a reward: A few
pages on they had a glimpse of Mobil in the objective
world, not the contrived one of its propaganda ads.'
The same day the company whined that it was shafted
by CBS, news stories told of Mobil's own art of
shaftery, for which Mobil had agreed to pay $19
million in refunds and penalties.
The settlement responded to the Federal Emergency
Regulatory Commission's accusations that Mobil violat
ed natural gas regulations. A refund of $18.5 million
would go to twopipeline companies, (in alleged over
charges) and $500,000 in civil penalties, the Washing
ton Post reported.
THAT'S A PITY for Mobil. But it's even harder on
me. Every time I ease back and enjoy Mobil for what it
does best-produce weekly propaganda ads that have
become comic parodies of the business line-the
company gets caught a something decidedly uricomic.
I prefer Big Oil when it isn't Crooked Oil, when
Mobil, and its pompous and clownish ad campaign, re
mains at the level "of the laughably predictable. For a
decade, Mobil ads have been a weekly fixture in major
American newspapers and magazines.
The surest way to extract the comedy in the Mobil
ads is to treat them as mirthful material for a parlor
game. Take eight people, four on this side of the cheese
dip, four on the other. One team reads aloud the first
sentences of a Mobil ad. The opposing team huddles
and has five minutes to come up with a closing para
graph. The winning team is the one whose prose is "
closest to the cliches and fatuity in the actual ad.
Cartoon by John Lynch, associate professor of life sciences
. ' SHOULD DULLNESS set in, a variation exists.
Select one of Mobil's Lofty Vision ads in which God,
Motherhood and Offshore Drilling are hailed. The
object is to guess the eminent thinker that has been
Cited. Two points for Churchill, five points for Samuel
Butler, 1 ,000 for Ludwig von Mises.
, Only one house-rule needs to be strictly applied:
automatic expulsion tor everyone who tries to begin a
discussion of the ads' content. The merriment is
precisely because they lack intellectual content. If
getting us to think is the goal of Mobil, it would do
better merely to tout its oil the way we used to hear of
Gulfs "No-Nox gasoline" or Shell with platformate."
The old bunk had no pretensions. Buy our gas, we
want your money. The new bunk of Mobil says the
opposite: Buy our viewpoint, we want your mind.
Mobil's propaganda-blab doesn't deserve the gift of
a serious dialogue. Mobil is no more than just another
oil company, Its ideals are stale, shallow or self-serving.
When a genuine issue arises the $19 million settle
ment, for one-Mobil is silent. Its ad the following
week was on the glories of its Lord Mountbatten TV
show. ,
Perhaps it was glorious. But it was nothing next to
the gaiety of a Mobil ad parlor game.
(c) 1979, The Washington Post Company
unlikely that the half hour pr hour
reductions will drastically affect stu
dent's lives in that respect. Enter
tainment alternatives to the union
are available in the campus and
downtown community.
The amount of money the reduct
ions will save is indeed small -only
about $l,000-and for a university
with a budget of millions of dollars,
that may seem insignificant. But in a
time of a budget and energy crises,
keeping the union open for a small
number of students seems to make
little sense.
Ombudsman likes
lull in the storm
It would appear (at the time of this writing) that there
won't be any major tragedies in the paper this week. At
least in practice, the predominant feelings leaking out of
my office are ones of benign neglect. Nobody is finding
anything that is sufficiently annoying to warrant a major
confrontation. Energy is short on the personal front, no
. body is moving unless they have to. People are cold out
, side and inside, and it doesn't look like much will change
that. - .
,0
o
I'm sure there is a similar lull at the complaint window
at Macy's. It's the pre-complaint season. The man with the
greased hair and the .pencil-thin mustache leans on one el
bow behind the counter and brushes the lint off the artifi
cial carnation in his lapel. He surveys the clientele with a
bored 'that's your problem?" look. Mentally he promises
to slowly chew the head off the first person who so much
as looks at him from the corner of his eye.
