To the editor:

I was surprised and delighted by the headline in the Jan. 23 Journal-World: “‘Border War’ has new battlefield.”

I was surprised not by the story’s content, which announced that the Kansas-Missouri football would be played in Arrowhead Stadium instead of Lawrence or Columbia, at the expense of local merchants and with prime seats going to Chiefs season ticket holders instead of mere college fans. This sort of thing is to be expected as long as we have Lew Perkins running athletics according to the Pretty Boy Floyd school of administration (when asked why he robbed banks, Pretty Boy replied, “Because that’s where the money is.”)

What delighted me was to see the term “Border War” used unabashedly as the description of this rivalry once again. A couple of years ago, some overpaid maven of political correctness over in Strong Hall decided that “Border War” was insensitive, either because it trivialized actual warfare (which everyone knows ought to be fought in the Middle East with real bullets) or because it pertained to the same genre of social conditioning that compels Raging Grannies to take up cudgels against war toys, video games and reruns of Chuck Norris movies. I expected the Oklahoma schools to follow suit by renaming their fabled “Bedlam” series on the grounds that it might be offensive to psychiatric patients.

It’s always gratifying to see a staple of mindless political correctness give way to common sense and common usage.

Bill Getz,

Lawrence