Page 2/The Battalion/Wednesday, June 17,1987
Opinion
Aggies in Washington D.C. are in good
company
Besides the
Texas A&M
campus, perhaps
the easiest place to
meet an Aggie is
in Washington.
In the three
months I worked
in the district, I met A&M graduates on
the subway, in restaurants, on the
observation deck at the top of the
Washington Monument and on Capitol
Hill. When I toured the Pentagon, my
guide was Class of ’75.
About 1,500 Aggies live in the D.C.
metropolitan area, according to the
local Former Students’ organization.
The gr oup has existed loosely for a long
time, a club officer told me, but it has
only been organized for about two
years.
I stumbled on to the club by accident
when I ran across several former
Battalion staffers in a restaurant. They
invited me to the club’s monthly happy
hour at a local bar. I thought maybe a
dozen recent graduates would attend,
but more than 40 people, some of whom
graduated 15 years ago, were there.
In the fall, Aggies gather at a
local club to watch the A&M
football games televised on ESPN.
If the game is shown on Raycom,
the club will arrange to get the
game by satellite. The two big
activities for the A&M club are a
summer barbeque and, of course,
Muster. _
It’sjust as easy to meet a Texan
in Washington. The Texas
Breakfast Club, which meets once
a month, brings together all
transplanted Texans, visiting
Texans and “Texans-by-
marriage.” At the three breakfasts
I attended, the audience ranged
from 30 to 200 people. After working
with Connecticut “Yankees,” who
constantly teased me about my alleged
accent, it was a treat to hear southern
drawls and lots of “ya’lls.”
It also was a relief to be around
people who could sympathize with my
yearning for chicken fried steak and
has existed among Texans and among
Aggies. The bonding among both
groups is well-known, even to outsiders.
This was best expressed in the
invocation at one of the
breakfasts: “Thank you, God, for
Texans. Without them, the world
wouldn’t be worth a darn.” Aggie
Spirit teaches that “Aggies” can
be substituted for “Texans” in
that invocation.
fajitas. I had to explain what both were
to the people in my office — they hadn’t
heard of either.
The “good of boy network” always
As a freshman, 1 thought the
concept of Aggie Spirit and all it
meant was neat. As the semesters
passed, I became much more
cynical. Sure, I liked A&M, but
the eternal bond theory seemed
to carry things a little too far.
People who believed whole
heartedly in it were the ones who
wrote letters to The Battalion
saying “Highway 6 runs both ways.”
To make things worse in most Aggies’
eyes, I didn’t think the University of
Texas was such a bad school; I worked
for The Battalion, perceived by manyas
a “liberal rag,” and I didn’t think itwasa
sin to ignore hallowed tradition and skip
almost every yell practice my senioryear
or leave football games early.
1 can’t say I’ve completely changed
my mind. I lowever, therejust mightbe
some truth to both the Aggie and the
Texas bond. I think that once you leave
the school, and especially the state,it
becomes more evident.
Deep down, 1 probably always felt
these bonds. But when you live in Texas
and are around 36,000 Aggies everyday
for several years, they aren’t as evident.
The feeling of “being an Aggie" takes
the back seal to surviving academically.
So instead of admitting I’m an Aggie
or Texan only when asked, I found
myself bragging about it. There is
something special about both.
Kirsten Dietz is a senior staff writerk
The Battalion and a truest columnist'
America needs guys
such as Gorbachev
The urges of
rock fans are
primal. They have
been known to
riot, occasionally
kill and, in East
Berlin of all
places, they
recently battled
police to hear a
“Genesis” concert
on the West side
of the infamous
wall. They shouted, “The wall must go,”
which is music of its own kind, “Down
with the pigs,” which is a refrain heard
here on occasion and then, most
troubling of all, the name of their hero:
“Gorbachev, Gorbachev.” He is no
singer. But he is singing some sweet
song.
There was a time when rioting East
Block youths might have shouted a
different name — say, John F.
