The Daily News Leader from Staunton, Virginia • 4

A4 Staunton, Daily News Leader, Tuesday, May 9, 1989 Opinions THE DAILY NEWS LEADER ISSN 0747-2501 Founded 1904 by Hierome L. Opie Daily News 1890 The Morning Leader 1906 Evarts W. Opie Publisher and Editor John C. Higgins III, General Manager Roy T. Stephenson, Managing Editor Broken dreams Amid scenes of confrontation unparalleled in 40 years of communist rule, Chinese students are expressing their pent-up hostility toward aging paramount leader Deng Xiaoping.

Student disorders can be seen as evidence of a broader frustration and discontent. The students' current protests are finding expression in subtle, insinuating ways. For example, Mr. Deng's remarkable fall from public favor is symbolically written countrywide in glass, specifically broken glass from small bottles. And support for reform is indicated by thousands of fluttering white paper flowers such as those mourners left in Beijing's Tiananmen Square to honor former party head Hu Yaobang after his recent death.

Ten years ago, when Mr. Deng embodied the nation's hopes for peaceful and prosperous change, ordinary people registered their support for him by leaving bottles in conspicuous places. The name Xiaoping in spoken Chinese can mean small bottle. But these days, the only bottles left in conspicuous places are deliberately broken first. This wave of discontent is an extraordinary political tumble for a leader whose policy of economic liberalization doubled personal incomes in 10 years and improved living conditions immeasurably.

On economic and social levels, there is general dissatisfaction with the extent of corruption, crime, shortages and rampant inflation. On a personal level, the Chinese people are resentful that Mr. Deng's children have capitalized on their father's position to benefit their business activities. And growing numbers simply believe Mr. Deng has clung to power too long.

He seems to have been overtaken by the liberalizing revolution he himself started. Ever-louder calls for democratic reform may tip the scales in favor of the Communist Party's general secretary, Zhao Ziyang, as Mr. Deng's successor. He is regarded as being a more liberal reformer than his chief rival, Premier Li Peng, a more orthodox communist. For the moment, though, Chinese frustration with the snail-like pace of reform is confined to two very different avenues of expression.

In the long run, white paper flowers and broken bottles could prove to be more powerfully persuasive. Letters to the editor DEFENDS EXXON A less moral company than Exxon would bring out pricy lawyers and declare: non culpaforce majeure disclaim responsibility; the ship was dodging an Yet, instantly, Exxon management assumed responsibility; agreed to assume the enormous cost. Exxon is, and has, hired thousands local people every person available spending millions, including technology, tainly not by Exxon waving a magic wand, this time to create money! It may happen in Wash" ington, but not in tight world markets. In the world sphere, Exxon can justly hold its head high. WILLIAM M.

DAVIDGE McGaheysville (Editor's note: Davidge is a ton mer navigator in the ocean Exxon fleet.) Dealing with the Central Park wolf pack gardening Follow: The Leader Nouveau Every year about this time when the tomato plants go into the ground, I get into an argument. The same argument. A friend, an avid gardner, says I can't grow tomatoes in just any old dirt. I have to prepare the soil first. "Have you had it tested?" he asks.

"For what?" "pH. And you need cow manure and sand." I tell him I dig a hole in the flower bed, drop a tomato plant in, fill up the hole and wait. "You don't use lime?" he asks. I shake my head. "What about the suckers? Do you pinch them?" I shake my head again.

"I don't even water." But now, he's so exasperated he won't even share his Burpee seed catalog with me and withdraws the offer of a free bucket of his homegrown compost. I watch him as summer arrives, talking to praying man-Uses, hauling in loads of pine-bark mulch, missing meals, postponing vacations, trying to synchronize his automatic sprinkling system, devising elaborate staking systems for his plants and losing sleep over the dreaded blossom end-rot. He has spent over a 10-year in this almost impossible clean-up task. World prices of crude oil had already practically doubled in the last two years, the increased cost of crude oil temporarily absorbed by processors for competitive reasons. A sudden and substantial retail price increase was inevitable, Valdez or no.

Do you really believe that one company, even Exxon, is able to control prices in PATRICK BUCHANAN field, etc. cost is bound to be Excuse me, this is where I came in. The Great Society was going to deal with crime 25 years and a trillion dollars ago, remember. Sorry, Richard, we don't have any more money for goo-goo experiments; and we don't need any more studies to tell us how to deal with savages for whom gang rape is "fun," as one of the wolf pack said from his cellblock. How does a civilized, self-confident people deal with enemies who gang-rape their women? Armies stand them up against a wall and shoot them; or we hang them as we did the Japanese and Nazi war criminals.

