The Raleigh Register from Beckley, West Virginia • Page 4

Register, BecBey, Monday Afternoon, July 17,1972 Thought For Today Confidence thrives only on honesty, on on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection and on unselfish performance. Withont them it cannot live. --Franklia D. Roosevelt Vacationing Reds In The Red The warning has gone out to visitors to certain resort areas: Beware of crooks who gone mobile. No longer waiting for suckers to come to them, card sharks are meeting arriving tourists at airports, luring them into cars and relieving them of vacation money in fixed games on the spot.

Not Florida or the Bahamas, -however, but at the Soviet Union's Black Sea vacation areas. The press, usually loath to ackomvledge that crime is a problem of any significance in Soviet society, lately has taken alarm at the increase in one of the oldest free enterprise games on earth. Some sunseekers from the north were reported left without a kopeck in their- pockets before so much as glimpsing a beach. Still a far cry from Miami's jewel heists and Caribbean casinos, maybe, but clearly the sucker business is tough all over. And ideology has nothing to do with it 'Head Tax' Headaches Of all the many forms of federal, state and local taxa- tion.

the property tax has long been regarded as the least popular. But the "head taxes" now being collected at a growing number of municipal airports may soon lay claim to that title. The usual practice is to collect a $1 fee from each emplaning passenger and to use the revenue for airport, maintenance. Philadelphia, however, levies a S2 tax on "both arriving and departing air passengers and puts the proceeds in its general revenue fund. A court hearing on the legality of the Philadelphia tax is scheduled for Tuesday, July 18.

Opponents of taxes on travelers often cite an 1867 U. S. Supreme Court decision, Crandall v. Nevada. At issue in that case was a Nevada staute that levied "a tax of one dollar upon every person leaving the state by any railroad, stagecoach.

or other vehicle engaged or employed in the business of transporting passengers for hire;" In striking down the statute, the Court argued: "If the state can tax a railroad passenger one dollar, it can tax him one thousand dollars. If one state can do this, so can every state. And thus one or more states covering the only practicable routes of travel from the east to the west, or from the north to the south, may totally vent or seriously "burden all transportation, of passengers from one part of the country to In recent years, the Court has taken a more permissive view of head taxes. Such levies now pass muster if they are "uniform, fair and practical" and if the revenue is used wholly or in large part to a public facility- Thus, in an April .18, 1972, decision affirming the right of a group of cities in New Hampshire and Indiana to levy taxes on air passengers, the Court held: "The facility provided at public expense aids rather than hinders the right of travel. A permissible charge to help defray the cost of the faculty is therefore not a burden in the constitutional sense." The Philadelphia tax no doubt will be challenged on the ground that it does not directly "benefit the city's airport.

Instead, the $14 million that the city hopes to raise from the tax in fiscal 1973 will be used to pare the growing municipal budget deficit. Philadelphia's need for the money is clear, but the courts may well force the city to seek it elsewhere. (RL.W.) Did God Do It? After a dam of heaped-up slate gave way, loosing flood waters that wiped out several West Virginia mining communities, a reporter sought comment from the dam's owner, the Pittston Co. A Mgh Pittston official in New York, asking not to be identified, said: investigating the a a which was caused by the flood which we believe, of course, Ultra-Fundamentalist Typewriters Due A Workout By LOUIS CASSELS tfPI Religion "Writer Religion is a subject that stirs up strong differences of opinion, and anyone who writes about it can expect to receive a bit of abusive mail. But even an old hand at the business is surprised sometimes by the intensity, of the response.

'The largest volume of irate mail I've received in years was provoked by what I thought was an offhand, obvious statement: That no moral issue is involved in the current vogue of men wearing their hair long. From aU parts of the country, letters poured in quoting the 14th verse of the llth chapter of St. Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians: "Nature herself teaches you that long hair is a disgraceful thing for a man." None of my correspondents was act of God." That prepared to accept the dam built by the" company was" possibility that Paul in this "incapable of holding the water which God poured into it" That's what is known as passing the buck upstairs, and at last report, God had no immediate comment. We don't think, though, the hill people will blame Him. He's probably a lot closer to them than He is to that mining company Times passage was merely expressing his own personal prejudices, conditioned by the Greek culture in which he lived.

It is Obvious But it is obvious from the context that is what Paul was doing. In the sentence immediately preceding, he says: "Judge for yourselves: Is it proper-for a woman to pray to God.in public worship" with nothing on her head?" The women of 1st century Corinth could have answered that easily enough. In their culture, only whores went around without veils on their heads. That is no longei true- so Paul's admonition that a respectable woman should-wear A hat in church simply is irrelevant to our time and society. It is, in fact, precisely as irrelevant as his view that long male hair is contrary to The conservative Protestant magazine Christianity Today-always an articulate defender of the authority of the Bible- gave prominent display recently tj an article warning evangelicals: "It is an error simply to take a biblical -injunction out of ats cultural context arid attempt to repro- 'duce it in our society -without reflection iipon its significance." To make the Christian gospel meaningful to people of many different cultures--not only those of distant lands, but also to "our own youth subculture--it is imperative to extract its timeless truth from any parti- cular cultural context, the article-said.