Kennedy. It is not hard to remember a
time when the name of a Soviet leader
would never have passed their lips,
except linked by a verb to an obscene
word. After all, in 1953, an earlier
generation hurled rocks at Russian
tanks and so many of them escaped to
the West that a wall had to be built to
contain them.
The problem is that the Berlin
incident, while unique in some ways, is
typical of the changes wrought by
Mikhail Gorbechev in a very short time.
In Western Europe, public-opinion
polls show significant numbers of
people consider Gorbechev, not Ronald
Reagan, the superpower leader most
interested in peace. In Britain, Reagan’s
standing is so low that his klutzy pre
election embrace of Margaret Thatcher
proved an embarrassment to her.
Many Western Europeans mistakenly
think it was Gorbechev, not Reagan,
who first came up with a zero option as a
way of elimination nuclear missiles on
their continent. Their confusion, while
lamentable, is understandable. Arms-
reduction iniatives seems more
characteristic of the dynamic Gorbachev
than more ideologically rigid Reagan.
And, anyway, when Reagan offered the
zero option in 1981, it was widely
believed to be nothing more than a ploy
— an offer to the Soviets they were not
expected to accept. Until Gorbachev,
they didn’t.
Too much can be made of this — but
not easily. The shift of European public
opinion and the admiration of a Soviet
leader by East German youth represents
a real reversal for the United States.
After all, it’s America that’s a vibrant
democracy and the Sioviet Union that’s
politically repressive and economically
stagnant. And yet in Europe, where it
may count the most, many people
cannot discern a difference between the
leaders of the two countries.
Washington is just beginning to feel a
twinge of uneasiness at this turn of
events. (One of the surveys of European
public opinion was secretly
commissioned by our own government.)
The town has been riveted by the
shenanigans of Lt. Col Oliver North and
his Wagnerian (both in height and
politics) secretary. Fawn Hall. But
sooner or later, even Reagan
administration officials will connect the
shift in European public opinion with
what’s happening in the Senate Caucus
Room.
The ultimate folly of Reagan and his
most zealous followers is that they have
chosen to fight wars that matter least.
The Contra phase of the Iran-Contra
hearings is just one aspect of the Reagan
Doctrine. The Reagan administration is
also fighting on other fronts — Angola
and Afghanistan, for instance — and
has not shied from “Showing the flag”
— usually by affixing it to a rifle barrel.
It’s most signal victory to date has
been the “reflagging” of Grenada. And
while the effort in Afghanistan cannot
be equated to the one in Angola, the
United States under Reagan has
nevertheless left the impression that i
has a mighty quick trigger finger.
Perceptions are important. They ; re
particularly important in Western
Europe where governments are
democratic. Public opinion must be
taken into account. An Atlanta alliance
electorate increasingly beguiled by
Gorbechev and wary of Reagan is not
likely to support leaders who wish to
stand fast against the Russians or who
are rightly skeptical of Soviet intentions.
Already, Western Europe and Japan
have refused to materially support the
United States in the Persian Gulf — and
it’s their oil, not ours, that’s at stake.
Ronald Reagan came to power
prepared to do battle with an aging and
ideologically ossified Soviet leadership.
He adopted some of its tactics — the use
of proxies to wage wars — but seems not
to notice that new guys have taken over.
Covertly or overtly, we fight the old
wars, rattle billion-dollar sabers and
send warships to do the work of
diplomats, while in the streets of East
Berlin, rock fans shout the name of
Gorbechev. It’s a foreboding sound of
the future to which the Reagan
administration has turned a tin ear.
Copyright 1987, Washington Post Writers Group
Richard
Cohen
The Battalion
(USPS 045 360)
Member of
Texas Press Association
Southwest Journalism Conference
The Battalion Editorial Board
Sondra Pickard, Editor
Jerry Oslin, Opinion Page Editor
Rodney Rather, City Editor
John Jarvis, Robbyn L. Lister, News Editors
Homer Jacobs, Sports Editor
Robert W. Rizzo, Photo Editor
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Where baggage is aeroneous
I haven’t missed
very many days
this year without
flying on
somebody’s
airplane. I have
more frequent
flier points than
Peter Pan. I hate
delays like
everybody else
does, and I worry
if the federal
government doesn’t fork over some
money for the air traffic controller
system, airplanes are going to start
running into one another.
