Banner Graphic, Volume 9, Number 225, Greencastle, Putnam County, 29 May 1979 — Page 7
opinion
LARRY GIBBS Publisher
Letters to the Editor Fireworks support asked
To the Editor For many years Greencastle’s July 4th celebration consisted of a fireworks display at Windy Hill. In 1976, to celebrate the Bicentennial, a family day was held in the city park, and a giant fireworks display was presented at a cost of approximately $3,000. In 1977 and 1978 no celebration of any kind was held in Greencastle. Yet, cars were parked along the highway north of town and in the fairgrounds, waiting for a fireworks display which was not forthcoming.. Many of us felt that Greencastle should have a celebration on July 4th to honor and remember the founding of this country. A committee (naturally) was formed, and we now have plans for a great July 4th celebration to be held in the city park. The Greencastle Jaycees are sponsoring a “Fun Day” with games, contests and events for the entire family. The bandshell will be in operation. In short, we plan to
'A high-classed seance'
To the Editor: I wonder just how gullible people can get? Just how far from reality have we drifted? I am referring to the article of May 18, 1979, in the Banner-Graphic, “Vatican Radio Sets Interview with Jesus.” It is really hard for me to believe that people in this supposedly enlightened country could swallow such a line as was proclaimed in the above article. In my opinion, this is nothing more or less than a high-classed seance, with religious garb. What has happened to the professed belief of the Roman Catholic Church in the Bible and their proclaimed belief that Jesus literally arose from the dead and is alive forevermore? Now if Jesus did literally arise from the dead and is alive forevermore, why do they need a medium to contact Him? The Bible says we can come “boldly to the throne of grace. ” Spiritualism is of the devil and is
All viewpoints welcome
The Banner Graphic believes the interests of its readers are best served by expression of varied points of view. Letters to the editor should be typed or written clearly and limited to 300 words if possible. All letters
A little of. .. This and That
By JIM ZEIS Banner-Graphic Civic Affairs Editor The other afternoon I counted a total of 35 cars and trucks passing a given point on East Washington Street in four minutes’ time and that’s not counting about 12 or 15 motorcycles. There certainly didn’t appear to be a gasoline shortage in Greencastle. 000 Brother Elk Billy Eiteljorge is in Methodist Hospital at Indianapolis where he will undergo major surgery. All his friends and relatives are hoping he will have a speedy recovery. Get back soon, Billy. 000 And I would like to report that my old friend and also a Brother Elk, Ira Moore, is convalescing at his home on East Washington Street. Ira spent nearly three months in the Methodist Hospital where he also underwent major surgery. Glad you’re back home and convalescing nicely. 000 Someone really bent over a parking meter at 109 East Washington Street during the weekend. It will take some work to replace it and repair it. 000 By the way, have you noticed the new loading zone signs in downtown Greencastle? These spaces will give truck drivers a chance to unload their merchandise
ERICBERNSEE Managing Editor
have an old fashioned July 4th celebration. To top off the day we have a giant fireworks display planned. Many local social, fraternal and non-profit organizations have pledged money to pay for this event. We have now raised about half of our $4,000 cost, but we need your help! We were trying to avoid coming to the business and industrial community, because we realize that you are constantly approached for all types of support. However, the people of this community should not have to go to Brazil or Indianapolis to celebrate our nation’s birthday. We intend to keep them home with this spectacular day in the city park. If possible, would you please send your contribution to the Greencastle Chamber of Commerce, 14 S. Indiana St. Greencastle, Indiana 46135. Your help will be greatly appreciated. William Marley Treasurer, Fireworks Committee
satan-inspired, no matter who is doing it or where the performance is held. Joe Martin Pastor, Christ Apostolic Church Publisher’s Note: The Associated Press article to which Pastor Martin refers contained no reference to a seance; medium or spiritualism. Rather, it . clearly stated that Professor Jean Galot of the Gregorian University, an acknowledged authority on the life of Christ, answered 23 questions on contemporary issues by quoting Christ from the Scriptures. “The “interview with Jesus” format was used by Vatican Radio merely to indicate the relevance of Christ’s Biblical answers to the issues of today’s world. Professor Galot did not paraphrase or make any additions to the Scriptural answers he researched for each question.
