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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (Oct. 3, 1973)
Commentary"” Absolutely the game of the week Dukes of Duckdom v. Quasi-Quaker Backers By SEAN O’HALLORAN “Frontrunner”, n., (adj): fickle: capricious; back-and-fill; half-assed: fair-weather friend (slang). Recently we have witnessed the re emergence of that hardy Oregon perennial, the Quasi-Quacker Backer, migrating to the U of O for another year of swoops aimed at fouling the Ducks’ nest . Short on facts, logic and numbers, this species stridently proselytizes the rest of Duckdom by out-squawking all other opinions. The juicy target for Quasi-Quacker Backer droppings is the annual $150,000 ASUO athletic department subsidy extracted from incidental fees. Their theory: ‘‘if I’m gonna pay the freight, I gotta right to get in the gate” - i.e., the subsidy entitles anyone to a seat anytime he chooses to attend. This reasoning ignores the fact that the entire $1 million Incidental Fee budget is funded by a mandatory $20-plus per term charge annexed to each tuition assessment. To any individual student the majority of the thereby-supported programs are not applicable. Tell me, Quasi-Quacker Backers, what “fundamental rights” have “two thirds of the student body” gained by involuntary financial support of the Day Care program ($15,000), or of OSPIRG ($41,000) ? In truth, all such subsidy’s represent value judgements made by student-elected leaders, not the athletic department. Incidentally speaking, as it were, out of the total annual fee less than $10 a year goes to the athletic department. The ASUO subsidy comprises about eight per cent of the total AD budget of 1.8 million dollars. Those funds are used to lower student ticket prices for all nine intercollegiate sports. The remainder of the budget, including all AD salaries and expenses, is self generated via general ticket sales, ancillary revenue and alumni con tributions. The AD does not get a nickel of President Clark’s $26 million budget. Nonetheless, we find a leading Quasi Quacker squawking about his “fun damental right” to see UCLA’s Walton Gang should he so desire because he pungled up $3.15 for AD support when he paid his fees. He feels he received “nothing” for his money. Listen you drumb Drake, that paltry contribution was one of the biggest bargains your misbegotten mind will ever have a chance to misconstrue. The meager ASUO subsidy allowed the AD reserves 40 percent of the seating capacity at Mac Court - including the best seats in the house for students. And does so despite a great gaggle of unrequited Duck lovers (enough of them to stretch from here to Portland) all begging to buy season tickets at four times the student rate. Those are real Quacker Backers, my fine feathered friend. 15,000 into 4,000 will not go. The AD did their best. The system of ap portionment (e.g., season tickets) was a method selected after consultation with the ASUO executive. For the benefit of Quacker Backers unable to obtain tickets due to impecunity or ill fortune, all home and several away round ball tiffs will be televised. Live closed-circuit telecasts for the dorms is in the works. The season ticket approach is the fairest; it benefits quality Quacker Backers, and saves everybody from hours of standing in line each week. Quasi-Quacker Backers are meted I heir just deserts. The miracle Dick Harter hath wrought (and Dick Enright attempts to emulate) was not engendered by fickle, fair-weather frontrunners that show up only for a winner (otherwise, see ya around, Charlie). The students deserving seats are those Duck Lovers (hat squawk for their Webfoots come rain or shine, not bird-brained front runners that spend more time disparaging Duckdom endeavors than supporting our sundry sports squads in their scrappy struggle to succeed. Oregon athletics deserve student support. Over and above the material returns, important intangible benefits accrue from intercollegiate com petition. The national regard and prestige Oregon realizes from suc cessful competition with the USCs and UCLAs of the Pacific 8 Conference belongs to us all. It would be a poor bargain to sell part of our school pride for $3 a term. Note: Sean O’Halloran is a second year law student. super-duper-all-electric-dump-your-trash-and-sewage-here Nature Nirvana: Sucicide in the woods By LEE SIEGEL With summer over it is now time to commemorate the souls of those hapless outdoor freaks whose lemminglike migration to the woods in search of nature nirvana became instead a headlong rush to their own oblivion. We will not bother to condemn hunters here, for they belong in a special category, one which is reserved for such people as dog beaters, kitten drowners, ant squashers, and the cruel and callous murderers of our finny friends the fish. The target of this snide and somewhat devious attack is the class of people broadly defined by the term “lovers of the great outdoors,” but which excludes those impotent technocrats whose idea of camping is to park a thirty-foot travel trailer with flush toilets and color television in a super-duper-all-electric dump-your-trash-and-sewage-here campground complete with a few anemic trees, piped water, and paved “wilder ness” trails. It should be understood that this is not the petty sniping of some two-bit armchair ecologist who whines about the beauty of nature and slobbers trite phrases of Whitman and Henry David Thoreau. As an ardent backpacker, I mean to criticize the pathologically suicidal tendencies I have observed in my fellow wilderness addicts, as well as the myth underlying the great American back-to-nature ethic. There are basically three kinds of nature lovers, idiots, fools, and outright lunatics. Each engages in