a OPINIoN Page 4 Sunday, October 5, 1980 The Michigan Daily Failure a problem student looks back. When I hear friends grumbling about a bad grade on a quiz, a test, or even a final, my reac- tion is one that some might think unusual. I become intensely envious. I quake with jealous fury at what my compatriots, a generally in- telligent, studious lot, call "bad grades." For them, a "bad grade" is anything that will significantly mar their pristine 3.7, or 3.4, or 3.15 Grade Point Averages. I should have such, worries. FOR ME, A bad grade is the mark I have earned in 8 of the 24 courses I have taken here, a grade unseen by the vast majority of my fellow drudges. So as not to be too blunt about it, that grade is a vowel, but is not the first let- By Joshua Peck ADMIT-TED TO COIE6E Of LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND THE ARTS N pt___ -_ FROM TRANSFERRED TO N TRANSFERRED TO _____________ _ IN ____ GRADING SYSTEMI (EFFECTIVE FALL 1975)t A+ 4.0 B-.7D+ 1.3 P-"ASS (A+--)W-OFFICIAL DROP U--UNSATISFACTORY A 4.0 C" .3 D .0 F-PAIL (D-t) EO-UNOFF. DROP CR-CREDIT A- S.7 C S.0 D^ 0.7 I-INCOMPLETC N^ MN-NO GRADE REPORTEIgNC-NO CREDIT B+ S.C C- 1.7 E 0.0 X-ABSENT PROM EXAM Q-UNOFFICIAL ELECTIO VI-OFFICIAL AUDIT SSO .0Y-EXTENDED COURSE S-SATISFACTORY THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN ANN ARBOR DEGREES AND CERTIFICATES ACADEMI.: RECORD OF (NAME: LA , FIRST, MIDDLE)/ 1332 GREST COURT/ I N arc RBOR MT 481o4 -7 TWO SUMMARIES FOLLON THEENTRIES FOR EACH PERIOD IN RESIAENCET MICHIGAN TERM HOURS ELECTED, TOTAL TERM HOURS CREDITED TOWARD HONOR POINTS EARNED{ SECOND, A CUMULATIVE TOTAL ON THE SAME FACTd 2.0 POINTS FOR EACH HOUR ELEI TED IS REQUIRED FOR A .'IEGREE.1 FIRST. A TOTAL OF ~ROORA MMICHIGAN RS. AN AVCRAGE OF ER M SEMESTER BIRTHDATE 06-12-57 CONCENTR ION: ------.- / THETR i hAI .IUI DRA~z+ 7 * ~ -V /I COURSE .&ECK.JOSHUA MAGENJCE FALL 75 12452J474:1 ~T BOOKS 191. GKEAT NOOKS PATH1 115 ANAL GEOM-$:WINTUk 76 1245204740 iNGL.467 SHAKL- PEARE PLAYS PHYvS 40 GENERAL PHYS 11 PHYS 941 ELEM LAB 11 loss-102 FIRST-SYEADk 2.971 *MSH 19 C P f8 MHIP 54.5 MICH I CR01 IMICK TERM TWRDJ HONOR KRS IPROM POINTS COURSt TER TWD ONO COURSE' , I I.-.. .1 5 ~ - - - r :3 4 12 3 3 1 4 7 3 4 4 4 -A3 R- w 8- Lb A- 1.1 W w" A- 1 86 8- .8+ E A JE 10 81 1 4b 3 G 6'O- 1481 208 13, 16 - WINTE i Eb&R W 20 4OURN 301 SYCH 171 kUSS 202 G6SS 450 -HMSH 57a k 77 124 5204740 )2 ELEM MUOD HEBREW L ASIS NEWS WRIT AS WCIAL SCI .SECOND YEAR 20TH C RUSS LIT 2.095 C TP 46 MHe 133.7 5 4 4 3 20 2. G+ ID IE 17 x1j5 4~.0 1.37 ', x+09 v- SPRING 80 1. RE IGION 304 TH M-H 83 CTP - i t ter of the alphabet. That's it; the one between "D" and "F" (although I have one of each of those too). I am an astonishingly bad student. I was when I arrived here five long years ago, I remained one through my first four terms, and I would have been one during the next year, had I not left school for a year. I have since con- tinued in that noble tradition over my last three semesters. It's weird, really, for at no point during the compilation of my current 1.996 Grade Point Average have I ever been accused of being stupid. I really don't think it would be fair to call me intellectually disadvantaged or culturally deteriorated or any of those other lovely euphemisms social workers throw around. BUT I DO have some sort of perverse strain that interferes with high academic achievement. It can't just be laziness; from what I observe, everybody is lazy, but vir- tually anybody else comes through with a self- delivered spur when needed. I only rarely do. Psychologists and psychiatrists, of which my parents are two (three, counting my step- mother), would think me an obvious sufferer of FALL 78 1245204740 IST 434 SOVIET UNION HURN302..WXTNG.%S.S MEDIA .1USS 301 . THIRD-'EAR OSC 100 PRINCIPLES JPPEECH 00 FUNDAMENTAL MSH 67 CTP 46 MHP MMUNCTN 8178 CN617 ENGL 567 'H.A uST 4 53 L0?L S C!1 IiHEA TTX 4 4 4 3 , FALL . 