opinions r- editorial opinion Undergraduate Student Government Bill Cluck and USQ federal liaison Kim Hammond took a trip to Washington, D.C., last week. Does anybody care? They went as representatives of Penn State students and, in a way, of all students to lobby against proposed cuts to federal financial student aid. Does that make any difference to you? While prowling the corridors and inner sanctums of government, they heard some interesting rumors. Rumors such as: • Pell Grants (formerly known as Basic Educational Opportunity Grants) could be cut from more than $2 billion to $1 billion. • Graduate students may be prevented from receiving Guaranteed Student Loans, a move that would cut the GSL budget by 30 percent. • The U.S. Department of Education might be eliminated and its 1983 budget could be slashed by 50 percent. • Supplemental Education Opportunity Grants, National Direct Student Loans and work study programs could be phased out and replaced with a single block grant, a move that would make one-step fund-cut ting much easier. Besides that, the Washington Post re ported recently that the $5OO million block grant Congress approved this year for •several federal education programs would opinion Heartbreak Hotel Welcome to Hotel CBL, Happy Valley’s only animal hotel, with single, double, and multiple cagg-rooms available for rats, mice, and hogs. The self-declared proprietor of. Hptqi. CBL (Centralized Biological Laboratory) is ftfr. Frederick G. Ferguson, who assures us that no effort or expense is spared to make its guests as comfortable as possible prior to the time they are.shipped off to the vivisectors for the greater glory of science and salvation of mankind. If the guests at Hotel CBL are indeed treated as well as is suggested in the Collegian article “Animals live happily in ; University laboratory,” Manager Ferguson is to be congratu lated. He is clearly not in the league of many of his colleagues such aS Dr. Edward Taub of the Institute for Behavioral Research in Silver Spring, Maryland, recently convicted on six counts of animal cruelty, who kept the amputated paw of one of his research monkeys on his desk as a paperweight. I am not among those individuals, nor is Trans-Species Unlimit ed .among those organiztions, which delight in the’discovery of gross abuse of animals because it provides an opportunity for media exposure. I am glad that animals at CBL are at least spared pain and suffering prior to experimentation. • The title of the article, however, is absurd, as is Mr. Ferguson’s comparison of his facility as a hotel. This brand of complacent mythologizing is unconscionable; it utilizes the limited humane treatment of animals as a cover for the perpetuation of far worse cruelties. Were the author of this article a southern journalist in the 19th century, its headline might well have read: “Negroes live happily on Mississippi plantations.” The truth is, there is no Hotel CBL: it doesn’t exist, any more than Old MacDonald’s farm. The elaborate handling facilities to which the “conscientious” factory farm er and the “humane” experimenter like to point to justify their shameless exploitation of animals are, after all, only a A plastic spastic version of Christmas replete with hula girls ; Late last December I felt particularly moved by the Christmas spirit and took a 'detour on my walk home. The streets became increasingly unfamiliar with each turn and I soon came upon a street I never knew existed. ; A group of people crowded before a quaint, wood-frame cottage and buzzed 'among themselves in what seemed like a tone of great expectation. From the rear of the crowd I couldn’t see what all the excitement was about, so I asked one short, plump, middle-aged lady. .' “Oh, it’s Mr. Tannenbaum at it again. Every year he sets up the most wonder ful Christmas display,” she said. “Ev erything is so gay and bright and the lights are so brilliant you can barely see. He doesn’t spare a thing.”, “Another plastic spastic,” I muttered. “What was that, sonny?” “Fantastic, just fantastic.” I elbowed my way to the front of the crowd. Before me was a massive collec tion of every kind of Christmas decora tion imaginable. Reindeer and shepherds and Santa Clauses of every shape, size and color. A thin, nervous man in a Woolrich coat scurried about the front lawn screwing in little light bulbs and pulling on plugs to make sure the connections were good. I assumed this man was the famous Tan nenbaum, glorified by song, story and