Page 2/ r fhe Battalion/Wednesday, March 30, 1988
Opinion
Lighten up, you raving UT-bashers
The
Several weeks
ago, I was driving
down University
Boulevard on a
weekend night
when some guy in
a truck, seeing a.
decal on my rear
window, chunked
a beer can at my
car and hollered,
“UT sucks.” I de
cided then that the
John
MacDougall
rivalry between the University of Texas
and Texas A&M has gotten decidedly
out of hand. To students who wear T-
shirts criticizing UT, Bevo or some com
bination of the two, I say “lighten up.”
There is an underlying principle in
sports and war. Don’t kick a dead dog.
Aggies should take this to heart.
In the past five years we’ve witnessed
the decline and fall of the University of
Texas. For years, UT beat A&M in foot
ball, baseball and basketball. Slowly,
A&M made gains. In recent years, UT
has gone through several coaches. First
there was the ousting of Abe Lemons,
the former cigar-chomping basketball
coach who had become a legend of sorts
in Austin. Then, Fred Akers, one of the
winningest football coaches in South
west Conference history, was sent pack-
ing.
Supporting UT has become as lonely
a proposition as being a Maytag re
pairman — and that’s in Austin. In Col
lege Station, supporting UT means tak-
ing the brunt of the jokes. Oh,
sometimes I’ll get a little sympathy from
so-called “two-percenters” when I la
ment about the football team. But for
the most part, Aggies have become cold
and unforgetting. Besides, UT-bashing
is in vogue.
What, me worry?
You better believe it
I worry about
SOCIAL SE
CURITY — I
used to worry
about Social Secu
rity a lot, but then
I stopped. I wor
ried that our huge
federal expendi
tures for “entitle
ments” were going
to sink us under a
Donald
Kaul
burden of debt. I was told not to worry.
Social Security isn’t part of the federal
debt; it is financed by its own tax and is
taking in more money than it gives out,
in anticipation of the retirement of the
Baby Boomers down the road. Things
were hunky-dory.
That was good enough for me. I
stopped worrying. Then I picked up the
paper the other morning and read this
headline: “And Who’s Going to Pay
Back All the Money Borrowed From So
cial Security?” It turns out that the So
cial Security surplus isn’t “saved” for fu
ture generations, it is loaned to the
federal government, which uses it for
waste, fraud and abuse. When those fu
ture generations retire and their re
quirements overwhelm the payroll tax,
the federal government will be expected
to make up the difference, and there
won’t be any money in the till. Social Se
curity then is apt to go bust, just as Pete
duPont warned.
So I’m worrying about Social Security
again. What was it duPont wanted to do
about the problem? Revoke drivers’ li
censes of elderly people who hadn’t
saved up for their retirement? Some
thing like that.
Anyway, we should start doing some
thing about the problem.
THE BUDGET — The House passed
a federal budget of $1.09 trillion the
other day, and it didn’t even make the
front page of a lot of newspapers. That
may be a perfectly sensible figure for a
country of our size and wealth — I don’t
know. The alarming thng is that the
budget projects a deficit for the coming
fiscal year of $134 billion. Even more
alarming is that the $ 134 billion Figure is
a phony. Had Congress used less opti
mistic, more realistic economic projec
tions provided it by the Congressional
Budget Office, it would had projected a
$170 billion deficit. Moreover, $4 billion
was shifted from “discretionary” to
“mandatory” loan accounts, thereby re
ducing the budget on paper but not the
amount of money shelled out. Moreover
yet, the Figure does not take into ac
count that Social Security tax is giving
the government a temporary $30 billion
surplus which will have to be made up
someday. The “real” federal deficit,
then, is likely to be more than $200 bil
lion, or about 20 percent of the federal
budget. And Congress and the presi
dent are congratulating each other over
the accomplishment.
I worry about that. We ought to do
something about it.
DEMOCRATS — The two-party sys
tem has flaws, but it beats the one-party
system by a long way. The Democratic
Party has won only one of the past Five
presidential elections and hardly
showed a pulse in three of the others. If
it fails to win this time I fear that it will
go the way of the Whigs. (If you can’t
beat George Bush, whom can you beat?)
