Western Front - 1996 February 2

              Want some fries with that
News: Earthquakes not an idle threat
Page 4
i S( API- FROM
Accent: Mono Men, destroyer of
musical naivete, hits the VU Main Lounge.
Page 6
Sports: Western men fall in close
contest with Seattle U., 88-80.
Page 8
The Western Front
WESTERN WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY FRIDAY — FEBRUARY 2,1996 VOLUME 95, ISSUE 6
Newstand pair not guilty
Jury deliberates six hours before reaching verdict
By David Lynch
Front reporter
It took nine months of preparation, nine
days of testimony and hundreds of thou­sands
of dollars to bring the felony crimi­nal
trial of Ira Stohl and Kristina Hjelsand
to an end.
In less than six hours of deliberation, the
jury of five men and seven women
returned a unanimous verdict of innocent.
Speaking before a hushed courtroom, the
court clerk read the jury's verdict to about
100 spectators, nearly all of them support­ers
of the defendants. Once the decision of
the jury became known, the audience gave
a spontaneous sigh of relief.
After Superior Court Judge Michael
Rickert thanked the jury for a job well
done, the audience erupted into applause.
"I feel relieved," Stohl said. "I think the
thing that bothered me the most was that
this man, Mr. McEachran, brought this stu­pidity
this far."
"He tried to ruin both my life and
Kristina's. He did everything he could to
lestroy my life and my business, a busi­ness
I am very proud of. I think Mr.
Front/David Lynch
Ira Stohl and Kristina Hjelsand revel in their victory.
McEachran is nothing more than a cheap
thug. This was a malicious, uncon­scionable,
unconstitutional prosecution
and it should never have gone on as long as
it did," he added.
The defense claimed from the beginning
that Answer Me! is a satirical magazine
that portrays sexual abuse against women
and children as abhorrent and the individu­als
who perpetrate these acts as deviant and
sick. It also argued the magazine helped to
bring about a much-needed public debate
on the issue of sexual violence.
In the trial, defense lawyers argued that
the stories, pictures and cartoons depicted
in Answer Me! were meant to shock the
reader and to show just how horrible sexu­al
abuse actually is. The magazine, the
defense argued, has serious social, artistic
and political value that contributes to the
social debate about sexual abuse in all its
myriad forms and is protected by free
speech under the First Amendment.
In order to convict Stohl and Hjelsand,
the jury would have had to believe beyond
a reasonable doubt that they had knowing­ly
distributed, exhibited and sold a maga­zine
that was pornographic in nature. The
state also had to prove that the average per­son,
applying contemporary community
standards, would find the magazine, when
considered as a whole, appeals to the pruri-
See Verdict, page 3
Author Neil Postman visits Western
By Craig Scott
Front reporter
A warning was sent to Western
in a speech Thursday night at the
Performing Arts Center.
People should ask themselves:
"Am I using this technology, or is
it using me?"
So said Neil Postman, chair­man
of the culture and communi­cations
department at New York
University, in a 48-minute
speech.
Postman is also a media and
culture critic and author of 18
books, including "Amusing
Ourselves to Death," "The End of
Education," "How to Watch the
TV News" and "Technopoly."
"As I see it, the principle prob­lem
facing us is a spiritual one,"
Postman told audience members,
who filled the auditorium to
capacity and spilled into the
aisles.
Postman warned that people
today are giving up their spiritual
selves in favor of "the technology
god." He said people are forget­ting
morality and need to reac-quaint
themselves with religion.
Religious scriptures affect
behavior more than technological
breakthroughs, Postman said.
"I believe we're living just now
in a special time," Postman said.
He said he thought humanity is
caught beneath the technology it
has created.
"We cannot go back to simpler
times and simpler tales. The old
ways of exploring ourselves don't
work (anymore).
"There are no island continents
in an electronic world," he said.
Postman poised the irony of a
once-disconnected world that has
become convoluted in its commu­nications.
"Information was once an
important resource," he said.
"Our technological ingenuity has
transformed information (into)
garbage and us into garbage col­lectors.
"We have to take possession of
our relationship with technolo­gy,"
Postman said.
He said each human being con­tains
a small part of a larger truth,
and each part is an individual nar­rative
that clashes with the narra­tives
of others.
Some narratives can be harmful
in the long run, Postman said. He
paused long enough to poke fun
at Karl Marx and later at
Sigmund Freud.
"(Freud said), 'The cortex is
the servant of the genitalia,'" he
quoted, laughing.
Postman ran through several
quotations from men whom he
classified as having scientific nar­ratives:
Isaac Newton, Marx,
Freud, Albert Einstein and
Stephen Hawking.
"Each of these men tried to
provide us with a firmer base of
knowledge," Postman said.
"Meanwhile, humanity reels
from what has been lost," he said
in reference to spirituality.
Postman said Adolf Hitler tried
to replace the religious narrative
with that of Nazism, which
replaced such narratives as
See Postman, page 3
Front/Jesse Nolte
Neil Postman speaks on the dangers of technology.