styrofoam snowflake, and I approached him to better understand his odd obses sion. - “Excuse me sir. I’m a newcomer to your winter wonderland and was curious as to the origins and purpose of this magnificent display.” Students should Obviously taken in by my eloquent and quite sickening introduction, Tannen baum was very happy to let me follow him around as he prepared for the flip of the switch which had become a neighbor hood tradition. His tool belt jingled and jangled with its burden of wrenchs, screwdrivers and pockets of nails and screws, making the man seem like a misplaced elf from Santa’s workshop. The first decoration that caught my eye was a group of 12 adult figures dressed in choir robes and posed with sheet music held in front of them. “Are these supposed to represent carolers?” I inquired naively. “Heck no. This is a tribute to Christmas in Utah and these folks rep resent the three best sopranos, altos, tenors and basses of the Mormon Taber nacle Choir. When I push the button, they start singing the ’Hallelujah Chorus’ and Brigham Young comes out from behind the house and reads ‘The Night Before Christmas.’ ” “What do you have in mind to com memorate Hawaii?” I asked in a tone of cynicism. “Hula girls with jingle-bell leis singing Who cares? about fighting for financial aid in Washington be cut by 40 percent in January. • Use the Christmas/Hanukkah vaca- Does that interest you? Or is the cross- tion to write letters to your senators and word puzzle more enticing? representatives, or make a few pre-vaca- Cluck and Hammond didn’t think so; the tion phone calls, or maybe even take a trip 150 people who made phone calls to their to Washington yourself, senators and congressmen last week, cour- • Tell your parents, and your parents’ tesy of USG, to protest financial aid cuts friends, to do the same thing. More voices, didn’t think so; even The New York Times more votes, more power. More persuasion, didn’t think so, noting in a story last week • University staff, faculty and adminis that, “In some areas, Mr. Reagan’s budget trators: That goes for you, too. cuts are starting to hurt and to provoke resentment. Students at Pennsylvania e P° y®*® h® 3 * to discourage abuses of State University are complaining to Mr. the financial aid system. Does your room- Clinger (U.S; Rep. William F. Cfinger Jr., mate > whose father makes $lOO,OOO a year, R-central Pa.) about reduced loans ...” take out a GSL to spend on a vacation For Cluck and Hammond, for the .150 cruise to the Bahamas? Those are the concerned phone-callers, and for USG kinds of stories that senators and rep which promoted and sponsored the phone resentatives hear, and the stories that calls and trip to Washington a big fat inspire them all the more to heave the axe “thank you” is in order. on the aid budget. Perhaps the biggest and most important . Don’t ignore the tremendous' power form of “thank you,” however, would be possible if all student, and non-student, some support - active support - from the groups pu iied their constituencies together, thousands of Penn State students who to attack this common problem: Forget the depend on some form of financial aid to go arguments that the Penn State Interna to school. USG’s crew has helped to unlock tional Dancers, for instance, qt a sorority the door; now the burden is on everyone or the chess club isn’t intended to deal with else to open it up and march through. “political” issues. Financial aid is a hu- : u man issue. A student issue. !. •To have a truly legitimate voice, ' 4 ■ students must register to vote, then follow And that s pretty good reason to care. through by going to the polls in May and November. A vote equals power; power equals persuasion. preparation for the knife. Humane treatment of animals prior to slaughtering or, torturing them is not adequate compensa tion. i ■ This is something we are apt to forget in reading through the account of the technical sophisticatiQni.pf- CBL’s facilities. - When the topic of the validity of is filially; brought up in the last paragraph of the article,.it is quickly dismissed with the experimenter’s Big Lie No. 2: experimen tation on animals benefits humans, i.e., we’d all be dying of dread diseases if we didn’t have it. In the case of a minute proportion of animal experiments this is possibly true, al though there is a large number of reputable former experi menters, such as Donald Barnes and Richard Ryder, who staunchly deny it. What is unquestionably true, however, is