So much for generating any sympathy for a defective
personal massager, pop-corn rotor toaster;
Well, such is life when you make your money from
other peoples miseries. Evidently, complaints are addic
tive. Unlike the Macy's man (barring grease, pencil-thin
mustache and lint), I think I appreciate the function of
the complaint window mentality. Nothing is everything.
"Zen and the art of screaming." Or (as it more generally is
"Zen and the art of explaining, rehashing, agreeing, dis
agreeing, spinning, and getting dizzy."
This relative calm is unsettling. If I were inclined to
complain about it, I'm not sure where I would go. I could
talk to myself, but find that terribly unproductive. We
seldom agree. I could talk to somebody else, but I've for
gotten how,
Maybe, I should let well enough alone. I would not
mind coasting through the rest of the semester without
any major problems-1 'm sure that many people feel that
way right now. Somebody has just called a well-placed
time-out. Although I'm always ready to play, I find that
nice.
The Ombudsman's window is open, but a Utile cloudy.
I keep expecting it to clear up any minute, but I'm not
holding my breath.
Manufacturers concentrate on teen cosmetic
business
BOSTON -As an unappointed culture
watcher, I have often given thanks and
footnotes to assorted Madison Ave. 'copy
writers for magazines.
One of them, after all, gave birth to the
Cosmo Girl, that marvelous creature of the
Swinging Seventies whose I.Q. is on par
with her cleavage. Another completed the
renovation of Playboy into the charming
egocentric of the Me Decade-elbowing
hit iDiu in cavinO I urint it all
; So.-iust imaanff how excited I was to
see the following announcement spread
across the back page of the New York
Times Jast . week by Seven tepn magazine:
"IN 1926, FREUD ASKED, 'WHAT DO
WOMEN WANT? IN 1979, WE FOUND
OUT."
Aha! I thought, out of the bible of
adolescence would come The Answer. Next
to this mystery, the shroud of Turin, the
quest for the photovoltaic cell and the
meaning of life have all paled.' Herein might
dwell the youthful role model of the
1980s.
Thus, atwitter with excitement, I sat
down to read. What secrets of raging
hormonal imbalance would the ad people
unlock? What, in short, do women want?
. Mascara.
Nail polish.
Bath soap. ,
ACCORDING TO the fine and not so
fine print, Dr. Freud had been stumped by
the question of what women wanted out of
life. But Seventeen, in a flash of inspira
tion, had hired Dr. Yankelovich to discover
what they wanted out of products.
Heading not to the couch but the poll,
they determined that: "an impressive
number of women want the same things
from their products that they wanted when
they were young."
The message was simply that if you grab
them while they're virtually virgin con
sumers, they'll by loyal to you forever. Or
at least to your nail polish.
In short, as proud -as-punch ad director
Robert Bunge put-it on the phone "We
Jiere at Seventeen always say it's easier to
start a habit than stop it."
Well, talk about your Freudian slips
The teen advertisers are in the business
of starting a habit all right. The habit of
self-loathing. If their manufacturers arc
selling solutions, they have to produce the
need. -. v .
They raise the Gross National Level of
teen-age insecurity and then offer the cure.
By 15, the average teen-age girl is hooked
on cosmetics and absolutely mainlining
shampoo.
Teen-agers have been easy prey since the
days when they saved up money for
freckle-remover cream. But today they are
an astonishingly big market, dubbedSuper
spenders. Thy spend $2.1 billion on beauty
aids, and $12.8 billion on clothes.
A QUICK LOOK at the magazine itself
(and this is the best in the market) will tell
you why. They're enough to make Freud
redefine anxiety. Teen-agers are defined as
tragically and physically Hawed people
who must stop the greasics, turn their lips
into a work of art, take their faces to Maxi,
and wonder MIf you shampooed yesterday
will he do this (snuggle) today?
. Continued on Page 5
