Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012, November 30, 2001, Image 2

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    Newsroom: (541) 346-5511
Room 300, Erb Memorial Union
PO. Box 3159, Eugene, OR 97403
E-mail: editor@dailyemerald.com
Online Edition:
www. dailyemerald. com
Friday, November 30,2001
Editor in Chief:
Jessica Blanchard
Editorial Editor:
Julie Lauderbaugh
Assistant Editorial Editor:
Jacquelyn Lewis
Yesteryear's Editorial
Nix On
Barbarism
Hi
■ang your clothes on a hick
ory limb, but don’t go near
.the water.”
That pretty nearly expresses our
advice to Corvallis-bound Webfeet,
at least so far as manifestations of
school spirit are concerned. Cheer,
cheer, please cheer deliriously while
Bjork and the boys bait the Beaver,
but when we’ve won the game — we
hope — let’s
University
of Oregon
125th
ANNIVERSARY
Originally
published on
November 21,1936
show the hum
bled men of the
Orange good
sportsmanship.
If we lose —
heaven forbid
— let’s show the
starters we can
take it. In either
case let us not
permit our spirit of rivalry to express
itself in the vandalism that has
marred our relations with the col
lege in times past.
There was a time when the Or
angemen thought the proper display
of school spirit meant painting the
Pioneer and dynamiting the con
crete “O” on Skinner’s Butte and
when the Webfeet thought Corvallis
streets must run with lemon and
green paint if the big game were to be
fittingly celebrated. Those were the
dear old days.
Today, although some mite of
paint has been spread by the more ir
responsible students without official
censure, the townspeople of Eugene
and Corvallis and the administra
tions of the two institutions frown
upon such effusions of spirit.
Last year, owing largely to a friend
ly visit to Eugene by Jack Graham,
OSC student body president, a truce
on vandalism was arranged, and the
big game came off without any mate
rial damage either to the properties
of the two schools or to their respec
tive spirits.
Dr. Boyer, who admittedly raised as
much hell as the next lad in his under
graduate days, pointed out before the
Beaver-Duck clash last year the
change in public opinion of inter
scholastic vandalism. “We can’t stop
a lot of underclass barbarism, ” he de
clared, “but let us do our best. A sav
age demonstration will destroy the
good will which marks our present re
lations. I am going to be sitting next to
President Peavy at the game, but I am
not going to turn around and swat
him — just as at a banquet I wouldn’t
pull on the tablecloth and turn the
gravy over in his lap. ”
Editor’s note: This editorial was taken from the
Nov. 21,1936, edition of the Oregon Daily
Emerald. Go Ducks, and keep it Civil!
Editorial Policy
This editorial represents the opinion of
the Emerald editorial board.
Responses can be sent to
jetters@daiiyemerald.com. Letters to
the editor and guest commentaries are
encouraged. Letters are limited to 250
words and guest commentaries to 550
words. Please include contact
information. The Emerald reserves the
right to edit for space,
grammar and style.
EUGENEANS ARE SMOKING QUACK
Since ducks lack the opposable thumbs to
turn newspaper pages and University of
Oregon students’ heads are too clouded
with bong resin to read for any length of time,
you’ve probably never seen my column in
The Daily Barometer.
Allow me to introduce myself. My name is
Carole. I’m a senior English major at Oregon
State (read: real college). In my field of column
writing, I am known for luring readers in with
my flip, fluffy wit and beauty-queen charm.
Then I pounce on them with my flagrant opin
ions and dominatrix-like language command,
and they have no idea what hit them.
You can try to run for
cover in your namby
pamby, Disney-fied, glo
rified green duck blind,
but you can’t hide.
Here, ducky, ducky
duckies... you’re in my
world now.
Being a Beaver is all
about something you
Ducks know nothing
about. It involves words
like honor, faith, fanati
cism and fervor. We’ve sat
diligently through the
_lean years and the leaner
years, argued in the face of
opponents who would accuse us of being less
than a football team, even when our only re
sponse could be that we believe in something
that no one else can see. We play by teamwork.
We play for the love of the game. We play for our
hometown. We play to show our belief in the
near-religious culture of football.
We wear orange, for God’s sake.
It takes a true fan to sit on a cold metal
Carole
Chase
Daily Barometer
bench in the driving rain, wearing an orange
poncho to support a team that, up until a year
and a half ago, hadn’t had a winning season
since Nixon claimed he was not a crook.
We know what it means to be a fan, and that’s
something you Ducks can never understand, nor
ever take away from us. What is a duck anyway?
The bottom of the aquatic food chain, these anal
retentive fowl have only webbed feet and drab
plumage to offer as noteworthy. These ugly water
scum have nothing productive to contribute to
the animal kingdom except a yearly crop of about
a dozen ugly ducklings, half of which will meet
their Waterloo crossing the street.
Read our response
Hey Beaver fans —Buck you
and your teeth
www.dailyemerald.com
Duck hunters can bag a whole
flock in an afternoon because
these funny-feathered mammals
are stupid enough to fly to
ward canned duck calls.