If, while Mr. Cohen's experts were perusing position papers on the underclass, the eldest of that wolf pack were tried, convicted and hanged in Central Park by June and the 13- and 14-year-olds were stripped, horsewhipped and sent to prison, the park might soon be safe again for women. Historically, civilized nations have put an end to savagery by a traditional means. With their con ing to delay modernization until after German elections next year. Kohl's additional demand, for immediate negotiations with the Soviets about such weapons, raise this question for U.S.

policymakers: Why sustain Kohl with concessions so that he can implement policies not substantially different "And then we must declare war." Coming from Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, the line had impact. It was Cohen's response to what happened to that 28-year-old woman, jogging a week ago in Central Park. Ambushed by a wolf pack of a dozen teen-agers down from Harlem to go "wilding" in the park, she was chased down and beaten to the ground with a pipe, and had her face smashed with a brick; when she quit fighting, she was stripped, molested, gang-raped and left to die in a puddle. "There are no excuses for this sort of thing," Cohen said. "Not poverty.

Not hostility. Not boredom. Not even the depression and hopelessness which lead some ghetto kids to devalue their own lives and thus those of others as well." Good, I thought; finally, they're waking up. Then came Cohen's recommended "war" plan which, being studied by the White House, "would entail the establishment of the task force of non-government experts. The task force would assemble the considerable numbers of studies already done on the underclass.

It would also hold public hearings in various to educate the public about the underclass. The preliminary focus would be on ways to revive inner-city institutions and attract bright, public-spirited people into the 1930), he can reduce the burden on his own. If he feels menaced by battlefield weapons that would reach only battlefields west of the Soviet Union, and primarily in das Land der Mitte, his policy is not defensive. U.S. policy has already conceded too much to Kohl by agree a fiercely competitive international world market? Calamity strikes in Bhopal, India, even in the USSR at Chernobyl and elsewhere.

Man errs on the cold, perilous ocean and in treacherous iceberg-loaded narrow arctic channels. The system breaks down sometimes even as it sometimes breaks down on Main, Wall, or Market street. It certainly should not be difficult to figure where the cost falls. Cer quering armies, they put the fear of death into the barbarians; then, with religious conversions, either coerced or voluntary, they instilled the fear of God. Thus, did self-confident nations "civilize" the barbarians.

Today we cannot instill in the children of the inner cities a fear of God, a hatred of sin, and a love of their fellow man because the ACLU forbids it; and we cannot instill in them the fear of death because Gov. Cuomo will not permit it. The wolf pack entered Central Park unafraid for the best of reasons; it had nothing to fear. If caught by the police, they would be unharmed; if convicted, their lives were secure. No wonder they were joking in their jail cells, they have the personal guarantee of the governor of New York that even if that brutalized woman dies of her fractured skull, they are safe from the electric chair.

Calling the atrocity the "ultimate shriek of alarm," Gov. Cuomo cautioned us against letting popular rage get out of control: "They'll say you don't need a trial, you don't need a search warrant, you don't need Miranda." Leave it to Mario, at a time like this, to be worried about a Warren court decision which says that New York police must be sure to warn the animals not to blurt out something that might incriminate them for what they just did. than those of the German opposition parties? U.S. policy is to delay negotiations on nuclear forces in Europe until there are negotiated reductions of the enormous Soviet conventional-force advantages that made deployment of NATO's nuclear forces necessary. (Strategic nuclear negotiations also are relevant.) And it is U.S.

policy that, even with conventional-force reductions, nuclear weapons must be components of deterrence in Europe for the foreseeable future. Kohl says he only seeks equal ceilings on short-range nuclear systems, not elimination of them. But there are only 88 short-range Lance missiles (the focus of modernization) in Europe. There is no military logic to any particular level between 88 and zero. Aside from the Lances, there is a large NATO inventory of nuclear artillery and other nuclear weapons.

The political pull of zero not just zero Lances but the longstanding Soviet goal of a denuclearized Europe might be irresistible. There is in Europe a crystallizing conviction that nuclear deterrence is now incompatible with detente. U.S. policy has fed anti-nuclear thinking. At the Reykjavik summit, only Gorbachev's overreaching rescued I Mr.