Wedded to Doctrine Ultra-fundamentalists won't buy mis. They are wedded absolutely to the doctrine that every line of the Bible represents a verbatim utterance of God himself. This stance has the of protecting scriptural from the gradual took place when biblical critics undertook to determine for themselves which parts of the text could be regarded as authentic. But it also leaves the biblical Uteralist in the position of attributing to God some quite statements and admonitions, including explicit orders for the massacre of women and children- in the Israelite conquest of Canaan. To believe that God really commanded wholesale slaughter of innocents described in the Book of Joshua is, in my opinion, a vastly greater impiety to acknowledge that the human -author of the scriptures may on occasion have reflected their own culture-conditioned ideas rather than words dictated to them by God.

Mailman, brace yourself. Arab Guerrillas Cause Cruel Dilemma For Lebanese Fischer Checkmates Himself By RALPH NOVAK We have seen over the past few days the creation of something new in 'chess, the Fischer gambit. This is where you threaten to hold your breath until you turn blue and-- or pick up your chess board and go home unless you can have your own way. A true inspiration to the youth of America, Bobby Fischer has shown us that these tactics work in this greed-smudged real world. Fischer's performance, the prelude to the world chess championship match in Iceland, should not have surprised us.

He had after all, never said he was sensitive, poised, considerate, generous, admirable or intelligent. He has said only many, many times) that he is the best chess player around, in Brooklyn the United States, the world, and presumably, the universe. Let us assume that he is right. The next question is, so what? Fischer seems to be operating under the belief that because we pay our athletes and entertainers outrageously large sums of money, we should do the same for chess players. From his point of view this is reasonable, of course.

But from everybody else's it is super-arrogant, nonsense. That we are foolish enough to sanction pay- Democratic Published by BECKLEY NEWSPAPERS CORPORATION, 341 Prince (25801) Second Class mail privileges authorized Beckley, W. and Hinton, W. Va. Telephone All Departments Beckley 253-3321 John Hodel Editor MEMBER OF' UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL SUBSCRIPTION RATES BY MAIL (Only where we do not have established delivery service) Daily and Sundny, one year S38.ll Daily and Sunday, six months $19.06 Daily and Sunday, three months 9.79 HOME DELIVERED By Carrier or Distributor Daily and Sunday, per week Daily and Sunday, per month S3.05 When requesting a change of address give old address as well as per cent state sales tax is included in the mail rates for all subscriptions within West Virginia.

AU carriers, dealers, distributors, are independent contractors and Beckley Newspapers Corporation is not responsible for advance subscription payments made to them or their representatives. ing Tom Seaver 5125,000 a year to throw baseballs is no jurisdiction of our being foolish enough to sanction paying Bobby Fischer $200,000 for shoving a bunch of toys around for a month. For one thing, there is the two- wrongs-don't-make-a-right theory. For another, there is the fact that chess is not, either historically or intrinsically, an interesting spectator sport. Such vicarious enjoyment as chess games provide comes from leisurely study of the move-by- move account, not from watching Fischer knit his brow in thought or lick his chops in fiendish anticipation of crushing an opponent's ego.

Maybe at some future time there will be enough fans around to support chess in the fashion to which Fischer would like to be accustomed. But right now there are not. And no exploiting capitalist is getting rich on Fischer's talent. This makes it doubly unfortunate that London investment banker James D. Slater saw fit to add 5125,000 to the world championship purse.

For Fischer's threats to quit the match bordered on extortion and his bluff should have been called. This would have been painful for Iceland--whose costly preparations for the match Fischer held hostage. But it would have put Fischer, a fatuous, graceless man, in his proper place, that of someone who happens to be a genius at a trivial pastime. Now, though, xve have the confrontation. Fischer has at times tried to make his match with defending world champion Boris Spassky a Cold War kind of crusade, good old American versus godless Russian Communist.

But he was not so dedicated to the crusade that he was willing to wage it for a mere $100,000. He was not so proud that he would not apologize to the Russians to save the match and his money. And he was not smart enough to realize that if he had just quietly won the championship, he would have earned the respect and, probably, the financial rewards he demanded so prematurely. Go, Boris. by PHIL NEWSOM UPI Foreign News Analyst Ever since the May massacre at Tel Aviv airport in which hired gunmen killed 25 persons and wounded 72 others Lebanon has lived in suspenseful fear of a massive Israeli counterattack.