“Gee,” their little bird
brains are thinking, “it
doesn’t really sound like
Aunt Eleanor, but it must
be her. What if she’s fallen
and she can’t get up? I better
go check it out. ” Duck-asses.
And the advertising team at
the University of Oregon
thought they were coming
up with something really
ingenius by marketing
those little duck calls you
wear around your neck.
What for? Do you blow
on them so little Joey
Harrington will
know where to
throw?
You would never catch a beaver dead with
some tail or something hanging around its
neck. Beavers are fine, brave creatures, feared
by the legitimate farm community. Their pug
nacious, tenacious, voracious spirits drive
their magnificent chompers to fell old growth
in minutes. They’re well respected in their
field of work, a force to be reckoned with. Our
title may not be as ferocious sounding as war
riors or bears, but I pity the leg that a beaver
sinks his bloodthirsty fangs into.
Animal instincts aside, the Beavers are sim
ply a more honorable lot than you all. Sorry!
For starters, we recruit in high schools and
junior colleges, not prisons.
And Eugene! Please! You people are so ad
versarial you can’t even put up a Christmas tree
without somebody getting their panties in a
bunch.
Face it, people. Your water-tight asses are in
a proverbial sling when we hit Autzen on Sat
urday. And until then, duck off.
Carole Chase is a guest humor columnist and forum editor
of The Daily Barometer. The opinions in this column do not
necessarily represent those of the Barometer or Emerald.
Chase can be reached at chaseca@onid. Responses can be
send to letters@dailyemerald.com.
Americans can't overlook Iraqi threat
The body of evidence suggesting Iraqi
complicity in the Sept. 11 atrocities and
subsequent anthrax mailings is now
quite large. That the Iraqi dictator has the
means, motive and opportunity to be an ac
cessory cannot be denied. To wit:
Saddam Hussein is an inveterate America
hater with a festering sense of revenge for the
ignominy of the Gulf War.
Saddam considers terrorism an instrument
of national policy. A collaboration between
the Ba’ath Party dictatorship and al-Qaeda is
entirely reasonable — “the enemy of my ene
my is my friend.” Hussein, a secular dictator,
has in recent years courted Sunni Islamists
and has even changed the Iraqi flag to include
the inscription “ Allahu Akbar” (God is great)
in his own calligraphy.
According to Jane’s Security, Israeli mili
tary intelligence believes Iraq helped finance
the Sept. 11 attacks.
There are reports from Iraqi defectors that
as recently as last year, Islamic extremists
were training in hijacking techniques on a
Boeing 707 located in Salman Pak, an area
south ofBaghdad.
There was a meeting between lead hijacker
Mohammed Atta and Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim
Samir al-Ani, nominally an Iraqi diplomat,
that took place in Prague last April.
Guest Commentary
Sean
Walston
Saddam used weaponized anthrax against
his own Kurdish population before resorting
to more lethally effective chemical weapons.
Richard Butler, the former chairman of UN
SCOM, recently told Frontline, “The highest
degree of resistance (to weapons inspections)
was in the biological area, which leads me to
conclude that this (is) Saddam’s favorite toy:
killing people with germs.”
The professionally prepared and precisely
sized anthrax spores, complete with the addi
tive bentonite to reduce static cling, all but
rules out our own lunatic fringe or al-Qaeda
terrorists working alone out of caves as the
original source of the anthrax. Iraq is one of
the only states capable of producing this qual
ity of weapons-grade anthrax.
The demise of Saddam Hussein has a lot to
recommend it. First, the continuing human
rights abuses of his regime are most distressing.
Second, it is manifestly clear that Saddam
has never complied with U.N. Security Coun
cil Resolution 687, the cease-fire that ended
the Gulf War and required Iraq uncondition
ally to destroy and never to develop, con
struct or acquire chemical, biological or nu
clear weapons.
Since the United Nations gave up on in
spections three years ago, Saddam has with
out doubt reconstituted his programs to pro
duce these weapons. Khidhir Hamza, who
headed Iraq’s nuclear weapons program be
fore defecting to the West, believes Saddam
will be able to deploy as many as three nu
clear devices by 2005. To put not too fine a
point on it, this man and his addiction to
weapons of mass destruction remain a very
serious problem.
Third, as already noted, Saddam’s involve
ment in the recent terror attacks is beyond rea
sonable doubt.
And fourth, it is only a matter of time before
Saddam sponsors another and possibly much
deadlier terror attack than the Sept. 11 mas
sacre — next time possibly using a weapon of
mass destruction. The death and devastation
at the World Trade Center will pale into in
significance compared to the scenario paint
ed for the detonation of even a primitive nu
clear device in a large population center.
It is therefore urgent that Saddam Hussein
and Iraq’s Ba’ath Party be the next targets in
the war against terrorism.
Sean Walston is a graduate teaching fellow in the physics
department.