must be signed and include the author’s address and telephone number. Although we encourage readers to permit publication of their names, requests for use of initials will be honored in most cases.
without too much trouble and not interfere with passing traffic. 000 Just missed seeing my high school basketball teammate, Gene Peck, recently. Gene retired recently and moved from Michigan City to Arizona to make his future home. Gene and I were on the Greencastle High School net squad from 1919 to 1921 and our coach was Wilfred (Big) Smith. He was a letter man in football, basketball, baseball and track while enrolled in DePauw University and later became sports editor of the Chicago Tribune in the days of Don Maxwell and Phil Maxwell, former Greencastle boys. 000 Mr. Motorist, please watch out for kids in the streets and on bicycles now that school is out. Observe all speed limits and be on the alert at all times for some youngster darting out behind a parked car to chase an elusive baseball. This city has had very few traffic injuries and fatals. Let’s keep up this good record. 000 Just wonder how many of you readers of this column remember the popular swimming hole some years back on west Columbia Street. I’m writing about Blue Hole where we used to swim in the nude. No one had swimming trunks and everyone had a good time with the exception of two drownings that occurred there in years past. I am told that Blue Hole in Big Walnut Creek doesn’t look like it did in those days. Well, as they say, “Time marches on.”
Russell Baker
$250,000f0r rusty plumbing? It's the Arabs!
By RUSSELL BAKER c. 1979 N.Y. Times News Service NEW YORK Apartment hunters in New York quickly learn about the Arabs. Agents show two bedrooms and rusty plumbing and say, “This one’s only $250,000.” Isn’t that a little steep? “It’s the Arabs,” is the reply. You prefer something in a modest town house? Well, it’s not so wide as a church door, and it does need $150,000 in work to put it in livable shape, but it’s a steal at $450,000. “Four hundred and fifty thousand dollars?” “It’s the Arabs.” What Arabs are these who are moving into Manhattan in such multitudes, with such wealth that no one not of Islam can afford to compete for a little place where he may call the cockroaches his own? You can walk the sidewalks of New York for weeks without seeing a single person in desert robes. Some of these profligate Arabs, admittedly, may go abroad in Western dress, but you can move through
i p 7 Ip i ji®
Gas squeeze a test of Carter's leadership
By EUGENE V. RISHER Newhouse News Service WASHINGTON President Carter’s most serious political problem is that people do not perceive him as a leader. A good man, morally strong, with a keen sense of right and wrong. A reformer. But without the ability of a political leader to define a problem, propose a reasonable solution, and rally support for it. The current gas shortage is a case in point. Americans must use less gasoline. Otherwise, in a very short time the whole economy and the economies of most of our industrialized allies could be hostage to the whims of oil sheiks in the Middle East. It was six years ago when Arabs imposed an oil embargo and most people realized for the first time the extent of their vulnerability. The long gas lines and cries of outrage so alarmed Richard Nixon that he called for a crash program, similar to the race to be first to the moon, to make the nation energy-independent. It never got off the ground.
