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About The daily Nebraskan. ([Lincoln, Neb.) 1901-current | View Entire Issue (Jan. 30, 1990)
Editorial Edwards, Editor, 472-1766 Nelson, Editorial Page Editor Steeves, Managing Editor Pfanner, Associate News Editor I Lisa Donovan, Associate News Editor Brandon Loomis, Wire Editor Jana Pedersen, Night News Editor Representation needed Parking committee lacks student members A SUN President Bryan Hill sent a letter last semester to Chancellor Martin Massengale and to Vice Chancellors James Griesen and John Goebel asking for representation on the Parking Advisory Committee that would more fairly reflect student concerns. Hill pointed out that students account for 70 percent of the total parking revenue but currently represent only 40 percent of the committee. Student concerns easily can be overlooked by university employees who make up the greater percentage on the committee. Hill’s suggestion was to increase student membership to aDout percent or tne committee. Massengale’s response to Hill was brief and to the point: a kind, gentle no. Once again, administration has promised to seriously look at the parking problem at UNL, but, unfortunately, when it comes to actually implementing solutions by allowing students to have a bigger voice on an important ? committee, administrators come up with excuses. Massengale’s excuse (in a letter to Hill) for not placing ! more students on the committee was that bylaws already exist for the committee to change its membership. He f added that, “I am very reluctant to make a change in the Parking Advisory Committee other than those suggested through the bylaws of the committee.” Fine. But Massengale should keep an eye on the Park ing Advisory Committee. If a change isn’t made, he should take up Hill’s proposal himself. A change in the committee would give students greater | representation, which conceivably could swing parking a__• .l _• c_ tuvvioiwua in uivii lavui. As Hill said, “Administration now has an obligation to solve parking problems.” And part of that obligation is allowing students to be represented fairly in the process. ~ Emily Rosenbaum for the Daily Nebraskan Analyze issues, then decide Sometimes the wrong thing gets into the wrong place — like C.J. Shcper's column being in the Daily Nebraskan Friday, Jan. 26. One hopes that an editorial col umn written by a news-editorial ma jor would include some degree of reasoning behind the argument, but 1 guess -in this case dial’s asking loo much. Bad luck? Who knows. Your argument that, if he (John Joubcrt) had known he was going tc be electrocuted for his crime, he wouldn’t have murdered those “sweet wonderful boys’’ (If they had beer “spiteful, juvenile delinquents,: woulc Joubcrt deserve a lighter sentence?; is ridiculous, to put it mddly. For one thing, people don’t sil around debaung whether they arc going out to kill and mutilate children de pending on whether or not they’ll gel fried. Deciding whether or not you’ll risk getting fined for sneaking alco hol into a public park, yes, but people who can even hold the thought ol such a hideous crime aren’t making rational choices - murder isn’t a ra tinnal rhnirp If’c a mnral which is something you fail to grasp — what the hell does I.Q. have to do with anything? A person with an I.Q. of 85 knows that killing children is wrong. Do you really think there are people walking around right now whe are thinking of random and senseless murder, kept in check only by the . knowledge that they could gel the chair? You arc talking about an impor tant moral issue here. Does society decide, in this instance, that murder by the state is justified? What mes sage are we sending to the world and to ourselves if we condone capital punishment? And, more relevant to your column, would it do any good? This is the issue you fail to fully address - as far as I can see, you were revolted by the picture (a normal response, to be sure), and since this crime was indeed sick, you feel he should die for it. Fine, but as you admit, your “logic is mixed,” per haps the only piece of true insight your column gives us. Because your logic is mixed, faulty and unable to deal with any reality other than your own reaction to the crime and its consequences, do you think the decision between the chair or a life sentence should be decided on the basis of how grossed-out the judge got? Consider also a man walking into his bedroom to find his wife in bed with his best friend -in a jealous rage he grabs his shotgun and shoots them both. Would he at any point during this episode (which probably lasted all of 10 seconds, as most heat-of-thc moment situations do) sit down and rationally consider his options and the consequences of his actions? If your answer is yes, as it was for a psychopath like Joubcrt, then I think you need to spend a little more lime studying how real people in the real world think, feel and act. You just might learn something. ultimately, yuur Mioucommg is (hat you fail to see that in the scenario I presented (and there are hundreds of instances like that in our country each year) murder happens when some one is pushed, either by overwhelm ing passions and cmoitons or by permanent mental instability, to a point where reason doesn’t fit into the pic ture, where rational choices can’t be made - the fact that somebody is capable of committing murder should tell you that calm reasoning has been left behind. I hope that after some thought, this bare truth might make some sense to you. And please, next lime you’re driv ing down the interstate in hysterics, %pull over until you get control of yourself. You could kill someone. Kirk Johnson social services (between semesters) fTHEITOT FWlAF1fTH£7f5TPTOARMRici) ! S’VIET LEADER IN IHEK>:. LEADER IN' I 1 1 Can the right survive today? Columnist ponders effect of communism s death on conservatism The anticommunist left effec tively disappeared with the death of Henry “Scoop” Jackson and the open declaration of “neo-conservatism” — a term ratify ing the nghiward lurch of a genera tion of former leftists (mainly former