Daily Nebraskan
Tuesday, July 1, 1986
Page 4
Nebrayskan
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Goodwill
Turner does what
It has been 10 long years since
the United States and Soviet
Union last competed against
each other in the Summer Olym
pics. Since the Montreal Olym
piad in 1 976, two Summer Games
have come and passed with no
competition between the two
countries. The United States, in
protest of the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan, skipped the 1980
Moscow Olympics. The Russians
returned the favor in 1984, skip
ping the Games at Los Angeles.
What the Olympics haven't
been able to do in 10 years, one
man will accomplish from July
o-20 in Moscow. The two coun
tries will finally meet in a large
scale competition that doesn't
include any skiing or ice skating.
When Ted Turner first pro
posed the Goodwill Games a fp'v
years back, most everybody wa.
skeptical. How could Turner ex
pect to do something that the Olym
pic movement hadn't been able
to do? That's an easy question to
answer, he spent lots of money.
Turner is a man who is either
loved or hated. He's a wheeler
dealer who doesn't let people, or
in this case nations, get in the
way of his ideas. He has turned a
local television station, WTBS,
into one that is beamed nation
wide on cable.
Like all television executives,
Turner needed some program
ming to fill the airspace. Buy the
Braves, buy the Hawks, buy MGM
and instantly he was set. Then
Peace efforts wasted
Monies better spent
The major problem with the
peace movement in its various
forms from the '60s to the pres
ent, has been its rhetoric.
Rhetoric and image has always
managed to isolate the move
ment from large-scale political
effectiveness. The Nuclear Freeze,
Ground Zero, any number of grass
roots peacefreeze organizations,
and most recently The "Great"
Peace March, a hyper-messianic
act of suffering and martyrdom,
have played into conservative
hands by choosing the '60s as a
model for effective political
action.
When conservatives accuse
marchers of being a motley crew
at best, of being hopeless ideal
ists and of choosing a means that
is light years away from its desired
end, they are not far off base.
It is not as if anyone sponsors
these marchers and have prom
ised to reduce the nuclear arse
nal by one missile for every mile
they walk. When the marchers
reach Washington, Reagan will
pretend they do not exist just as
he did when they were stranded
in Barstow, Calif., two months
ago.
The one thing the Peace March
seems effective at is the con
sumption of funds and people's
good graces. The march costs
$4,000 a day just to move. While
the rest of the world hungers for
employment, these men and
women have given up their jobs
to make a long-winded peregri
nation toward political oblivion.
Bob AsimisstMi, Editor, 472,1766
Janit's Rogers, Editorial Page Editor
Kent Kndacott, News Editor
Jeff Korbelik, Associate News Editor
Jeff Apel, Sports Editor
Charles Lieurance, Arts X- Entertain merit Editor
Game
Olympics couldn't
came the idea for the Goodwill
Games.
If the Goodwill Games are a
success, which at this point looks
fairly certain, Turner will be a
hero. His bold move will have
worked and he'll get standing
ovations wherever he roams.
Like him or hate him, Turner
has to be applauded for his
efforts. Forget about his motiva
tions, whether they be good or
bad. The thing we should all look
at is the bottom line. The Games
are about to happen and that in
itself is a good sign for two
nations that haven't been the
best of friends in recent years.
In the past the Olympics have
been used as a political football
by both the United States and
the Soviet Union. But the Good
will Games are immune to that.
Because they are sponsored by a
private citizen the United States
can't boycott. And because the
Soviet Union is, in essence, par
tial sponsor for the event, it is
highly unlikely it would with
draw either.
When Turner first came up
with the idea for the Goodwill
Games, the United States Olym
pic Committee refused to endorse
them. But, with the knowledge
the Goodwill Games were going
to happen and that its endorse
ment didn't matter much any
way, the committee relented.
And so, thankfully, have the
sporting bodies from both na
tions. on educating public
The marchers insist their major
goal is to raise consciousness.
This has been a peace movement
cliche for too long. When some
thing is so symbolic that it be
comes absurd, it is being done to
"raise consciousness." Aside from
the ambiguity of this motivation
(Wrhat is consciousness? Whose
consciousness? Who is uncons
cious?), $4,000 a day for 245 days
is a lot of money to spend on
something as relatively intangi
ble as consciousness.
Education should be the cor
nerstone of an effective peace
movement. People should know
in numbers and monetary statis
tics what it costs the world to
continue an arms race prepos
terously beyond necessity, what
it costs to put bolts on a Trident
submarine, the staggering science
fiction power of the newest line
of weapons and how to effec
tively protest weapons prolifer
ation. Four thousand dollars a day
would buy a strong lobby in Con
gress, enough leaflets to wall
paper the Pentagon and might
serve to unite a peace movement
that has fallen into so many frac
tions a mathematician would
collapse from exhaustion trying
to sort it out.
Just as the idea of "con
sciousness raising" has become
a cliche, so has the sympathetic
adage, "their hearts are in the
right place." Four thousand dol
lars a day should insure that and
much, much more.
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meller' is effortless
Film elicits cliches,
For the ninth time this semester,
the high-school senior from a Chi
cago suburb has faked an illness
(licking his palms to make them clammy
is his preferred "non-specific symp
tom") to fool his dotty parents into
letting him "ditch" school. Now, speak
ing directly to the camera, he says: "If I
go for 10, I'm probably going to have to
barf up a lung."
Ninety minutes later, the discerning
movie- (note well: I do not say "film " or
"cinema ") goer leaves the theater say
ing: "At last, that is settled." Argu
ments can rage about whether the
second greatest movie is this or that
exploration of Scandinavian angst or
this or that study of men in black tur
tleneck pullovers who suffer urban
dread in Paris or Milan with women
who drink bitter coffee and wear their
hair in buns and ceramic earrings they
crafted in their backyard kilns. But for
those of us who seriously doubt that
movies are often serious, it is clear that
the greatest movie of all time is show
ing now at fine theaters everywhere.
