Page 2/The Battalion/Thursday, September 4, 1986
Opinion
Registration lines reminiscent of a Kafka novel
For some reason this Uni
versity is determined to make
my last semester as a journa
lism major a Kafkaesque ex
perience.
Franz Kafka was born in
Prague, Czechoslovakia in
1883. He wrote several nov
els and short stories about in
nocent people trapped in
governmental bureacracy.
Kafka’s characters were sub
jected to inhumane treat-
Karl
Pallmeyer
ment for no apparent reason. His life as a Jew in
Austria and Germany during the turn of the cen
tury was often the inspiration for his works. For
Kafka, it was over when he died in 1924. For me it
all started last Tuesday.
I ran into a friend 1 hadn’t seen since the end of
the spring semester. She told me she heard that
the last journalism class I needed to get my degree
wasn’t going to be of fered this semester.
1 went to talk to the professor, and he con
firmed the ugly rumor. As visions of my diploma
flying away for another semester filled my
thoughts, he assured me that all was not lost. I sim
ply could take another journalism class. The only
trouble was that I would have to go through drop-
add the next day.
Drop-add is on the list of things that I try my
best to avoid. Given the choice of going through
drop-add, castration or spending the afternoon
with Jerry Falwell, I would be hard-pressed to
make a hasty decision.
I got up early Wednesday morning to try to deal
with this mess. I had to go to work at my other job
at 9 a.m., so I thought that I would go through
drop-add at 8 a.m. The lines were so long that I
wouldn’t be able to get through in time to get
work.
It was a little after 11 a.m. when I was finished
with work so I went to stand in lines. After 10 min
utes some guy came back to the end of the line and
said that registration was about to close for lunch
and that no one would be allowed to go through
until after 1 p.m. These people didn’t come up
with the idea of taking off in shifts for lunch until
later in the week.
I had bills to pay, things to buy, people to see
and several other things to do that day, so I
couldn’t afford to wait around for almost two
hours while the registration people stuffed their
elder ly faces.
Around 4 p.m. I Finished my errands and went
back to the registration line. This time I had to
wait around for almost an hour before I was told
that they would not let me in this time, either. I
would come back another day. My other job took
me out of town Thursday so I had to wait until Fri
day.
I had heard that they weren’t going to take
drop-adds until after 1 p.m. on Friday so I didn’t
get in line until 11 a.m. For the first couple of
hours the waiting wasn’t too bad, I was talking to
other people in line, and we were having a good
time complaining about the lines and eating pizza.
After the three-hour mark things were starting
to get hairy. There was no more shade, and it was
getting hot. Once I Finally made it into the build
ing I began to notice there were a lot of strangers
standing in line with me. After three hours you get
to know a group of people but now, all of a sud
den, I was surrounded by a bunch of twits who de
cided that the best way to beat the system was to
walk into the Pavilion, look at the list of closed sec
tions and try to blend in with the other students al
ready in line.
I finally got to sit down at a terminal with a nice,
elderly woman who didn’t deserve the garbage she
had been having to deal with for the past few days.
She typed in my ID number and the screen flashed
back that I was blocked because of excessive park
ing violations.
According to signs in the Pavilion and else
where, registration would be blocked for students
with three or more unpaid parking tickets. At the
end of summer school I had paid all the tickets I
had accumulated over the summer, but I had got
ten a ticket earlier in the week. Our wonderful
peacekeeping force must have looked at that soli
tary, unpaid parking ticket, decided that I must be
a threat to the security and well-being of this Fine
University and determined that 1 didn’t deserve to
f o through registration until I paid their measly
1 0 fine. I had to go stand in another line.
It took an hour to take care of my parking ticket
— quite a bargain when you consider it only cost
me $10 dollars to stand in the police line for an
hour, while it cost me more than $400 to stand in
the registration line for four hours and 30 min
utes.
I went back to the Pavilion. This time everything
went through without problems and I went on to
pick up my schedule. It took over Five hours and
30 minutes to drop one three-hour
another.
After talking to people who have had tod
with the line this week I realize that I was luck'
could have been worse. We could still beusingi
old system we used i»efore the school spent ill
sands of dollars on SIMS. That antiquatedsvs
made you stand in line for. at most, twohoun.
When Kafka went to law school in Austria at:
turn of the century, thev didn’t have computers
they did we might have been required to read
great novels “The Trial," “The Castle" andll
Drop- Add” in our literature classes.