76 1245204740 ANTHR CUL 411 INTRO-LING JOURN 01 SOS RLE-ME0IA POL.SCI 395 URV SOV UNION tUSS 201. . SECOND-YEAR RUSS 451 SURVEY RUSS LIT I _ I . , \1 / V gleefully answer "four or five" when he asked for an estimate of the hours I spent each week studying. (My average has since declined.) And thus it was possible for me to self- destruct in a semester consisting of some of the easiest courses LSA had to offer. It was Fall, 1978. I had just returned from my year out of School, during which I had been working, writing, acting, and gaining residen- cy. When in mid-November my girlfriend of the previous six months and I parted ways, I took a little vacation, ignoring classes for a' week while nursing my wounds and listening to Burt Bacharach records. WHEN I returned to class the following week, teachers and fellow students expressed interest about where I'd been, most of it offered in perfectly benevolent fashion. I took their comments as an affront to my liberty, naturtlly, and put my typewriter and textbooks aside for the rest of the term. The results? Russian 301: Incomplete, later lapsed to "E." Journalism 302: "F." Sociology 100: "E." Speech 100 (everyone's favorite "cake"):"E." All depends on your definition of "cake," I guess. I took the year following that semester off as well, though this time it was the Academic Ac- tions Office that got the idea. How could it have happened? The second- place finisher of the Anna C. Scott Elementary School second grade spelling bee, winner of an all-around excellence award the following year, the master of ceremonies of his high school graduation, tossed mercilessly out of college on his ear without so much as a war- ning. THE COMBINATION that has landed me in hot water time and time again is that hard- bitten resistance to authority, and excessive, inflated pride. I resent the assignment of, say, a final term paper for a Political Science class. I put off researching it until the day before it's due, and then come to the conclusion that there's no point in turning in a paper that will be so clearly inferior to what I could have done with more preparation. So I'm off to my tenth viewing of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, failure be damned. I have no sure way of telling what my life would have been like had I been a nose-to-the- grindstone type. I probably would have graduated a year-and-a-half ago with a degree in Astronomy or Russian (my intended majors freshman and sophomore years, respectively). Conceivably, I could have been on my way to a professorship at some university. BUT I SOMTIMES wonder if more atten- tion to the Humanities might not have cost me the attention I've been able to devote to humanity. Playing by my rules, I have been able to afford avid involvements in all manner of endeavors: from studying the stars, to per- forming in a theater, to writing about the theater, to romantic entanglements, to editing this page. I cannot speak from experience, but surely pursuit of the academic above all else-and that does seem to be the only sure road to su - cess here-would have cramped my rather spontaneous style. If and when I graduate, I'll be a few years older than most, a little more tired of Ann Ar- bor, and-who knows-maybe a little wiser.,0 My academic achievements (or lack thereof) have not cost me companionship, my health, ,r my sanity. I wonder if all those who have put- sued a Phi Beta Kappa key instead can say the same. "fear of success"-a malady associated with an underlying fear of failure. I'm sure that's not it, though. In the areas of my life that are not academically related, I pursue and frequently achieve sometimes lofty goals. I know the delicious flavor of work well done, and wouldn't mind at all experiencing that flavor in the academic arena as well. If there is a psychological factor beyond laziness, I think it must be my hatred of authority. I can't stand having other people tell me what to eat or wear, how much or where to sleep, or more pertinently, what to read, write, think about, and listen to. Yet however freely I may have chosen a given University course, the syllabus with which I am forced to contend seems to smack of authoritarianism. Faced with the choice of submission or failure, the lat- ter alternative too quickly comes to seem the more attractive one. THUS IT WAS possible for me to fail Russian 451 four years ago because I refused to read War and Peace and then turn around and ab- sorb the Tolstoy masterpiece in my free time the following term with pleasure and amusement. At that point, of course, the three wasted credits were unsalvageable. Thus it was possible for me to look my Honors counselor in the eye freshman year-yes, I was in Honors once-and almost Joshua Peck Daily's Opinion every Sunday. is the co-editor of The page. His column appears Edited and managed by students at The University of Michig Vol. XCI, No. 28 420 Mayn