It is "Ferris Bueller's Day Off." By
"greatest movie" I mean the moviest
movie, the one most true to the general
spirit of movies, the spirit of effortless
Introducing the face of the Eighties:
Liberty's new look mostly cosmetic
On July 4, the Statue of Liberty will
have a new face. It is the '80s and
everybody is getting a new face. Old
decrepit rock stars get new faces for
MTV. Nixon gets a new face (same as
the old one but without all the egg on
it). McDonald's and a whole bunch of
other real patriotic folks want to make
Liberty mean something again. It is
indicative of the age that giving liberty
meaning again means giving her cos
metic surgery.
A little paint and buff and, voila,
good as new. Still a speck of injustice
on the big copper nose and a thin pat
ina of inequality all along the surface.
Clean, clean, scrape, scrape.
Some things that should be consi
dered: (1) The sculptor, Frederic Auguste
Bartholdi, used his mother as the
model for Liberty's face and his wife's
body to give Liberty her youthful figure.
Now, I don't really mind having a
Freudian nightmare for our nation's
representative in New York's harbor,
but how do the patriotic boys, girls and
conglomerates feel bout this?
Half-bridehalf Mom is one of those
things decent folk don't think about.
Even Greek mythology avoids creatures
like this.
But who am I to psychoanalyze the
artist that gave us such a charming
exaggeration of our nation's psyche.
(2) About our national psyche, as it
were. If we think our Lady is somehow
indigenous to this fair land, we are
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most true to the general spirit of movies
escapism.
Remember Steve McQueen in "The
Great Escape," busting out of a Ger
man POW camp? Ferris "borrows" a
friend's father's Ferrari and escapes for
a day, from something worse: high
school. As should happen in a teen-ager
liberationist movie, Ferris reduces a
ferret-faced school administrator to
rubble, bamboozles his soggy-headed
parents and lives out every teen-ager's
fantasy of subverting authority at every
turn. Ferris is, as the saying goes,
"into" fun. The movie will elicit cliches
what America's premiere essayist,
Joseph Epstein, calls "ephemeral veri
ties." The cliches will be to the effect
that Ferris is a symptom.
George
Will
Need you ask of what? Of the self
absorption of youth corrupted by the
complacency of the Reagan years. Such
zeitgeist-mongering is punctured by
sadly mistaken. I'm told there are Lady
Liberties strung all over Europe. What
ever act of artistic procreation spawned
her was repeated again and again.
Lord, you're thinking, now he's ques
tioning her sexual behavior, or the
artist's sexual behavior, or both, or
everything sacred, right, American...
Well, artistic promiscuity is no crime.
Just something to think about.
(3) What exactly does the statue get
to watch while it stands there getting
arm cramps?
gJ j Charles
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If we think the immigration into this
country is all tears of joy and happy
smiling faces yearning to breathe free
we are, once again, sadly mistaken.
The series of long wooden benches,
examinations of every orifice, cabalis
tic paper work and labyrinthine hal
lways of Ellis Island look, in most
books of phot ography, like scenes from
Nazi death camps. Then, the caption,
Oh, yeah, this is America. These people
are about to become Americans. A nice
glass of milk and a tenement will cheer
up those long faces.
1 won't even go into the eyes full of
false promise on our lady. I won't men
tion the nature of the lies we tell the
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escapism
Epstein's question: When, other than
periods of war or economic calamity,
have people not been self-absorbed?
"Ferris Bueller" is let us blurt out
the worst not serious. But, then, few
movies are, and fewer should be. Here
is an oddity of our age. Many people
would rather undergo torture or (what
is much the same thing) have a Judith
Kranz novel read aloud to them than
have it said that they willingly read
third-rate novels, yet those people go to
movies that are the moral equivalents
of Kranz novels, and will read ponder
ous reviews of those movies. Epstein,
who believes that much movie review
ing amounts to distinguishing between
the fourth-rate and the third-rate, says
that reading Pauline Kael, "page after
page, on, say, the movie 'Popeye'
becomes a spectacle akin to listening
to someone play "Mares Eat Oats and
Does Eat Oats" on a Stradivarius."
Oh, carry me back to olden days,
when almost all movies were like "Fer
ris Bueller" no nonsense about
seriousness. In the early 1950s, the 11-year-old
intelligentsia in Champaign,
111., plunked down ten cents for a
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world. Now there's room for everyone.
The immigrant could go door to door.
"Seen some freedom and opportun
ity lately?"
"None here, try Broadway and Sixth
Street."
"Been there. The police showed up
to escort me back here."
(4) What will the new face look like?
I'm personally in favor of Ronald
McDonald for a face and Tina Turner's
torso. Maybe a Swatch wrist watch. The
hand held high in the air for all the
world to see could bear Cokes and sty
rofoam pods with hamburgers in them
for all.
Maybe Ronald Reagan would like to
put his favorite horse's head on top and
Nancy's torso on the bottom.
(5) What does it all mean?
Well, if we have a Statue of Liberty,
let's get statues for some other things
too. How about a statue for every time
Ronald Reagan forgets a delicate ques
tion a reporter asks him in the space of
five seconds? How about a statue for all
the Nazis who work for the space pro
gram and draw $100,000 a year pen
sions? And let's get statues that represent
how little we really know or care about
our government's actions in Latin Amer
ica, the Middle East and, for that mat
ter, here at home.
Perhaps those could all be one
statue. It would look a lot like the
statue for justice, blind and carrying a
sword.