William F. Buckley Portillo's curious embrace of Fidel Castro
It was humiliating enough to hear the words with which President Nixon festooned the totalitarian regime of Mao Tse-tung during the China visit in 1972, and one did well to wince at the effusive cordiality shown by a president sworn to uphold the Bill of Rights toward a regime that celebrates the elimination of every human liberty. But -- the power brokers will tell you, and verily they are men of affairs - the United States needed a liaison with China, and so an appropriately oleaginous rhetorical mode was in order. But why does Mexico need Cuba? ONE IS NOT EVEN aware that President Jose Lopez Portillo is a cigar smoker; but even if he is, surely he could have managed to get Cuban cigars without referring to Castro as a “liberator” of his people? Sugar? Sugar is one of the few things Mexico is practically self-sufficient in. What else does Cuba export? Mostly people. Ten per cent of the Cuban people have reacted to the “dignity” Lopez Portillo announced that Castro brought to his people by fleeing Cuba. Leav.wg Cuba without their property ; leaving behind, often, members of their families: rather than bear the oppressions of life under Castro. It is not easy to think of another country ten per cent of whose population
layers of New York society for a year without meeting more than two or three persons whose names have the Arabic ring. You do not have to be a close observer of metropolitan life to realize that New York is not a big Arab town. Perhaps, then, the Arabs who are driving up real-estate prices are based elsewhere. In London, maybe. Everyone returning from London reports the Arabs have moved in lock, stock and oil dividends. Conceivably, vast hordes of Arabs in London are bidding absurd prices for real estate in New York with intent to drive New Yorkers out. Conceivably, but not likely. If you’re an Arab in London, why would you spend $250,000 for two bedrooms and rusty plumbing astride six potholes and an all-night fire-engine route when, for the same amount, you could take the children skiing in Switzerland and have enough change left over to buy a ghost town in Nevada? If pressed on this point, persons wise in New York real estate will admit it isn’t
A few gimmicks were enacted lower speed limits and revised thermostat settings. But the basic problem worsened. In 1973, 30 percent of oil consumed in the United States came from foreign sources. Now, it’s about 50 percent. So Carter bit the bullet. After trying unsuccessfully to get a tougher oil policy through Congress two years ago he announced on April 5 that he would gradually take controls off the price of domestic oil, letting it rise during the next three years to world levels. The rationale was that this would discourage consumption when things cost more, people buy less. And it would encourage production the oil companies would have more funds for finding new energy sources. A windfall tax on the oil company profits would be used to cushion the blow to poor people and improve public transportation. The net effect would be to make the nation less dependent on foreign oil. Less American dollars would flow out of the country. Perhaps the protests of our allies that we are getting more than our share of
FIDEL CASTRO has left, often risking their lives in creaky old sailboats in order to cross the Cuban moat to liberty. BUT LOPEZ PORTILLO hardly needs more people. Approximately ten per cent of the Mexican population has crossed the Mexican border into the United States -- not to escape oppression, in any formal
really the Arabs who are inflating prices. It’s the rich Italians. All the rich Italians, according to this theory, are in terror of being kidnapped by their domestic kidnapping industry, or marked for death by the Red Brigades, or forced by the government to pay income taxes. And so, they are buying housing in New York to which they can flee in a crisis. When, however, you visit these apartments and houses, the market price of which might have made Midas blanch, the only Italians one meets are the grandchildren of parents who emigrated in 1910 and who are, in fact, Americans. The people who inhabit them are the same people who spend Saturday afternoons in East Side shops buying pilhdend dyes that make toilet tanks flush blue water. If not rich Italians, then who? Greek shipowners. Everybody knows Greek shipowners are richer than Midas and Croesus combined. Greek shipowners are richer than Great Britain. “It’s Greek shipowners,” goes the explanation, ignoring the fact that any Greek
dwindling world supplies would abate. With the dollar stabilized, OPEC would be more inclined to hold down their prices. All admirable, necessary aims. But political dynamite and the backing and filling and political positioning began. When Carter announced the decontrols, he said he was doing it to minimize the economic impact of a sudden price boost. Congress already had passed a law mandating the lifting of controls by 1981. It was better, so the White House reasoning went, to lift them in stages and make the pill easier to swallow. But Congress can, of course, vote to continue the controls and that is precisely what the House Democratic Caucus announced this week it planned to do. That and similar moves by such Senate Democratic stalwarts as Henry Jackson of Washington and Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts have deeply embarrassed the president. Various statements and estimates dire warnings followed by reassurances emanating from the White House, the