Ann Arbor, Editorials represent a majority opinion of The Daily's Editorial E estat 'Re iser against 1s Y OU'VE GOT until 8 p.m. tomor- , row night to arm yourself for the war against the Tisch tax cut proposal. Tomorrow night is the deadline to register to vote in the November elec- tion-an election especially important because of the ballot proposals to be decided as well as the president to be elected. Whether or not you are a Michigan resident, as a member of The Univer- sity of Michigan community you should be vitally interested in working and voting to defeat the irresponsible Tisch plan, which would roll back property taxes to - 1978 levels, slash them in half, and require the state to -make up for the lost revenue. Of course, the state has no money to replace those lost funds-already public employees such as state troopers have been laid off. The effect of the Tisch plan will be utter devastation of economy-not to menti University. Further, the Tisch pla the hands of the state tc lost revenues by ra taxes-any increase wo approved by 60 percent figure nearly impossible Within the University is easy to become com the threat that Tisch pr everyone on campus is plan. But throughout a sta unemployment, the Tis joying great popularity A recent poll indicate Proposal D could win 6( November vote. Register to vote tor Secretary of State's offi up in the Union or the going to be a tough figh is desperately needed. an nard St. , M 48109 Board ch Michigan's ion that of the n carefully ties o replace those ising fees or )uld have to be of the voters,a e to reach. community, it nplacent about resents: nearly opposed to the te ravaged by ;ch plan is en- as a quick fix. s that Tisch's D percent of the norrow at the ce or tables set Fishbowl. It's t and your help j , "Politics," Chairman Mao used to say, "comes out of the barrel of a gun." In 1980 that axiom holds doubly true for Americans, but with a twist. The gun in question is mounted at the rear of a television picture tube, where it fires electronic images at the screen on which so much of American life-political and otherwise-is now conduc- ted. And it derives much of its power from programs which do not, on the surface, appear even remotely related to politics. In ways which are little understood, the character of mainstream U.S. political opinion has been defined less by Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley than it has by "Father Knows* Best," "Bonan- za," "Kojak," and "Lou Grant." WHAT POLITICS SELLS today is a vision of life, rather than an organized program for the governing of society. It presents ideology in the broadest sense, a "belief system" full of conven- tional views of the world and con- ventional expectations of it. And that, after all, is just what television entertainment presen- ts. It is the chief ideological force in America, the chief testing ground of our conventional ex- pectations, thanks to a systematic effort to read the national pulse and address the most deeply felt public needs. In the age of Television Politics, no politician can survive long if he ignores the TV public or the principles which guide enter- tainment programming. As a result, successful politics and successful TV have run sur- prisingly parallel courses through the last 30 years. Even in the medium's infancy, a rudimentary relationship bet- ween political imagery and the prevailing images of television entertainment was apparent. Dwight Eisenhower was the very embodiment of those ideals which elevated Robert Young and "Father Knows Best" to the Nielsen summit: solid. P olitics From 'Dranet 'to 'Lou Grant' equivalent. Dozens of tense spy and police programs in the early fifties ("I Led Three Lives," "Dragnet," "Racket Squad," "The Crusader") operated on the premise that a criminal or political confidence man lurked behind every American door. They were the most common television fare of theirnera. But not nearly as common as their successors at the heart of the TV schedule: the westerns of 1956 to 1960. During the second Eisenhower administration, John Foster Dulles shifted the locus of American paranoia from domestic subversion to inter- national Cold War conflict. In the four years which saw Dulles bring the U.S. ever closer to the brink of nuclear war, some 60 dif- ferent TV frontier series premiered, and they often spoke, at least metaphorically, to the mentality of brinksmanship. Many