Banner Graphic, Volume 13, Number 102, Greencastle, Putnam County, 6 January 1983 — Page 7

opinion

LARRY GiBBS Publisher

Letter to the Editor

Operation Life board ideal structure for central dispatch

To the Editor: In response to the letter to the editor by G. W. indicating a non-political operation of the central dispatch, it seems to me that the ideal structure is already in place: the Operation Life Board. It is my understanding that the Operation Life Board would have to be adjusted to represent a majority of criminal justice representatives to be authorized to operate the NCIC/IDEX machine by qualified dispatchers under rules outlined in 1015 of the NCIC manual. An example would be a police, sheriff and prosecutor as criminal justice and a fireman and a doctor as non-criminal justice as an ideal makeup for the board. The Operation Life office is just across the street from the police and fire departments and has an office nowoccupied by Child Welfare that could be used for the dispatching center; or leave it at the police department--the location is irrelevant.

Signed letters are welcome

The Banner Graphic believes the interests of its readers are best served by expression of varied points of view. We offer our opinions and those of others on this page and welcome you to do the same. Letters containing personal attacks on individuals, libelous statements or

Politics as the crow flies won't stop teen-age drunken driving

By WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR. Univ ersal Press Syndicate Rationalism in the formulation of public policy is, in the imperishable phrase of Michael Oakeshott, “like making politics as the crow flies.” There is inadequate and exorbitant medical care? Nationalize the doctors. Dairy farmers are hurting economically? Buy their surplus. Do what with it° Why, er. store it. And if people are hungry? Give it to the hungry. But if the hungry are qualified for food stamps? That's an entirely different point. How? I am too busy to explain the difference. AND NOW WE WILL control the death rate on the highways by upping the legal age for selling liquors to minors to 21. Here are a few of the givens in the situation. Alcoholism is, arguably, the single worst social affliction in the world. It is responsible for jobs lost, marriages

Computer as Time 'Man of the Year' better than previous choices

(c) 1983, Los Angeles Times Syndicate I think it's swell that Time magazine picked a machine instead of a person to be its Man of the Year. Machines are nicer than people and have been for sometime. Other cultures have already realized this. The Japanese, for instance, have the right attitude toward machines. They know machines are trustworthy, brave, quiet, clean, reverent and don't ask for raises. MACHINES NEVER ARGUE. If they make you mad, you can kick them. They won't kick back. Sure they break down. But so do people. When a machine breaks down, you throw it away or buy a new microchip for $1.98. When a person breaks down, he has to go into analysis for S9O an hour. Writers are supposed to be “artistic” and therefore great haters of machines. In fact, all the writers I know love machines. Buying the latest gadget gives the writer what he needs most: an excuse to delay writing. IN THE OLD DAYS, a writer could put off finishing his novel for weeks, even months, by gathering together just the right pencils, felt-tip pens, rolling-ball writers, carbon packs and binders. Then came electric typewriters, dictation machines and now word processors to choose. Any excuse will do. I know a guy who has put off finishing his novel for the last six years because he can't find the right paper. “The rag-content is the key,” he repeats into his vodka-and-tonic each night. “If I could find the right rag-content. I’d wrap this book up in six months and be on Donahue' by the end of the year.” Machines, I must admit, do spoil you.

ERI: BERNSEE Managing Editor

In addition to the abovementioned. the city and county would contract with and appropriate their share of the operation into the OL budget for dispatching services. Additional savings could be acquired by using the director of Operation Life to also assume the duties of chief dispatcher. He more or less has that responsibility with his own dispatchers now'. The OL director could be paid an additonal $2,000 to $3,000 for this extra duty. This w'ould be a savings of $9,500 to $10,500, based on $10,500 for five dispatchers, or increase their salaries, or use six fulltime dispatchers at $10,500 and $2,000 additional to the OL director. The cost is no more than the proposal for five dispatchers and a chief dispatcher. Then modify the licenses involved to include the agencies involved, acquire one telephone number with seven or eight lines and you're in business. M.K.L. Greencastie

profanity will not be published. All letters are subject to editing, although such will be held to a minimum and the intent of a letter will not be altered. Send your letters to: Letters to the Editor, The Banner Graphic. P. O. Box 509, Greencastie, Indiana 46135.

William Buckley

dissolved, violence unpremeditated, and death.