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Karl Pallmeyer is still a senior journalism m
and a columnist For The Battalion.
While you were out.
■ACS TIN
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Howdy Aggies!
back
Welcome back to
Texas A & M . 1
hope that you had
a fantastic sum-
Mike
Foarde
Guest Columnist
Km like a
Barry Lyn of the American Civil Likjcoiningent y
ties Union said that the commission'* I’dbegla
“the sexual Dr| mone y fo
at ,i news u
Mich think t
Freed from Castro's grasp
Shortly after a
Cuban tribunal
sentenced Hum
berto Sori Marin
to death, his
mother went to
visit Fidel Castro
to plead for her
son’s life. Marin
and Castro had
fought as com
rades in the
mountains, and
Richard
Cohen
One of the beneFits of being a liberal
in a conservative era is that easy assump
tions get challenged. One of those as
sumptions has been that Fidel Castro
was not, all in all, such a bad guy. He
was credited with improving the stan
dard of living— particularly health care
— for most Cubans, with cleaning up
notorious Havana (the prostitution capi
tal of the Western Hemisphere) and, of
course, with toppling the repressive Ba
tista regime.
fact, not only were Castro’s crimes ig
nored, but the man himself was de
picted as the romantic revolutionary —
a baseball-playing companero, a macho
Hemingway type in the land of “Poppa”
himself . Castro’s compelling and attrac
tive antics totally overshadowed the si
nister aspects of his reign — so much so
that even conservatives, who loathed
Castro for his communism, remained
ignorant of the true nature of his re
gime.
after the revolution they often dined to
gether at Marin’s home with Senora
Marin doing the cooking. At the meet
ing, Castro assured her: “Don’t worry,
nothing will happen to Humberto.” The
next night, Castro himself ordered the
execution.
That incident comes from the pen of
Armando Valladares, whose book,
Against All Hope, is an account of the
22 years he spent in various Cuban pris
ons for the “crime” of speaking out
against communism. To say that the
book is compelling is to understate its
power; to say that it is horrific is also an
understatement. With this book, Fidel
Castro takes his place as yet another of
this century’s mass murderers.
The execution of Sori Marin was just
another day’s work for Castro. Turning
on enemies and former colleagues alike,
the Cuban dictator dispatched several
thousand political prisoners (the exact
Figure is unknown) and imprisoned
countless others. Valladares gives an ac
count of a Latin Gulag where prisoners
were terrorized, beaten, starved, tor
tured and casually executed, often on
the caprice of some uniformed sadist.
Many were like Valladares — convicted
by tribunals that, for the sake of efFi-
ciency, handed down their verdicts be
fore the trial had begun.
It was conceded that he was a dicta
tor, that he was responsible for human
rights abuses. But it was argued that
these were insigniFicant and paled in
comparision to what was happening
elsewhere in the hemisphere — Chile,
Argentina, Guatemala and El Salvador.
Liberals held their fire.
For whatever reason, the American
left is at last coming to terms with Cas
tro. The Neier essay, plus the reviews
that Against All Hope received in The
Washington Post and The New York
Times, has done much to rectify mat
ters.
In an essay in a recent issue of The
New York Review of Books, Aryeh
Neier tries to account for such a double
standard. Neier, vice chairman of the
Americas Watch Committee, attributes
the left’s preoccupation with atrocities
by rightist regimes to the tendency of
those regimes to label their own enemies
Castroites.
Now it is the conservatives who follow
false messiahs. President Reagan’s char
acterization of virtually any Third
World anti-communist as a “Freedom
Fightex ” is the moral equivalent of call
ing Castro an agrarian reformer. We
await patiently the mea culpas from the
right.
It seemed that to concede the case
against Castro also would concede the
case right-wing dictators were making
against their own dissidents — not to
mention the case being made by Ameri
can conservatives. The xeasoning is no
more sophisticated than the old maxim
that the enemy of my enemy is my
friend.
According to Americas Watch, there
remain at least 110 political prisoners in
Cuban jails and hundreds moi'e in so-
called “political education programs.”
Some of them have been incarcerated
for more than 25 years — old men
whose executions effectively have been
played out in slow motion.
mer and are x eady for an even better
fall semester. I just thought I would
clear all the notes off my desk and catch
you up with a few things that happened
while you were out. So from around the
world and around the corner here axe
the events and some comments about
what took place:
Sadly, starting with the end of hist
spring semester, an A&M student died
of AIDS. .Silver taps pending. 1 lomo-
sexual spokesman Marco Roberts said,
“the A&M student community would
be one of the last affected by AIDS.”