worked on the thesis of Have Gun Will Travel, in which a grim but purposeful gunman travelled about the less developed world offering his violent skills in the service of} freedom, American-style. They were parables of foreign inter- vention, punctuated inevitably by a confrontation in which the menace to American values was annihilated. Anyone who. finds the notion outrageous that the western shoot-out had some metaphorical relationship with the Cold War should consider the summation of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis of- fered by then-Secretary of State Dean Rusk: "We were eyeball to eyeball," he told the press, "and the other guy blinked." THE EISENHOWER YEARS marked the triumph of a critical principle for image-makers. Like the well-balanced TV schedule, the successful political formula required a sympathetic per- sonality (Eisenhower himself), reinforced by a hard, aggressive M viw mnnlhi _I j -a enm- By Frank Viviano Television was full of Kennedy images: The nation had been exhausted by the ideological strain of the Fifties; television knew enough to rid itself of stone- faced gunmen like Paladin and to replace them with stylish detec- tives on the model of "77 Sunset Strip" and appealing idealists like Dr. Kildare. It was part of the Kennedy genius to recognize the same thing, while Richard Nixon paid the price for a fixed identification with the paranoid Fifties. OVER THE ENSUING years, this curious process has taken even firmer root, with politicians rising and falling in suggestive proportion to their ability to reflect-or generate-an image which matches the expectations of television entertainment. When Lyndon Johnson was at his best during the early Vietnam War years, he could seem like a modernized version of "Bonan- za's" Hoss Cartwright: big and immensely powerful, but driven only by the best of intentions. "Bonanza," "Big Valley," and programs like them were all about gigantism, about sym- pathetic' super-states which were not too big to help out a little guy in trouble-which was the way the nation and its president also chose to see themselves until the unpleasant truth gradually emerged toward the end of the decade. But the truth, in a way, was too unpleasant for the mass imagination, and. as George McGovern learned, opposition to the war and embracement of the rival left-liberal ideology meant political disaster. The Counter Cultre/New Left generated-some sympathetic television images-most notably "Kung Fu"-but the real action was on the right. Nixon himself never managed to meet the image ex- pectations of television in anything but a negative sense. He family life of "Little House on the Prairie" or the Osmonds. To a remarkable extent, both Gerald Ford and .Jimmy Carter offered' that prospect. One was from small-town Georgia, the other from small-city Michigan. Both had big, happy families. The most frequent word used to describe each was not "com- petent," or "forceful," but "decent." FOUR YEARS LATER, that formula has had its chance and failed the test of global and domestic challenges. If the president has any image on xTV entertainment today, it is in the image of incompetence com- municated in programs like "Carter Country" or "The Dukes of Hazzard," in which the small town South is populated by buni- bling clowns. This is precisely the image that media fixation on the comic vagaries of brother Billy has helped give to Jimmy Carter. Beyond that, it is difficult to generalize about contemporary television entertainment, because it has never in the mediumts history suggested so little consensus on values. There are no prevailing images on TV in 1980, certainly not in the sense that theegrim thriller prevailed in 1952, the western in 1958, the stylish idealist in 1963, the ethni cop in 1972, or the wholesome family in 1976. If anything, television seems taken with itself, with a nar= cissistic assertion that the mass media are the real stars, evident in programs like "WKRP in Cin- cinnati," "Lou, Grant," or the relentlessly prosecutorial "Sixty Minutes." There may be nothing sur- prising about this, for in the :30 years which now separate .us from the first combining -of political imagery and television entertainment, politics, in effect, has become a television enter- tainment series. The political primaries of 1980 recalled nothing so much as the classic American television f i L' lL"-Vic L4 )'AWE