sense of the word, but to seek a better life, with economic opportunity provided by the freedoms Castro went to Mexico to excoriate. The President of Mexico, who a few weeks ago was publicly rude to the President of the United States, addressed the President of Cuba by saying, “It is a privilege for me, as president of my coun try, to salute you and receive you.” It is hard to know just what to make of this. If Lopez Portillo was making realpolitik, then we must suppose that Cuba has got hold of something truly intimidating. What? A nuclear arsenal? This has been alleged, though not proved ; we do, of course, know that the bombs brought into Cuba by Krushschev in 1962 would easily have reached Mexico City. BUT IN THE ABSENCE of power politics, what is Lopez Portillo up to 9 One must suppose that it is humiliating to a man who disapproves of torturing people, who disapproves of holding huge numbers of men in concentration camps, of denying any liberty whatever to his people - publicly to praise the work of one of the two or three most finished totalitarians of the century? When Qaddafi defended Colonel Amin - right to the end - Qaddafi embarrassed most of the civilized world. But he was dismissed, and has long since
May 29,1979, The Putnam County Banner Graphic
shipowner worthy of his calling is unlikely to spend $450,000 for a row house not so wide as a church door when he has the wealth to buy either the Parthenon or Rib de Janeiro, or both if he is in a whimsical mood. In any case, there are only five Greek shipowners. Their demand for Manhattan real estate cannot be sufficient to drive the price of two bedrooms and rusty plumbing to $250,000, unless they are plotting to buy up New York and convert it into a dry dock,; which seems improbable in view of Greek shipowners’ well-known distaste for ex--posing their wealth to American tax collect tors. Nor will it do for somebody to say, “It’s the Nazis.” We all know from best sellers; movies and television that Nazis livd forever and have huge hidden fortunes, the undiscovered loot of Hitler’s Reich, at their disposal. True, but while Nazis live forever, they also age. Almost all Nazii are now beyond retirement age. As seniorcitizen Nazis, they are not likely to choose Manhattan as their home for the golden years. The climate is hard on rheumatism and survival is to the fleet of foot. If the Nazis wanted to drive up real-estate prices, they would do it in Arizona or Argentina. In any case, Nazis are not the kind ot people to call attention to themselves by buying pillows shaped like Count Dracula. If a Nazi wanted a pillow shaped like Count Dracula, he would buy the raw materials and make one in the privacy of his home where nobody could find out what he was up to. It might take a lot of time, but Nazis are exceedingly patient. Who is left? Not the Canadians. People who elect a prime minister named Job Clark are not the sort to pay $450,000 to livb on an all-night fire-engine route. The answer, obviously, is that it’s not the Arabs, nor the rich Italians, nor the Greek shipowners, nor the Nazis, but the people who buy pillows shaped like Count Dracula. What curious people are these?New Yorkers. Where do they get their fantastic wealth? They borrow it. Will they not be sorry when the notes come due? No, because they believe that something will turn up and, in the mean; time, they have lived like Arabs and languished on pillows shaped like Count Dracula. -
Energy Department and Capitol Hill have left people so confused that the only solution they see is to keep a full tank. Buy it now because it may not be available tomorrow. Or if it is, it will cost more. • Polls show that many people don’t evenbelieve there is a genuine gas shortage.They think the big oil companies have con-* spired to contrive shortages and boost prices. Carter, in the bully pulpit, has not been able either to dispel those suspicions on stem the rebellion in his own party. In fairness, Congress quite frequently manages to arrange its procedures so that members can vote on the side of the angels at least once on tough issues. They please their constituents before voting their corn* sciences. But the handling of the whole situation has been so inept as to reinforce Carter’s image as a weak leader without clear goals or compelling arguments to supportthem. His political aides are worried. The energy crisis is a severe test of leadership and it is not going well so far. <•
been dismissed, as a fanatic of sorts, whose internationlist adventures are never quite predictable. Uganda has now been liberated from Amin, but the traces of Amin’s bloody work are everywhere. I warrant that Fidel Castro could match Amin atrocity-for-atrocitv. Over a period of 20 years Fidel Castro has easily kept up with the premier oppressors of the century. As between Amin and Castro, however, there is simply, no questioning the relative moral superiority of Amin. Because Amin was. simply a loutish, depraved, sadist, about whom one can develop sentiments of the! kind we feel about Jack the Ripper of Caligula. -, FIDEL CASTRO IS far worse - in that he rationalizes what he does. Every time he sends to prison to be tortured and’ forgotten a Cuban for the sin of wanting to practice his religion or speak his mind, he excuses himself by grand and pompus historical justifications based on the' writings and preachings of men who are not historically designed as madmen: such as Marx, and Engels, and Lenin. Lopez Portillo may have acted so as to appease his own left wing. The price he has paid is to lose, forever, his credibility as a defender of human dignity.
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