Wausau Daily Herald from Wausau, Wisconsin • 8

pinion Page 8A Friday February 27, 1987 Wausau Daily Herald Viewpoints welcome Write letters to the Daily Herald at P.O. Box 1286 ban causes a lot of smoke Ad Wausau Daily Herald Sonja Craig, Publisher Pat Whaley Opinion Page Editor Elliot Tompkin Managing Editor Ellen 1 Goodman American Civil Liberties Union Director Ira Glasser says: "We have always been againist bans of advertising (for) any products that are legal to sell." I have watched this argument emerge with some trepidation. I no longer worry that banning tobacco ads today will make it easier to ban liquor ads tomorrow and then, salt, beef fat, even automobiles. Tobacco is unique. As Synar put it, "We are dealing with the only product that when used as instructed is destructive." Moreover, each ad that portrays the glamour of healthy young people smoking is intrinsically false.

But I agree that there is something contradictory in the message that it's OK to sell cigarettes but not OK to tell people about them. The Supreme Court ruled that Puerto Rico could permit gambling and prohibit advertising. Such a duality is apparently constitutional but also contradictory. Nevertheless, what are our choices? Cigarettes are deadly. It isn't OK to sell them in any moral sense, but we allow it.

Fifty million addicts make a ban on cigarettes impossible. Does that mean we are stuck forever with this historic health disaster? Because we can't forbid cigarettes, do we have to allow the industry access to new addicts, allow them to keep their numbers up, keep their constituency intact, maintain the smokers' clout? I don't think so. This is perhaps the most powerful place to interrupt the cycle. A ban on advertising is an imperfect and unstable compromise. But the alternative is grim in its consistency: the seduction of yet another generation into disease.

Ellen Goodman is a Boston Globe Imagine what would happen if some modern entrepreneur came up with a nifty idea for a new consumer product. It was an item that had no notable benefits, was addictive and would be implicated in the deaths of some 350,000 Americans a year. What precisely would be the response of his corporate superiors? Beyond stunned silence? Would the Food and Drug Administration give his brainchild a seal of approval? Would the government allow it to be extolled and sold to citizens? Hardly. If cigarettes did not exist, we might invent them, but never in the wildest scenario would we let them loose on the legal market. But what do you do once cigarettes are in the marketplace? What do you do once you have a hooked population, a hooked economy? This is the raw-throated question that plagues the anti-tobacco coalition.

When you cut right through all the arguments by lawyers and doctors and public-policy makers, what we have are 50 million addicted Americans. We know two things about them with absolute certainty. That smoking is bad for their health, bad for everybody's health, not to mention health bills. That banning cigarettes at this moment in time would be a social disaster, turning smokers into criminals and farmers into bootleggers. The actions of the anti-smoking people can be seen as an attempt to get around this central conflict, an attempt to wean the country from smoking without going cold turkey.

So far, they have tried putting warnings on cigarettes and rotating those warnings. They are backing legislation to raise cigarette taxes and to eliminate the industry's deduction for advertising. Even the movement toward a smoke-free workplace and Memory lapse a very poor excuse "Everybody that can remember what they were doing on Aug. 8, 1985, raise your hands." Source: President Ronald Reagan, on whether he was able to say for certain whether he gave advance approval for early arms shipments to Iran. The president forgets.

Now the president says he has forgotten whether he approved the first sales of U.S. arms to Iran, the first half of what in some quarters has come to be called Irangate or Iranscam. We all forget. But it would seem to common folks that providing arms to a country which has called us "the great Satan," a nation which most Americans loathe, would be a noteworthy event in even a president's day. To believe Reagan, it was entirely forgetable.

A dinner table conversation at the White House on or about Aug. 8, 1985, might have gone something like this: Lady: "How did it go at the office today, Ronnie?" 'The President: "Oh, we sold missiles and spare parts to the public space has, as a subtext, the hope that smoking will gradually become socially unacceptable. But nothing has elicited quite the level of controversy as the proposal to ban all forms of cigarette advertising and promotion. The latest bill, introduced Feb. 24 by Mike Synar would outlaw the whole $2 billion boodle: newspaper and magazine ads, billboards, posters, match advertising, samples, sponsorships of athletic events virtually anything with a cigarette name on it except the package itself.