But there’s something else that also
bothers me about air travel. Doesn’t
anybody check their bags anymore?
Carry-on luggage has gotten terribly
out of hand. Each time I fly, I see at
least one idiot walk onto the plane with
enough luggage to send a fully grown
mule to its knees under the weight.
I see people with huge hang-up bags,
suitcases, briefcases and their company’s
entire computer system attempt to walk
down a crowded airliner aisle without
hitting somebody in the head with all
that equipment and giving them a
concussion. Others attempt to put what
wouldn’t fit into a Ryder truck into one
of those tiny compartments over their
seats.
You had to do that sort of thing back
when you had to ride a bus or train. On
the way to college, you lugged your
suitcase to your seat and put it into the
rack above your head.
That’s also where you put your guitar
and the box lunch your mother
prepared for your trip.
You don’t have to do that anymore.
You can give your bags to an
occasionally f riendly person at the
airline ticket gate and your bags will be
stashed in the bottom of the airplane
and you won’t have to fool with them
again until you land in Peoria.
True, from time to time airlines do
lose checked baggage. Better to risk
that, however, than to risk hernia
hauling all those bags onto and off of
the plane.
“Passangers seem to think they can
save a great deal of time by carrying on
their luggage and not having to wait for
it at the baggage claim,” a Delta
employee was telling me.
I fully expect someone will get on an
airplane one of these days with aerate
full of live chickens and a goat on a
rope.
It can’t be safe to have all that luggage
and whatever else people bring onto
airplanes stacked all over the passenger
compartment.
1 don’t want the plane to hit sudden
turbulence and have a lugs-and-bolts
salesman’s sample case fall on my head.
Airlines are crowded enough with
human beings to bring all that stuffinto
the passenger compartment. I get on
airplanes today and feel like I’m riding
on the back of Jed Clampett’s truck with
Jethro Bodine.
I think you could cut down on some
of the delays if you didn’t have 80
percent of the passengers aboard a
flight taking 15 minutes to find a place
for all their junk before sitting down.
On second thought, it’s OK to bring
aboard a box lunch your mother
prepared for your trip, airline food
being as bad as it is. J ust leave the
chickens and goats at home or put them
on Greyhound or Amtrak.
More than likely, they’ll be waiting
for you when you get off the plane.
Copyright 1987, Cowles Syndicate
Lewis
Grizzard
Mail Call
Poor little orphans
EDITOR:
I have to admit I was more than a little amused at the
plight of the former residents of Davis-Gary quoted in
Friday’s Battalion article “DG residents, official differ on
relocation.” They complain that housing officials
overreacted, and that “a lot of intermediate steps were
avoided.” They also whine that officials did not “try hard
enough to track down the individual vandals.”
“I never in my wildest dreams figured they could kick
out an entire dorm,” one student is quoted as saying. Well,
never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined a fairly
large group of supposedly college-educated adults caring
so little about the place where they lived that they would
enjoy spending their free time destroying it — $5,000
worth of damage to windows alone. What were these poor,
mistreated, misunderstood kids expecting, a note to every
resident explaining that the bad old housing office would
really prefer that they not play so hard in the dorm, or
maybe the threat of detention hall?
The University has been more than gracious in
allowing these people to return to on-campus housing.
They are not being inconvenienced by a move mid
semester, and they’ve been informed three months before
their return. I’m sure that there are many who never
participated in any vandalism, but given the situation,
housing officials had no other intelligent choice.
Congratulations and a pat on the back to them, and I’ll cry
a tiny tear for all of Davis-Gary’s orphans a little later.
Michael Gardner
Former Schuhmacher resident
Letters to the editor should not exceed 300 words in length. The editorial staff
reserves the right to edit letters for style and length, but will make every effort to
maintain the author’s intent. Each letter must be signed and must include the
classification, address and telephone number oj the writer.
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