that the overwhelming majority of experiments on animals either have no relevance whatsoever to the alleviation of human suffering, reproduce results already conclusively established, or are simply inapplicable to human beings. Of course, as the author of this article points out, the animals who suffer in such experiments are not complaining. Indeed. Like the exploited powerless everywhere, they are mute. George P. Cave, president of Trans-Species Unlimited Nov. 20 Great show Bravos and thanks to Raymond Brown, Smith Toulson, Kim Kronenberg, the University Choir and the University Sympho ny Orchestra. The Christmas Festival program was well selected and well-executed. Dufay to Williams what joys of the season! James G. Neal, visiting associate librarian University libraries Dec. 14 ‘Tiny Bubbles’ to the tune of ‘Silver Bells.’ ” This was my first indication that I was dealing with a sick man. Tannenbaum continued: “Over here is my modern nativity scene with real actors. It takes place at the front desk of a Holiday Inn. Mary and Joseph drive up in a 1967 Chevrolet Nova with mags, racing stripes and dual exhaust. The hotel is all booked up with Christmas vacationers, so Mary and Joseph have to go over to a vacant garage and have the kid. Instead of shepherds visiting we’re going to have a couple of winos.” “Who’s the drummer boy being re- 1 placed by?" I asked, almost dreading the answer. “The kid down the block with a porta ble Panasonic tape deck playing AC/DC’s version of ‘Do You See What I See.’ ” “Hey, Mary really looks pregnant. Is that a pillow or a motorcycle helmet underneath her ‘Smoke Columbian’ T shirt?” “Hell, no. She’s really pregnant and due soon. With any luck she’ll give birth tonight in my garage.” What realism! We moved on to the rear of the hpuse where an odd sight greeted my eyes. Deer with antlers tied to their heads and bells around their necks were being driven up a ramp to the roof of the house. Needless to say, this was being done with little agreement on the part of the deer. “Santa’s reindeer,” Tannenbaum ex plained. “Didn’t anybody like the Humane So ciety or Trans-Species Unlimited protest The Daily Collegian's editorial opinion.is determined by its Board of Opinion, with the editor-in-chief holding final responsibility. ' CM the garbage In response to the stirvey on dorm contracts that was passed aroiihd oyer the weekerid, I would like to submit my own plan. Keeping with the survey, I will call my plan, Plan D Option. Plan D Option would be stated as follows: if you are seeking reassignment (same room and building) then submit your contract request and advanced payment by mail by January 11. The University will then honor this request and temporari ly save the Then by March 1, the University must receive a form completed by the student confirming his original request. If the form of confirmation is submitted by the deadline, the student’s housing for next year is reserved. If the confirmation is not received by the deadline, the student ' forfeits his temporary reserve and then must follow one of the other plans (A, B or C as voted upon). As previously stated, the confirmation request must be received two weeks prior to the March 14 date used in the other plans. This two week allowance enables housing to determine the number and location of available dorms, and also allows time to send letters to students confirming their requests, which would eliminate surprises for the students. There will always be spaces in each dorm area due to graduating seniors, transfers, people moving off campus, etc. so that no dorm area will ever be completely filled by Plan D Option students. Students who live on campus and want to stay in the same room would have the highest priority, those that want to change rooms next and so on (compare this to upperclassmen getting the best seats in the stadium for football games). . Plan D Option would take care of only those students who want reassignment of the same room. The other students would then be taken care of by the plan implemented by the University, which should be the plan voted for by the majority of the students. To make Plan D Option students stand in line about this?” “Yeah, but I told them to hit the road. Some people don’t have any Christmas spirit.” Even the front yard statuette of the black jockey holding a lantern was dressed in red and white and his lantern was wrapped like a gift. “I’m an equal opportunity decorator,” Tannenbaum explained.