Cohen sees a need to "attract bright, public-spirited citizens." But if there is a war on, we need, first, to arm and equip our troops, the cops, and turn them loose on the enemy with the kind of backing we gave our troops in World War II. We won that war, remember, Richard. We are losing the war on crime because our. troops are demoralized and the enemy is unafraid; and we will not win the war on crime until the fear that was pounding in that poor girl's heart as the pack was running her down is transferred to the hearts of the savages who assaulted her. It wasn't always thus.

Some of us grew up on films about tough lawmen coming to town to string up horse thieves and shoot down bank robbers, and about bounty hunters who brought back killers, dead or alive. The films were all about: How the West Was Won. Well, the West is being lost today. Paralyzed with guilt, equating evil with illness, worshipping "process" and "procedure," our Lords Temporal have lost sight of the first purpose of law: Salus populi, the safety of the people. Until America's war against crime is taken away from the talkers and turned over to people who know how to wage it, the barbarians will prevail and we probably ought to get our women out of the parks.

security us from our improvident agreement to get rid of nuclear weapons. Ronald Reagan defended SDI as a program for getting rid of nuclear weapons. Reagan and candidate George Bush celebrated the INF treaty with triumphalist rhetoric implying that any elimination of "an entire category" of nuclear weapons is wonderful. One rationale for the INF treaty was that it was homeopathic medicine, treating a disease (arms-control fever caused by the anti-nuclear virus) with small doses of the disease. It may have worked briefly, but intervals between bouts of the fever are becoming shorter.

"The Germans," said one of the greatest of them, Goethe, "make everything difficult, both for themselves and for everyone else." History's worst calamity began in August, 1914, when Germany went to war. It has been truly said that if in July, 1914, the Kaiser had been given a blank page on which to describe the world as he wanted it, he would have been hard put to list significant changes. Germany wanted to be important, but had no clear idea of what that meant. Today Germany is acquiring new importance as the agent of disintegration of the security system that has kept the peace. period, probably, $10,000 on shovels and spades, pruners and loppers, watering cans, gloves and knee cushions.

Expensive tomatoes. If he harvests 500 a season, each costs $2. And he's got plans to expand next year: cut down a couple of maple trees to get more sunlight and tear up half the backyard for radicchio and haricots verts and all the other things he doesn't have room for. And about August, I take him a couple of tomatoes from my garden because he overferti-lized and overwatered and the spray he got to kill the white-flies killed half his plants. "Luck," he says, scornfully.

"No, nature," I reply. There were tomatoes before nouveau gardening. Plants have plans of their own, programmed into each seed. I watch a big, green ugly horned caterpillar inch along the stalk of one of my tomato plants and I don't panic and reach for the insecticide. I leave it alone.

Weeds and bugs will win in the end no matter what we do. That's the law of nature. They're supposed to. It's all out of our hands. F.P.

deter Soviet use of them. And in an extreme situation, NATO could use such weapons the lowest rung on the escalation ladder to alter the nature of a conflict. Small nuclear weapons are linked to larger ones. However, all arguments establishing the utility of battlefield nuclear weapons may be refuted by this question: Could an alliance that is paralyzed and sundered by the prospect of modernizing those weapons ever agree to use them? In March, a NATO military exercise was aborted when German and Turkish participants objected to a U.S. proposal for hypothetical use of battlefield weapons against aggressor forces on German and Turkish soil.

Nuclear-weapons systems decay, so the alternative to modernization is obsolescence unilateral disarmament in this category of weapons by the mid-1990s. If modernization is deemed inconsistent with the latest detente, then solicitude for Gorbachev means giving him a veto over any changes, other than unilateral reductions, in NATO's military dispositions. But if he really wants to lighten Soviet defense burdens so that there can be a great leap forward in living standards (forward to the standards of, say, Portugal in Concessions to Germany could endanger Western li -x WASHINGTON The century will end as it began, and as it was in much of its middle part: wary about Germany. Suddenly "das Land der Mitte" is back in the middle of Western worries. GEORGE WILL The government of Helmut Kohl, its political support evaporating, has panicked and pandered to anti-nuclear and pro-Gorbachev sentiment by falling away from a NATO decision to modernize short-range nuclear forces.

But much more is at stake than those weapons. The supposed utility of those weapons is three-fold. By being there, those weapons would prevent the Soviet Union from concentrating conventional forces for the blitzkrieg NATO fears most. Because any ban on short-range weapons would be utterly unveri-fiable, NATO must assume the Soviets will retain such weapons, so NATO weapons are needed to.