Synar, who smoked for ten years, became convinced after watching the non-effect of labels that, "You cannot compete with $2 billion worth of advertising and promotion." The ban is seen as a better way to stop companies from recruiting new and young customers, to make up for the ones who have died or quit. With no new recruits, ashtrays will gradually become heirlooms. The American Medical Association agrees. The American Bar Association disagrees. First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams calls it censorship and warns: "Censorship is contagious." Vets say thanks for 'Platoon' screening help EDITOR: I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of those' who helped make our "Platoon" screening a success.

The Gannett newspaper for running the information, a local radio personality who gave us a plug, the TVi station that got us onl the air, and especially! the local theater for donating the proceeds to the Wisconsin Vietnam Veterans Memorial Project. I do want to thank 1 Iranians, directly contradicting my public statements that we would not deal with terrorists." ft First Lady: "How nice, dear." President: "Will you pass the butter, please, Nancy." First Lady: "You've been working too hard. Let's jet off to the ranch for a long weekend." President: "Yes, dear." Maybe it's true. Maybe President Reagan really doesn't understand the gravity of the situation. Maybe he believes this Iran-Contra furor all will blow over.

Maybe he forgot. The question no longer is, what did the president know, and when did he know it? The question is, if the president ever knew, how could he forget? 1 Americans love Reagan. They've been willing to overlook reports that he has lapses of memory and his mind sometimes wanders during conversations. But the truth, now. Much as you admire Reagan, do you feel confident that a president who cannot remember whether he gave prior authorization to sell missiles to "moderates" in Iran is fully able to negotiate nuclear missile reduction with the Soviets? What if he forgot something important then? How much a contrast there is between Reagan and his predecessor.

Jimmy Carter got so caught up in minutiae that he see the forest for the trees. Ronald Reagan is so detached he doesn't remember seeing either the forest or the trees. It was as unsettling to watch Carter beset by problems and seemingly unable to act as it is to watch Reagan acting without giving much thought to the outcome. Of course, it would be easy to blame chief of staff Donald Regan for all these problems. Regan does have the president's ear and apparently played a large role in the whole affair.

He's an easy and immensely disliked scapegoat. It would be easy, but as former President Richard Nixon once said, it would be wrong. Harry Truman's desktop sign said it best: "The buck stops here." For the next 22 months, the buck still stops at Reagan's desk, and that is something the president darn well better not forget. you for supporting us, and for trying to understand us and our problems. I also want to thank the vets who came and saw the film, and in their own way supported our memorial project.

Please remember this is a memorial to veterans, and for veterans. This memorial will help us not to lose sight of the fact that this thing called "War" is so brutal and so futile. GEORGE G. (RUSTY) ELBE Public Relations, Wisconsin Vietnam Veterans Memorial Project Central Area Letters are welcome. Please Include your name, address, signature and phone number.

Names will be published with letters. Writers are requested to limit their letters to 400 words and the Herald reserves the right to edit letters for brevity. Mail to: The Wausau Daily Herald, Letters to the Editor, P.O. Box 1286, Wausau, S4401. 11 ALAS, POOR REGAM I KNEW HIM DO reforms have Chance? Gorbachev may go way of Khrushchev Bob Maynard enemies, suppose he were, somehow, to prevail? We would then face a young, tough and enlightened Soviet leader who could be a formidable foe for administrations of the future to deal with.

At bottom, I do not think Gorbachev believes any differently than Khrushchev. He still thinks we are in a worldwide contest of ideology. What he seems to be saying is that Moscow is handicapped by inefficiency and bad morale. The question is whether Gorbachev's reforms could ever work, and, if they did, whether they would make the difference he thinks they will make. It is hard to say.

We only have one other major reform effort to compare to the present one. That was the short, unhappy rule of Nikita Khrushchev, the only head of his party and country who did not die in office. Bob Mavnard is a Universal Press Syndicate columnist. One reason for the fragile assessment of Gorbachev's future is a significant change in his stance vs. that of every Soviet leader before him, Khrushchev included.

All have touted the superiority of socialism over Western capitalism. The line had been that it was only a matter of time before socialism triumphed virtually everywhere. Gorbachev is the first Soviet leader to launch an open campaign based on the inarguable premise that the Soviet Union is a mess. He has brought alcoholism and drug abuse out of the national closet. He has called the Afghanistan misadventure "our bleeding wound." Far from boasting about burying the West, Gorbachev has advanced a few Western reforms, including a suggestion that there be more than one candidate on the slate for party offices.