- The time had come to flip the switch and Tannenbaum climbed into a booth marked “Christmas Central.” He raised his hands as if he were Eugene Ormandy about ready to conduct the Philadelphia Symphony and the crowd, which now spilled out onto the street, became sud denly quiet. Tannenbaum let his left hand fall in a dramatic arch, then suddenly jerked it Upward, flipping the steel lever and bringing his display to life. Singers sang, hultf girls danced,- reindeer pranced and every light sprang to 'brilliance. It was everything I had expected and more. Bqt then a spark flew, a light bulb blew out and the looked like* fuses leading to the receptacles in the house. Before you could say “Up on the rooftop, click, click, click” the wooden cottage was a pile of ailhes. Tannenbaum stood in his booth, his face a mirror of complete astonishment. I felt a tug on my coat and looked down to see the lady whom I had first encoun tered. “See,” she said. “I told you Mr. Tan nenbaum goes all out for Christmas.” Judd Blouch it an llth-term journalism major and assistant arts editor of The Daily Collegian. THE !?E&&A*JS'CHI?ISIMkS CARD for any length of time is crazy, but to make them stand in line days in advance because somebody else wants to change a room is even crazier especially when the Plan D Option students usually get reassigned to their oklrooms. Exempting these students would shorten the line (air computer list) which wpuld in turn speed up the processing time of the remaining students. Plan D Option has been in the planning stages for just a short time and I will be the first to admit that a lot more work needs to be done on the idea but at least the idea has been expressed. As far as I can see, this plan would have the same results as A, B or C but with fewer inconveniences for'all involved. Why can’t a Plan D Option be drawn up by the committee that developed the other plans and offer it to the student body? Maybe it was too easy to think of or too convenient for the students. Gary F. Stead, 6th-electrical engineering Dec. 15 Wednesday Dec. 16,1981—Page 2 Paula Froke Editor Business Manager ABOUT THE COLLEGIAN: The Daily Collegian and The Weekly Collegian are published by Collegian Inc., a non-profit corporation with a board of directors composed of students, faculty and professionals. Students of The Pennsylvania State University write and edit both papers and solicit advertising material for them. The Daily Collegian is published Monday through Friday and distributed at the University Park campus. The Weekly Collegian is mailed to Commonwealth campus students, parents of students, alumni and other subscribers who want to keep abreast of University’news. Mr. Tannenbaum's home The Daily Collegian Wednesday, Dec. 16 -19d1 Collegian Inc. Debby Vinokur --reader opinion Unsettling review In his review of Warren Beatty’s film, “Reds,” Stuarl Austin seems oddly determined to find flaws in a great movie. Although Austin finds both Beatty’s screenplay and direction “excellent,” he implies that Beatty’s character John Reed is simply a warmed-over version of the Leo Farnesworth char acter in Beatty’s “Heaven Cap Wait.” And Austin calls both characters, and Beatty himself, “boyish,” “cute,” wanting “to make the world safe for consumers, ... workers, ... (and) cute guys with lots of fun ideas about how to make the world a better place.” For all his hard-boiled cynicism, I don’t think that Austin knows what he is talking about. Yes; Beatty’s character John Reed is similar to his Leo Farnesworth character, but not because Beatty had not the imagination to think up a new character. .Beatty’s Reed is a greater, fuller development of the ideas Beatty had when he created Farnesworth. These characters express Beatty’s sense of what human beings, . particularly middle-class artists like himself, are and should be: honesj;, open, unafraid of life, and yes, boyish. These characters neither apologize for what they are, nor attempt to charm movie audiences with superficial, humorous eccentri cities. Reed is a much fuller development of these ideas than Farnesworth, because Reed is truer to life. With his character, Reed, Beatty has abandoned the conventional Hollywood world of sentimental plots and characters like “Heaven Can Wait” and Leo Farnesworth. Beatty’s portrayal of John Reed, historical figure, is part documentary, part biography, and even part autobiography, as both the character John Reed and the actor Warren Beatty sincerely grapple with problems that deeply concern them both, as well as the audience: whether to be an artist or a rebel, how to have both love and freedom, how • to live in the community and yet still maintain one’s individu ality. It is an extraordinary performance. I also dislike Austin’s sneers about Beatty’s idealism: his wanting to “make the world safe for consumers,... workers, ..'