Trotskyites). The American right, however, never opted out of the Cold War: Anticommunism was the one constant, unifying, highly diverse tradition in the conservatism of the post-WWII era. In often uneasy alliance, anticom munism permitted disagreements to be glossed over for the duration of the war. And the movement is diverse, encompassing libertarians, “classi cal” liberals, traditionalists, natural rights advocates and religionists. Of course, to be given the desire of one’s heart is not an unmitigated blessing: Conservatives who have lived with the Cold War for their entire lives now can be seen walking about muttering to themselves and blinking at a new world they do not under stand. Liberal pundits can scarcely con tain their glee, and conservatives speak iui ivai ui JirustlCilCC, as they pose the question, “Is the death of conservatism in the death of communism?” The obvious answer is that the movement will not survive intact: Someone will have to leave -- the libertarians and the Burkeans will make sure of that. But whether or not the movement survives as a relevant voice in American politics depends on who else has to leave and why. Some hints of the nature and sig nificance of the division were given at a conference last week in Clare mont, Calif., organized'by the Clare mont Institute, a conservative think tank. The conference, born of the mind of William Rusher, publisher of Na tional Review for more than 30 years, was devoted to the “Ambiguous Legacy of the Enlightenment,” an admittedly odd topic from which to glean the structure of post-Cold War conservatism. Nonetheless, the clues were pretty obvious. The issue seething underneath this apparently arcane subject revolves around the depth of Enlightenment thought in the American founding: Docs the founding’s reliance upon the “shallow Enlightenments” ofthe English and the Scots doom the proj ect, ultimately, to the paroxyislic nihilism of the French Enlightenment? A recent flurry of articles in Na tional Review by several conference participants has reopened old battles and old issues. The division is deep and fundamental. On one side are conservatives like the late Leo Strauss and his Clare mont progeny, particularly Harry Jaffa and Charles Keslcr. They argue that the genius of the West -- and of the United States’ founding — springs Jim Rogers from the dynamic tension issuing from its double commitment to reason (so called) and revelation. In his eloquent paper, Keslcr ar gued that the American founding reasserted the grand synthesis of rea son and revelation found in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. The synthesis of Athens and Jerusa lem is neither an absurdity nor an i impossibility: Reason (socalled) and i revelation are not contradictory, but consistent and mutually supporting. Thus, Keslcr praises the shallow Enlightenments, and points out that they did not share the anti-religious bigotry of the French Enlightenment. In reasserting Thomislic wisdom, then, me proper arena tor slate action is only where reason (so called) and revelation coincide. i In stark contrast to Kesler’s claim i was Oxford University professor John Gray’s argument that only faith, or wholly theological reasoning, can avoid the collapse of Enlightenment reasoning, shallow or not, into an abject nihilism. He repeals the me- ( dieval “I believe that I may under- i stand.” 1 Weighing into the dispute was Richard John Ncuhaus (author of ‘‘The i Naked Public Square”) with his analy- i sis of the logical end of the Enlighten- i ment project in the writings of “lib- i cral ironist” Richard Rorty. Theproj- i eel collapsed in the “disintegration of confidence that there are such stan dards by which all rational beings arc bound...” Ncuhaus, as I take hirti, points out the ultimate poverty of natural, i.e., i non-fidelities, reasoning. I In contrast, the Claremont conser- i vatives insisted on the possibility of a ‘‘practical compromise” between reason (socalled) and revelation. But not just any understanding of revela tion: Faith must be of an approved kind; a faith that serves the American regime. Indeed, Tom West of the Univer sity of Dallas even argued that the American founding required a spe cific theology w herein people approach God as4 ‘almost equal.” He approved of this and disapproved of the Au gustinian and Calvinistic traditions which, in West’s terms, has believers ‘‘cringing” before God. And in so arguing. West approved of the idolatrous impulse in the American founding. After all, I pointed out, the Original Sin was Eve’s desire to approach God on West’s same terms. Ernest van den Haag of Fordham University and Gerhart Nicmcyer of the University of Notre Dame sug gest that such a theology of 4 4 sell salvationism” dooms Enlightenment “rationality” into the patent irration alism of Rorty. The key figure in the Jeclinc of Enlightenment thinking into irrationalism isn’t Hobbes, as West oclicved, but Pelagius -- the fifth :cntury heretic asserting the auton omy of the human soul. The very possibility of belief in Lhc face of the irrationalism of Rorty is the question of moment -- the dic lates of natural reasoning arc simply rrelevant and imnotcnt. if not nosi ivcly wrongheaded. The time for synthesis has passed. The key to answering the ques ion, “will the right survive the death >f communism,” is found in last week’s nissing participant; the Christian nghl. The survival of conservatism dc xinds not simply on retaining the "ass numbers in the Christian right, lor upon a cynical exploitation of the novemeni, but upon a full-bodied, ;onfidcnt assertion of Christianity’s public philosophy. That Claremont conservatives seem mablc to understand the claims of the Christian right only bodes ill for the ;onservative movement should Clarc nont conservatives inherit the reigns )f conservatism without a modifica ion of their own public understand ng of Christianity. The time has passed fbr a syncretic udge on fundamental issues. Rogers is on leave from Biown Unlvcr ilty in Providence, R.I. and a former editorial >agc editor and columnist for the Daily Ne >raskan.