Nor has that fear been relieved by a sharp attack by Israeli forces across the Lebanese border during the month of June. That attack was in retaliation for an Arab guerrilla ambush against a tourist bus inside Israel. Therefore it could not be counted in this struggle in which the'balance is an eye for 50 Years Aqo From The 1922 Ffles Of The Raleigh Register George Williams is preparing to remove the building which has been his home for the past several years on Kanawha Street and to erect a larger brick dwelling on the same site. His family this week moved from the old home 'into one of the houses on the same street owned by Clyde Scott until their new home is complete. 25 Years Ago From The 1547 Files Of The Raleigh Register Oak Hill R.

R. Thomas Sr. is the new mayor of Oak Hill following his appointment by the new seven-man council under the city manager form of government including Claude R. Hill, retiring mayor. Samuel Thomson will be installed as worshipful master of Beckley Lodge No.

95, Ancient Free and Accepted Masons, at public ceremonies in the Masonic Hall on Main Street. Plans are being developed on Devil's Fork above Arnigo for a new drift mine of the E. C. Minter Coal Company which by early next year, is expected to be producing 1,500 tons Pocahontas No. 6 coal daily.

an eye. Lebanon, on Israel's northern border, is caught in a cruel dilemma. Its 1949 armistice accord with Israel was supposed to guarantee peace on the frontier. It was observed during the Israeli-Arab War of 1967. Lebanon, half Christian and half Moslem, would like to be neutral even though it is an Arab state.

But it also is bound by another agreement reached with the Arab- guerrillas in Cairo in 1969. Safe Haven Guaranteed That agreement guaranteed the guerrillas safe haven in Lebanon and opened certain routes for them to attack Israel across border in return for a guerrilla promise riot to use Lebanese villages as bases, not to fire across the border and not to operate in the Mediterranean coastal zone. The guerrillas have violated each of these conditions but another circumstance is that the Lebanese army has neither the strength to repel, Israeli attacks nor to deal with the 5,000 or so guerrillas within its borders. It is a weakness which has made Lebanon especially vulnerable to pressures from the more extremist of the Arab nations, notably Algeria, Libya and Syria. Syria harbors the greater number of the Palestinian guerrillas--perhaps King Hussein of Jordan broke the back of the movement in his kingdom.

Syria has, however, been able to place strict limits on their activities by using Lebanon and attacks against Israel across its borders as a safety valve. Caught as it is between its Arab neighbors and the forces of Israel on the one hand and its own weakness on the other there is little Lebanon can do except appeal to the guerrilla leadership jtself for at least a little understanding, that or accept an Israeli threat to set up a "permanent presence" inside Lebanese borders. Tenuous Agreement A tenuous agreement reached between Lebanese Premier Bug Dust TJovTAbout A SS Pension Of $2,360 A Month? WILLS You may have noticed an opinion piece that appeared on the editorial page of last Tuesday. The gist of it that the salaries of federal employes are increasing at an alarming rate and that there is no end in sight. article pointed out the "four or fiye weeks of vacation time all tut the more Junior federal workers enjoy," not to mention accumulated sick leave and work available the centers of Bureaucracy" to employes who want It also noted that federal workers had received one pay raise at the start of the year and were due to receive another one on pet Those raises fall under a 1970 law in which Congress voted to raise its own pay from $30,000 to $42,500 annually.

To spare themselves the embarrassment of voting themselves more pay raises under the disapproving eyes of the electorate, the solons worded the law so it would give them automatic raises every so often. To make it somewhat palatable, other federal employes were included in the automatic pay raise provision. They've sort of got a bull by the horns. There is some Mud of political law that says once a tax or a pork barrel measure is passed there is no way to go but up. There is a provision under which this automatic pay raise could be stopped.

Congress could decide a raise at this time isn't and the President could veto the raise. Though President Nixon has said he will try to delay the Oct. 1 raise, you can bet your boots that he won't in this election year. And to keep Congress from deciding a raise isn't justified, self- serving government employes are, the story noted, feeding statistics into the computer to prove that government employes again have fallen below "comparability" with private pay scales! (Wonder what business" they're It certainly isn't the newspaper business, or any other I can think of operating in this neck of me woods.) Of course Congress isn't about to stop the raise anyway. The pot can't call the kettle black.

Self- interest must be served. It's part of the bureaucratic and legislative process. Congressmen have an election coming up too. Let the spiral ascend. But if you think the above is something, you haven't heard anything yet Talking about i a i governmental 'expense and inflationary trends, consider for a moment the case of social security benefits.