There are even people who believe that the final winner in the East-West struggle may prove to be the society that most successfully withstands the parasitic drain of alcoholism. At this level we are ahead of the Soviet Union so far, and we have

In the old days, it was a point of pride that a reporter could write on anything. A beat-up Smith Corona, an Olivetti with half the keys missing, a 10-year-old portable that didn’t backspace-it didn’t matter. If necessary, you told yourself, you could scratch your story out on birch bark with a rusty nail. TODAY, REPORTERS won’t go near anything that isn’t a disc drive word processor with at least a 64K memory. I know a number of reporters who get a book contract first and a home computer second. That way they can put off beginning the book for at least a year. You need at least six months to spend in stores like Radio Shack and another six months to arrange for financing. The great seduction of technology is that there is no turning back. Years ago, I made a terrible investment by buying into a dying technology. In a fit of madness, I went out and bought the fanciest electric typewriter I could find. The reason was simple: I had two long freelance magazines pieces to do at home and I needed a good excuse not to do them. THE MACHINE I bought was beautiful.

Reagan's inability to adjust fosters disarray

By ANTHONY LEWIS c. 1983 N.Y. Times BOSTON Two years into the Reagan presidency, Americans are beginning to suspect the awful truth: They have a government incompetent to govern, a president frozen in ideological fantasy and an administration spotted with fools and rogues. The unmistakable symptom of incompetence is the economic disarray in Washington. The United States government faces a deficit approaching S2OO billion in the next fiscal year, more than double the previous record. How is the president going to deal with it 9 One month from his budget deadline, he has no serious idea. On this as on so many economic issues the Reagan administration sends out contradictory signals twice a week. It is going to speed up tax cuts no it isn’t. It is going to raise taxes certainly not. It is going to make drastic cuts in domestic expenditure the president has changed his mind, or no he hasn't. Ronald Reagan came to office as the man w'ho would take charge of the economy. Yet today there is a vacuum in

( UMEMPIiIYMENT.,7| FORM MY .) IVE6OTTOWSOME-I ( V'J RE-ELECTION J THINS ABOUT 1 COMMITTEE

reason to be grateful to Marx-Lenin-Stalin-Brezhnev-Andropov for presiding over a society that would drive archangels to the bottle. BUT ALCOHOL IS ALSO a Western problem, and we do well to acknowledge it as such, within realistic confines. What are realistic confines"’ They were established, in America, between 1919 and 1933. Making politics as the crow flies means prohibiting the manufacture and sale of liquor. But what about the kid problem? In the great age of permissiveness, during the "60s, state after state that had previously insisted on evidence that a purchaser w’as at least 21 (some statesi or 20 (others) or 19 (still others) slid back the legal drinking age to 18. Pari passu, the voting age went to 18, and the whole business appeared to be symmetrical -- old enough to fight? Well, old enough to drink, and old enough to vote. The logic is of course flawed, but it

It was huge, but sleek. It purred when you turned it on. The carriage did not move. Instead, a little ball raced back and forth, bashing into the page every time you hit a key. I spent three days deciding what kind of typeface I wanted-I got Courier 72, same as the White House-and even bought a special little cart for the machine to ride around on.* - The choice of colors took me nearly a week. I finally chose black, because the black ones came with light gray keys. It made the whole machine look like as smooth and sleek as a shark. Which is what I called it. Whenever a deadline was pressing me, I would switch it on and listen to it throb. “It’s just you and me, Shark,” I would whisper to it. “Let’s go get ’em.” I BARELY USE the Shark anymore It is old and slow compared to a computer. It cannot shift whole paragraphs around. It cannot change margines at the touch of a button. Now it just sits on its cart and sulks. But it taught me the invaluable lesson that you can never beat technology. You can never keep up with it. In 1980, I noticed that everyone on the presidential campaign trail had really neat micro-cassette recorders. I had an old mini-recorder and felt like a hick. So I went out and bought the smallest recorder I could find. I cleverly disguised the purchase on my expense account as lunch with the Supreme Court. Now my recorder is practically an antique. The new ones are not only much smaller, but also have new capabilities. “THE REALLY GOOD ONES are voice-

Roger Simon

I I

Anthony Lewis

executive leadership; the crucial economic policies are coming from Congress and the Federal Reserve. What has gone wrong 9 Rigidity is a large part of the explanation: an inability to adjust to facts. A president who drove a radical economic program through Congress refuses to see that the program is not working. And the denial of reality immobilizes him. Reagan told us, and believed, that he could create an economic boom, and balance the budget, by cutting taxes while spending more for arms and less for