Yet it continues to wrangle and kick and
scratch and fight through its primaries
just as though it still had a choice. It
doesn’t. Michael Dukakis is its man. He
may not be the Democrat of everybody’s
dreams, but he is clearly the class of the
field, the one candidate who has run a
national campaign and shown some
strength everywhere. Instead of trying
to wear him down so that he arrives at
the convention looking as though he has
just taken a midnight stroll through the
south Bronx, Democrats should now
unite behind him and start beating up
on Republicans. It they don’t, we are
going to have Republican presidents un
til Heck (as Mr. Bush calls it) freezes
over or until a Great Depression, which
ever comes first.
It worries me. Someone ought to do
something about it.
OZONE — You’re not going to be
lieve this, but the depletion of the ozone
layer is a big problem, bigger even than
ring-around-the-collar. A recent study
indicates that it is deteriorating at a
frightening rate, stripping the Earth of
its protection against the sun’s ultravio
let radiation, putting at risk its animals,
its plants and us.
This deterioration has been known
since the early 1970s when scientists
warned that we must reduce the use of
the industrial chemicals that were caus
ing it. Industry being what it is, it lob
bied against such restrictions — and
won. President Reagan’s (Ha-Ha) secre
tary of the interior even argued that the
best defense was a hat with a broad
brim.
The 1 1 nations that produce the of
fending chemicals, chlorofluorocar-
bons, tentatively have agreed to cut back
production somewhat, but even that
feeble gesture won’t go into effect until
everybody signs the agreement — and
only two have so far.
In the meantime we and the plants
and animals of the hemisphere are
going to burn to a crisp.
I worry about that.
Don’t you?
Copyright 1987, Tribune Media Services, Jnc.
The Battalion
(USPS 045 360)
Member of
Texas Press Association
Southwest Journalism Conference
The Battalion Editorial Board
Sue Krenek, Editor
Daniel A. LaBry, Managing Editor
Mark Nair, Opinion Page Editor
Amy Couvillon, City Editor
Robbyn L. Lister and
Becky Weisenfels,
News Editors
Loyd Brumfield, Sports Editor
Jay Janner, Photo Editor
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And to a degree I don’t really blame
you all. I have two older brothers. One
went to Texas A&M and the other to the
University of Texas. There was always a
lot of snippeting going on around the
house when I was in high school. I al
most went to Texas A&M as an under
graduate but couldn’t get on-campus
housing, which turned out to be a decid
ing factor in my decision to attend UT.
When my oldest brother, Joe, was going
to A&M in the late 1970s, the school was
a little different. The football team was
terrible, but almost everybody at school
supported it wholeheartedly. Socially, in
College Station, things were pretty laid
back. To get a date, you had to take a
road-trip to Austin. For these reasons,
Joe was always on the defensive.
beautiful coeds and an awesome football
team. Texas A&M was seen by T-sips as
an agriculture and engineering school
with a country-bumpkin mentality. But
the Aggies’ humiliation of the Long
horns at both Kyle Field and Memorial
Stadium and the surge in female enroll
ment here signify a changing of the
guard.
hamb
|udieni
lance
heate
The University of Texas was basking
in the limelight. UT was known for
Though Aggies should be proud of
their school’s improvement in academ
ics and sports vis a vis UT, they should
not take the rivalry too seriously. Some
of it is pretty amusing, like the UT toilet
paper, but sometimes the intensity of
UT-hating gets out of hand. Though
there are a few Longhorn supporters in
College Station, you won’t find too
many of them advertising it. There are a
few exceptions. The bravest, and maybe
stupidest. Longhorn I’ve ever seen was
this guy who wore a Longhorn warm-up
suit into the Dixie Chicken onali
day night. Later, I heard thatheli
Black Belt in karate, which prci ^ K i e se
came in handy. Ban rel
, Hndaci
Almost every major college hahB 1 * 101
rivaly. The University of Texas,foB utn, 1 " 1
ample, despises the University of(M iim | )t .
homa. Every year, UT and Of
converge on Commerce Street in
to raise hell. What is unique abo
A&M-UT rivalry is tl lat it seems
sort of one-way, at least duringtlifj
season.