I have a son who works for the Social Security Administration in its main offices in Baltimore, and I learn that some of the statisticians in the Administration have figured out since the recent 20 per cent hike in benefits voted by Congress that, if present inflationary trends continue, when a person who is now 22 years old retires at age 65 in the year 2015 he could be eligible for a Social Security pension of $2,360.60 a month: That's if he's single. If he is married, he and his wife could draw as much as $3,545.80 per month! Those, figures assume that the 22- year-old is now paying the maximum amount annually, into Social Security; that his wages reflect the current'average increase of 5 per cent per year, and that the cost of living continues to rise an average 2.75 per cent annually. How much that $2,360.60 a month in 2015 is another matter entirely." Timely Quotes When L.was a little girl in Columbus there were things we (Negroes) could do and things we couldn't do. One of the things we couldn't do was go. into museums, let alone-think of hanging our pictures there.

My, "times have changed. Just look at me Thomas, 77, as an exhibition of her paintings opened in New York's Whitney Museum. The (press briefing) permits the press and the government to sleep together, even to without getting married or having to "accept the responsibility for any offspring." If the "public on whose doorstep orphans of deceptive information and misleading allegations are Moyers, former presidential press secretary The Innocent Bystander American Revolution Lives; Miami Beach Is Proof By ARTHUR HOPPE Saeb Salam and guerrilla leader Yasir Arafat points up the contradictions within the Arab agreement declares that temporarily at least the guerrillas will suspend their operations against Israel from inside Lebanon in order to spare the country reprisal attacks from Israel. But even as the announcement was made, a splinter guerrilla group called the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, General Command, declared it would ignore the accord. Chief contradiction to emerge is Arab reluctance to curb the guerrillas who negotiate almost as a separate nation and yet whose contribution to the Arab cause is questionable at best Certainly the Tel Aviv massacre did nothing to win world sympathy for the Arab cause.

MIAMI "BEACH One day soon, God willing, Americans will wake up to find they are running their own country. It will tie a revolution Marx never dreamed bf. You could see the beginnings of it last week in Miami Beach. It was not the nominee the party picked nor the platform the party adopted. It was who did the picking and who made the decisions.

It was the delegates themselves. From high in the press gallery, it looked like any convention of the past years the blue smoke hanging in the air, the red standards, the aisles jammed with milling bodies, the old pols sitting in their VIP boxes. But then you looked at the delegates, rows'upon rows of them. For the most part, they sat quietly in their chairs, their expressions intent, their eyes thoughtful as they listened to the speeches. You could feel their sense of purpose.

They were such delegates as no American political convention has ever seen the middle-aged housewife in the Penney's seersucker dress, the thin dignified black man in crisp collar and tie, the pudgy young college type with brown hair curling over his ears, the Chicano in an open-necked denim shirt, the elderly couple Alf! ft 4M.M.M.M.M.M.M.M.M.M.I.M.I.M.M.M.MJ J.M.t Dimmit, GUNS don't kill ptoplt; 2 PEOPLE kill ptoplt! holding hands. They looked for all the world like an audience at a PTA meeting, a city council session, a town hall. And they were the harbingers of revolution. IT WAS FITTING that this was the way they should look. For they were chosen, most of them, in small caucuses throughout the country by their friends and neighbors.

They were the product of reform. "Reform works," cried a jubilant young Democrat after the crucial vote to throw Mayor Daley out of the convention. Maybe so. But it worked creaMly. Make no mistake, these new-style delegates were not above wheeling and dealing in the same manner as the old pols who had preceded them.

One young-McGovern delegate, a member of the women's caucus, actually voted against seating more women in the South Carolina delegation. It was a complicated political maneuver designed to insure her candidate's nomination. "I knew it was wrong," she said defensively. "But I didn't fight for six months to win a delegate's seat and win the primary and then come here to lose." So some of them at least have already been corrupted, not by power, but by the search for power. Yet you felt that, unlike the old pols, they wanted power, not for themselves, but for the causes they believed in.

And, if so, that is part of tha revolution. FOR 200 YEARS these people have, most part, run their own community affairs their PTA's, their city councils, their town halls. For 200 years, for the most part, party nominees and platforms at the national level have been picked by old pols, fat cats and labor bosses. But now these people have ignored the old pols, offended the fat cats and tossed out the labor bosses. As a consequence, they may well lose in November.

But the revolution has begun. The Democrats, having embarked. on party reform, will find it all but impossible to turn back. And the Republicans, for political reasons, will find it all but impossible not to emulate them. And maybe some day just maybe the faces we see in congress will be the same kind of faces we saw on the convention floor Miami Beach.

Should that day come, the revolution will be a success. Not the revolution Karl Marx dreamed 'of. But the revolution that began 200 long years ago..