That idea flew through official Moscow with all the grace of a lead kite. China is in the midst of discovering the challenge of experimenting with free expression in communist states. Not all of Gorbachev's ideas are being welcomed, but he continues to shake up the place. The one big advantage Gorbachev has over Khrushchev is that all the old-line Stalinists are either dead or too old to put up much of a fight. That fact helps in the political environment of the Politburo, but that is not where today's biggest fight is likely to be.

Gorbachev has squared off against an entrenched, corrupt and powerful bureaucracy. Sooner or later, the bureaucracy will find a way to do him in or co-opt his reforms. Even though most students of the Soviet Union agree Gorbachev can't last at the rate he is making Soviet system a more efficient competitor with the West. And, once again, the future is in doubt. How long can Gorbachev last? He is freeing dissidents branded only weeks ago as enemies of the Soviet state.

He is shaking up the bureaucracy and invading sanctums of privilege. Such hard-nosed critics of the Soviet system as former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former Ambassador Jeane Kirk-patrick are not easily wooed by Moscow rhetoric. All the same, they came away from a three-hour meeting with Gorbachev convinced he is sincere in his desire for reform. Mind you, the group of foreign policy specialists who met him don't believe Gorbachev has all that great a chance of success. Some wonder if he can last two years, and the more optimistic give him no more than four years.

Ours was not a home in which gloom was permitted to prevail for long. My parents were cheerful optimists about the world. One of the memorable exceptions in our house was the night when Nikita Khrushchev made his famous tirade against the West. 'WE WILL BURY YOU' -Khrush." That was the headline of one of the New York tabloids lying on the dining room table. My mother picked it up.

"I am chilled to the marrow of my bones," she said. I remember feeling chilled myself, even though I could only dimly comprehend what the Soviet leader meant. It turned out he meant that the Soviet system would vanquish the Western democracies, not with missiles, but with the spread of the powerful ideology of Marxist-Leninism. Khrushchev, the amiable post-Stalin reformer, was eventually toppled by the powerful Politburo and bureaucracy that were the legacy of Stalin's bloody reign. Khrushchev wanted a more efficient Soviet system so he could give us a better run for our money in the world arena.

The Soviet system, headed for 70 years of age in October, was not hospitable to reform and it eventually became inhospitable to Khrushchev, who died broken and bitter. Now Russia is ruled once again by a liberal reformer with bold ideas and a keen will to make the Doonesbury BY GARRY TRUDEAU Looking into the past HAVE YOU GOT A BRAD, CHANGE "WALLET" TO "MEP-IC1NE CABINET. SLOW IT DOm.KJDS! WE'RE NOT THAT'LL check irri MYWALr LBV. OH, BRAD, MAI- (UBLL.W5 OKAY, BUT RE- npmRSE BE YOU'RE RIGHT! HAVE BEEN MEMBER, IAJE MAYBE WE ARB TOGETHER FOR. HAVE PMC- 1 FINALLY READY! NINE YEARS, TICBSAFB LTT' 1 1 D0IN6 O.

FEDERAL efl ffcr FEDERAL Sr. 50 YEARS AGO Feb. 27, 1937 A crisis in the city has passed. During the past two weeks many local cigar counters were without one or more of four popular brands of ciga-rets. They are made in Louisville, and due to the floods an embargo was placed on all tobacco products, These restrictions have been lifted, and wholesalers say the city's supply is again normal.

Gov. Philip F. La Follette has accepted an invitation to speak before the Wisconsin County Boards Association at its annual meeting at Wausau, according to word received by E.H. Kuhlmann, Matathon County clerk. 25 YEARS AGO Feb.

27, 1962 One man was killed, two were wounded and a fourth suffered cuts from flying glass in a wild shooting affair on a town of Berlin farm which lasted more than eight hours during the night. Dead was Fred W. Schmidt, town of Berlin, wounded were Patrick Crooks, Marathon County district attorney, and Gordon Westfall, town of Berlin tavernkeeper, who were shot by Schmidt. Both were reported in good condition. Marvin Nelles, news reporter for WRIG Radio Station, suffered cuts about the face from flying glass.

Scores of shots were fired by Schmidt and law iforcement officers in a gun battle. EXPRESS HERB1..