the activity of his or her preference in order to find the mythical lost innocence and purity which was the basic ingredient of pioneer life as idealized by the typical mealy-mouthed liberal hiker, backpacker, climber, river-runner, or parachutist. These blurry-eyed romantics drool over pastoral scenes of frontier life, ignoring the historical truth that the pioneers were an odorous band of monstrous exploiters whose only care was survival and whose greatest spiritual conception of a tree was the vision of firewood. So, setting off for the woods, often ill prepared with a mind full of fuzzy notions of solitude inspired by the Thoreauvian rabble, (Thoreau, by the way, walked over to Emerson’s house often to get a decent meal when he got sick of listening to birds and eating bugs for dinner) the nature lover often sets in motion chain of events that leads to his own pathetic demise. Every year hundreds of these wooly brained morons drown, freeze, rot, starve, and fall from glorious lowering heights to end their mortal existence in a splash of blood and guts reality. The fact is that nature has become a religion, one far deadlier than anything practiced by the most obnoxious of the tract pushers or shaved-headed, bell ringing weirdos. And as if in recognition of this fact, Mother Nature demands a seasonal quota of human sacrifice. The idiots are simply those who un dertake relatively harmless pursuits such as hiking and backpacking in such a way as to guarantee a fifty per cent chance of death. Usually this means a lack of warm clothes, food, maps, and other supplies, but more often it is a clear cut case of simply leaving common sense at home. Exposure and unexpected falls from steep trails are the idiot’s favorite way to die. Fools are those crass egoists who have to get to the top of every peak in order to convince themselves of their masculinity. This is confirmed by the fact that there are boxes at the top of every major peak which contain a book for the mighty conquerer of the mountain to sign so that the whole world will know that John Doe is a Mighty Mazama who can climb tall mountains in a single outward bound and is capable of almost any feat of physical endurance. These pitiful plebians usually end up lost forever in a deep crevasse, only to emerge twenty years later, ground to rock flour, at the terminal moraine of a glacier. Finally, there are the indisputable lunatics whose-sense of machismo demands that that they climb sheer cliffs hanging from ropes, jump from planes at four thousand feet for the thrill of it, and ski with homemade wings off El Capitan to end up as a jello-like pulverized mess in Yosemite Valley, which some unfortunate ambulance attendant has to scrape off the Visitor Center parking lot with a spatula and dust pan. It is true that great beauty can be found in nature, as well as a sense of peace and well-being. But there is nothing which demands that beauty can only be found by taking imbecilic risks, or that peace is achieved only through death. Summer is almost upon us, so enjoy it and have fun, but always keep in mind the cardinal rule of the Margarine Magnates of Madison Avenue, who in a television commercial for their greasy product tritely declared “It’s not nice to fool with Mother Nature!” Note: Lee Siegel is the environment editor for the Emerald. He’s an okay guy, but a little weird. If you’ll notice in the last sentence of his article, he thinks SUMMER is coming!! Please, if you see him on campus, don’t tell him the truth. It wiP break his heart! Letters' The Attica trial Three thousand miles away, behind concrete walls fortified with gun towers, the rights of incarcerated persons everywhere are being laid on the line in Attica State Prison in New York. Un derstand that the scope and far reaching effects, that all decisions made during the trial will effect the entire penal system and the whole philosophy of ‘corrections’. When inmates are indicted for murders that sprang from a ‘police riot’ then something is very amiss. Those behind bars have rights and those rights are daily being violated, with these indictments and within Attica itself. When in distant places, things occur which will affect us nationally, then it is the duty of those responsible for bringing us the news, to bring it! I want to see more coverage of the Attica trial in our Oregon newspapers. Tomas Donovan 1875'/2 Onyx Street Eugene, Oregon 97403 By what right? Recently I received a letter from a group calling itself “Citizens for Decent Literature” in which funds were solicited for the legal prosecution of “merchants of pornographic filth.” I am totally opposed to pornography and smut. I am also totally opposed to the actions of the CDL group. It is a violation of the First Amendment for government to regulate the reading and viewing matter of free citizens, in my view. Even if the First Amendment did not exist, by what right does any group or governmental agency decide what is “decent” for others to see or read? While it may be proper for the CDL to protest what it considers undesireable literature through the use of boycott and other peaceful activity, it is not proper for the government to intervene by passing prohibitive legislation. Every law has a gun behind it. Such a gun should be used only to defend freedom of information — not to threaten it. Therefore, I oppose SB708 (the so-called “anti-porno” bill) because it restricts the right of individuals to determine what they might wish to read or view. Such restrictions are dangerous to a free society — pornography is not. The ends (socially acceptable literature) do not justify the means (coercive restraint). Tonie Nathan President, Eugene Chapter Women in Communications. Inc. Director, Oregon Libertarian Party.