Ji the s
11 leogray
Rivalries spice up athletic evenisBf the si
help foster camaraderie among B fho
dents. Unfortunately, some Aggies
things a little too seriously.
:reativ<
Tench
John MacDougall is a graduatesk noved
and a 1985 graduate of the Uni\t>
of Texas.
\inerk
nentec
on Co
>wn ng
n cow
lancin
irough
icon J
he cl
nance
The V
orpor;
Davey
hither
Class of ’91, where were you?
EDITOR:
On Thursday, FIJI sponsored a political forum for the
Class of ’91 presidential candidates. This attempt to
inform the voters of what these candidates could
contribute to the class was well publicized through flyers
placed throughout the campus. To my disappointment,
only about 30 people showed up, five of whom were
candidates!
Class of ’91, where were you? Aren’t you concerned
about the issues of your class? What about the problems?
Don’t you care who will find the solutions and push for the
improvements? We are a major part of Texas A&M, so
let’s start acting like it. Let’s put the “student” back into our
Student Government, and the “class” back into our class
meetings!
Tracey Butler ’91
the 15-minute length clue you in? You probably thougif
the Association of Former Students’ building looked likij
parking garage before they finished it.
I, for one, am glad that they restarted the Video^
land (now Aggievision) after a one-year absence. Sincetliifl
is my final semester, I find it comforting to know thatlcaaB
hold on to some of the memories I experienced hereJ
Texas A&M preserved on video. It would’ve beenaroii'j
pain for me to lug a video camera everywhere to recorded
erything I wanted to remember.
To Greg Keith and all the others who are puttingitf
their time and effort into producing the video, thanks!
Diamond Dave Mendoza ’88
Accept the ugliness
EDITOR:
It’s not finished yet
EDITOR:
I happened to be in the MSC yesterday and saw a
crowd gathered around a Battalion, so I stopped to look.
But I couldn’t understand why everyone was standing
there once I saw what they were reading. That’s right. It
was the Mail Call section of the March 22 paper. A letter by
Richard G. Scott, knocking the video yearbook.
True, I am no expert on television or anything either,
but did you, Mr. Scott, notice the ads in The Battalion and
the flyers on campus advertising that this was a PROMO
TIONAL tape being shown? “Promotional” as in “not for
sale?” As in “preview?” Perhaps, as in “unfinished?” Didn’t
I would like to make a closing remark to what a few
narrow-minded observers would call the “ugliness”on
A&M’s campus. This issue pertains to the anti-apartheid
shack built across from the Academic Building. A&M
should accept this so students can be open-minded in the
future to the reasons why other people do what they do.
(This is not bringing up the dispute of apartheid being
right or wrong). There will always be issues brought upon
campus, and everywhere else, that people will have
disagreements on. It’s the fact that we can learn andgro"
individually by seeing more that just one side of the pic
ture.
I
Katherine Coffey ’90
Letters to the editor should not exceed 300 words in length. The editorialslafj'nM
serves the right to edit letters for style and length, but will make every m
maintain the author’s intent. Each letter must be signed and must includetk^ 'li
sification, address and telephone number of the writer.
BLOOM COUNTY
by Berke Breath
you mv not Hme
Noncep, QuiCHe.- PL/r
TVS SONS THROUGH SOM
CHANGES OF LATE /
MY Eves ARE 5UPPENLY OPCU.
TERRIHLe TRUTHS ARE
REVEALING THEMSELVES...
ANPIFINP THAT I CARE...
1 REALLY...
PO...
CARE...
V
3-3Q
TARN TTY THE
REPM/ftPUST
Horoernm m
jusnee (n f\mmu
MY
MARTINI'S
IN YOUR
TORTELLINL
fluff ^