. (and) cute guys with lots of fun ideas about how to make the world a better place.” Is Austin saying there is something wrong in wanting workers to be able to collectively bargain with their employers? With wanting the majority of Ameri cans “consumers” and workers to participate in the decisions about economic production that greatly affect their y r: -party / Our new pal m adds, a gracious +o our party r CfflL 23f m ot The Train. Station Restaurant SOUPOC SALAD BUFFET for $2.95 All-You-Can-Eat of our lavish array of 13 different sumptuous salads complimented with our homemade Soup du Jour, and fresh assorted homemade breads! SOUPE lives? What is wrong with trying to make the world a better place? ' Austin cannot fully appreciate “Reds,” I think, because artistic greatness unsettles him. Beatty’s film is “engaging and very entertaining,” writes Austin,... “But how much can one person do?” Obviously not much, at least hot enough to suit Stuart Austin, Daily Collegian Staff Writer. Not if he can help it. Thomas Smith; 13th-English literature Dec. 10 Let the people decide My, my \ Jean Guertler (reader opinion, Dec. 14) would have it both ways, wouldn’t she? When the abortionists went after abortion of demand, why did they not “let the people decide?” Instead, they went by way of the courts, thereby circumvent ing even the representatives elected by the people.. Now that the courts have ruled that the taxpayers aren’t required to pay for those abortions, and the elected representatives of the people are acting in the people’s behalf to further curtail abortions, suddenly the abortionists change their, minds and decide in a last ditch stand to chance throwing the matter to public opinion. They evidently believe their own fairy tales of those totally misleading “polls'” regarding abortion. Everyone knows polls can be manipulated to produce desired “results” just by cleverly wording the questions. And how is this life-or-death issue to be put into the tiny space allowed on voting machines? (Yes, Virginia, there are such things as voting machines, outside of Centre County, that is.) , , And how do we go about “educating”’ the public on the magnitude of such a life-or-death vote? Do we give them the full facts? the color photographs? the statistics proving thousands of unborn far past the first trimester are being aborted? Shall we tell them the details of the excruciating deaths the unborn suffer through the various methods of abortion? Well, don’t look to the abortionists to trust the people with the full facts! They are the first to scream, “Don’t bring in those bloody pictures!” Why do they feel “the people” can’t deal rationally with the full facts? And what are the abortion ists doing for “poor women” besides asking them to kill their | Thanks for all your lime and effort. Vou were a great coach! | Love, | I Ul5 , The Kappas f m SENSE,NMW. THE AIRCOMW6RS DONt RESENT TMQN& OTHER6QVERNMEKT JOBS. DOVOU ( CHARLES? WPONiT RESENT TAKIHOmOTHER GOVERNMENT t)OB. DOYOU? CHARLES? SLOW DOWN, CHARLES,,» unborn? Let’s start asking the abortionists why they think facts the legislators voting against abortion have only then “poor women” can’t be trusted to have children. Let’s demand 0811 vote a informed vote, that the abortionists fully reveal to “the people” exactly what j wim j B 9th .p hllosoph y abortion does to the unborn. Let’s give the people the same Dec. 14 * * HOLIDAY SPECIALS FROM ROCCO'S *l.OO OFF 50 { OFF Stromboli (Good only on Dec. 15 & 16 with coupon only) 237-2466 434 E. College Ave.' FreeDeliverv Hours: Mon-Thurs. 4p.m.-2a.m/ rree uenvery Frj & Sat 4^ m .. 4a . m .. Sunday 4p.m.-la.m. •WEDNESDAY SPECIAL Save up to 40% 14.99 Reg. $23 to $26 Men’s Haggar Slacks Give You Handsome Fit at a Practical Price! At this great price you’ll war stock up on solid colors and fancies to stretch your wardrobe. Machine wash an dry 100% polyester is easy c and lasts and lasts! State College Second Floor 10am to 9pm. Nittany Mall .10am to 10pm. Sorry, No Phone Orders, No Layaways. The Daily Collegian Wednesday, Dec.l6, 1981—: KSr DEPARTAAENT STORES One Day
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