sounds good. (Try: Old enough to procreate 0 Well, old enough to be a mother or father.) The proximate cause of the local excitement (in New Jersey the drinking age has just been lifted to 21) is the accident figures. Estimates vary, but not by much. Perhaps 60 per cent of fatal automobile accidents are caused by intoxicated drivers. And the overwhelming majority of intoxicated drivers are young people. THIS SHOULD NOT surprise. Young people tend to lack the experience necessary to make sound judgments, and so some will hop into the car when loaded, where some highway-wise dad would let mother take the wheel. Every year there are more Americans killed in automobile accidents than there were American soldiers killed in Vietnam in seven years. These figures understandably cause concern. So? In New Jersey, they make

activated now,” a friend told me. “You don’t have to turn it on when the President starts talking. It turns itself on. And when the President is finished, it turns itself off.” Next year, they’ll probably -have one

domestic needs. What we have instead is a severe recession, massive unemployment and record deficits. Confronted with the painful economic facts, the president waves them away. He w’ill not face the real sources of fiscal trouble: the uncontrolled growth in military spending and the shrinking of the revenue base. To blame them, he says, is “dipsy-doodle” thinking. And so, reduced to tinkering, he strains to hold the deficit to a mere $175 billion. The pattern of evasion and ineptitude is disastrous to financial confidence. Even the president’s natural backers are turning away. A Gallup poll of big business executives published in The Wall Street Journal shows that, in one year, those expressing “a great deal of confidence” in Reagan’s economic leadership have fallen from 58 to 27 percent. His appointees share responsibility with the president for the economic mess. White House advisers and the administration’s top economic officials have never broken through Reagan’s fantasies. His Pentagon civilian appointees actually encourage illusion; the uniformed chiefs

politics as the crow flies. You see. we do not live in a society in which it is feasible to devise means of preventing people at the age of. say, 20. from drinking beer (or whiskey). In a society in which any teen-age moron desiring illegal marijuana can find it, it is unlikely we can keep him away from a sixpack. It is unrealistic to suppose that the young gentlemen at Princeton University are going to stop drinking. How, then, refine the problem? The problem is to discourage young people from first drinking and then driving. How 0 There are no obvious means, but there are approaches. Every automobile belonging to a family with underage children (for instance) might be required to exhibit prominently a stamped orange streamer, say in the upper right hand corner of the windshield and back window.

that turns the President off. I know some of you resent computers and progress. You long for the good old days. And you are probably angry at Time for de-humanizing its highest honor by picking a computer.

January 6,1983, The Putnam County Banner-Graphic

are now the realists on arms spending. What George Shultz has done for foreign poliicy in six months shows that it is possible to move this administration toward realism. But there is no equivalent on the domestic side, in economics or anything else: no voice of quiet reason in the president’s councils. Instead we see ideology run riot and a gang of predators getting what they can out of the federal government. The perfect symbol of the administration in domestic affairs outside of economics is the Legal Services Corporation. For ideological reasons Reagan tried to abolish the program of legal help for the poor. When the country’s establishment lawyers resisted and Congress said no, he appointed a Legal Services board that he hoped would subvert the program. When some members would not, he dropped them. Then it turned out that the new Legal Services president had negotiated himself a fat-cat contract including membership in a private club of his choice. He negotiated it with the chairman, an old friend of his. All that is supposed to be conservatism. Reading about some of the officials in this administration, you would think the Snopes family had all moved to Washington. A Reagan appointee to the Interstate Commerce Commission, Frederic Andre, said the ICC should do nothing about bribes in the trucking business because they are just “instances of the free market at work.” The man Reagan chose to head the Veterans’ Administration, Robert P. Nimmo, spent $54,183 redecorating his office and resigned just before an official report criticized him for misusing military aircraft and a government chauffeur. It is not just insensitivity. There is a deeper sense of departure from the standards that have made the federal government work reasonably well under presidents of both parties. The Justice Department which has for so long maintained a professional esprit, is a sad example under the California society lawyer who is now attorney general, William French Smith. A career lawyer at Justice remarks that he and others look back with nostalgia to the days of John Mitchell and Richard Kleindienst. That is where we are. halfway through Reagan’s term: nostalgic for the Nixon administration.

That sticker, when spotted after dark, would alert highway patrolmen to stop the car and question the driver, if under age. WOULDN’T WORK? Nothing will “work” in the sense of eliminating drunken driving by teen-agers. It would work in the sense of diminishing the incidence of such driving, always assuming the police would be as diligent in looking for the orange stigmata as they are expected to be in checking the supermarket counters for beer cans being carried out by teen-agers. Someday the scientists will develop a steering wheel that will be immobilized by contact with fingers animated by blood with alcoholic content over .1 per cent. Then the kids will wear gloves. Meanwhile, in New Jersey, the crow is unlikely to land at the desired resting place.

But consider that in previous years. Time has chosen Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as the Man of the Year. I'd rather have Pac-Man than those guys any day.

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