Well Maxco, with the death of Bruce
Whitworth, we already have been af
fected. So long, Bruce.
Elsewhere on campus, A&M Chris
tian Fellowship, which has been affil
iated for many years with Great Com
mission International, has changed its
name to Great Commission Students to
more closely unite with its 114 world
wide sistex organizations. President
Tom Rugh says, “Great Commission
Students are the same gi'eat people as
AMCF with the same purpose only that
it will be much better as we are united
with Christians all acxoss the country.”
Great Commission Student activities
axe scheduled thioughout the semes
ter.
On the national level, many interest
ing things took place this summer
which caused much conti'oversy. First,
the national press ranted and raved for
weeks when South Africa censored its
newspapex s, but said little when Nicaxa-
gua’s communist government closed
the last free newspaper in that Central
American country.
The drug-related deaths of two ma
jor sports heroes touched off a national
awareness of the nation’s huge drug
problem. President Reagan began to
take steps to curtail the pxoblem both
on the supply and dexnand side. These
efforts are commendable, but it’s ob
vious that the real struggle is going to
be more on the state, local and personal
level.
Another major contxoversy was the
Meese Commission Repox t on Pornog
raphy, which caused 7-Eleven and
other convenience outlets to pull por
nographic magazines off their shelves.
Wfxeieas most conservatives lauded the
report for its severe indictment of por
nography’s dangers, libexals such as
trying to l etxxx ii us to
Ages.”
You remember the sexual DarkAf
That w;ts when women didn’t live inctKMattox an
slant fear of being raped, and sexi-sited $1.7 b
abuse of children was an abhorrentriB
ity instead of an everyday occurea*
Back in the dark ages venereal diseM
was generally a disease of low-lifest
scum, and AIDS was an appetites
pressant, not a frightening disease
those days fidelity was the norm and
had strong families which bred emotii
ally stable children.
But thanks to the ACLU and oik
groups like Norman Lear’s People
the American Way, a group dedicated
counter the movements of the “Religit
Right”, we now have become more 'ft
lightened” people. Unfortunately wet
ily feel the pain that their philoso|t
causes.
In state government, Texas Alton
General Jim Mattox made headlines!
summer by saying that he would s
prosecute homosexuals who are in vie
lion of the state’s sodomy law, butons
other occasion vowed, “to prosecute
the fullest extent of the law,” those op®
ators of pregnancy counseling cetin
that deceived women into not havi
abortions. He also relentlessly hound
a Fort Worth minister guilty onl)'
helping a few needy boys and deck
something to the ef fect that the state
fact, owns our children!
Mattox is up for re-election thisli
Good luck at the polls Jim! You’llntf
it.
There ai'e two final summer tid-fc
Aggies. The Rev. Phil Donahue bro;
cast a five-part sex ies on NBC entid 1
“The Human Animal.” This seriet
lowed the “voice of secular humanist
to preach his false gospel to televisif
viewers all over America. Itwasrepon f
that in his week-long investigation 1
life’s most basic questions, Donahued
not once mention Cod, faith or any td
gious aspect of human life.
On a higher note, though, the R (
Jerry Falwell won both liis laws® 1
against Hustler publisher Larry Flynt.
Well Ags, that was a summer wrap®
I’m sure that there is more tocomeso
watchful! Remember that we have
election this November, so choosey®
side and vote. Exercise your right
choose. Gig’em!
Mike Foarde is a senior education ft'
jor and is the president of the 0
chapter of Americans for Biblical fo'
ernment.
The Battalion
(USPS 045 360)
Member of
Texas Press Association
Southwest Journalism Conference
Neier’s credentials as a critic of all op
pressive regimes are beyond reproach.
He offex s some reasonable justifications
for what amounted to Castro playing
American libexals for a patsy, but they
in no way take the left off the hook. In
In Against All Hope, Valladares tells
their story just as sux ely as he tells his
own. Through the personal intercession
of French President Francois Mitter
rand, Valladares was freed from Cas-
ti'o’s grasp. Through his book, so have
we all.
The Battalion Editorial Board
Copyright 1986, Washington Post Writers Group
Cathie Anderson, Editor
Kirsten Dietz, Managing Editor
Loren Steffy, Opinion Page Editor
Frank Smith, City Editor
Sue Krenek, News Editor
Ken Sury, Sports Editor
7Vie Battalion :
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