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The Battalion
Editorial Board
Mark Evans, Editor in chief
William Harrison, Managing editor
Jay Robbins, Opinion editor
Editorials appearing in The Battalion reflect
the views of the editorial board. They do not
necessarily reflect the opinions of other
Battalion staff members, the Texas A&M
student body, regents, administration, faculty
or staff.
Columns, guest columns, cartoons and
letters express the opinions of the authors.
Contact the opinion editor for information
on submitting guest columns.
Carter’s Coup
Former president salvages North Korean talks
Sex pervades modern entertainment
Hollywood should leave sex in bedroom, not show it all on screen
O n every channel, in every movie,
it’s the same thing. I mean, how
many times do we have to sit
through it before we have seen enough of
it to get the basic picture? Maybe an
explanation booklet ought to come with
every movie ticket, including full-color
diagrams in a baseball-card format.
What are we talking about? Sex.
For many of us sex is a fundamental
part of life. After all, how many women
would sit around being pregnant for nine
months if sex did not have some sort of
pleasure involved in it? From what I am
told, getting up every morning and
throwing up is not as fun as it sounds.
And from the men’s side — if sex did not
have the attraction it does for malekind,
the floral business, restaurant business,
clothing business — well, the whole
stinking economy would simply fall
apart. On the other hand, the sports celt
market would flourish and alcohol would
be the mainstay of any diet.
Now, all that said, one may ask, why
is SEX in EVERY SINGLE PIECE OF
MODERN ENTERTAINMENT? I’ll tell
you why. Somewhere, deep in our genetic
code, a small chromosome causes every
cell in our bodies to scream,
REPRODUCE! This is-important. In the
pre-history days, human beings were
traveling around in clans and women
would be hard-pressed, no matter how
necessary it was, to get themselves
pregnant when they were half-starved
and battered by nature. Happily, most
people like being with each other,
especially when they are reproducing.
In this way, the human species began
its long trek of gaining enough of a stable
population to start societies, learn about
their environment, sail to the New World,
and start Texas A&M. Whoop!
Now that we all understand its
importance, can someone tell me why we
have to watch two, three, or multiple
groups of people having sex on every TV
station? Can someone explain why
almost every movie, even those based on
JOSEF
ELCHANAN
Columnist
books totally lacking sexual encounters,
have love scenes inserted by the
screenwriters?
I hate going to see shoot ’em ups and
action films and have some dame stuffed
into the movie plot simply for some weird
profit-making scheme. Damsel in
distress, ok; bad-girl, fine; killing
machine, great; sex toy, big negative.
I’m not saying that everyone shouldn’t
be allowed to see the two-dimensional sex
stuff if they want. There are special
Look at the great movies:
'Apocalypse Now/ no sex;
'Patton/ no sex; 'Star Wars/
one kiss, no sex; 'Blade Run
ner/ lots of innuendo, no sex.
places you can go to rent that kind of
stuff and those porno magazines that can
probably satisfy most people’s sexual
cravings. That’s what’s great about a
market economy — something for
everybody, except for the sickos who like
... well, we won’t discuss that.
Anyway, I want quality! I want lots
and lots of guns in my movies, no
Freudian intent there for the psych
majors. I want the cool death scenes and
the helicopters and the tanks and the
rocket launchers and not one bit of naked
porno stuff. Let the sissies and dateless
get their own movies!
I mean, look at the great movies:
“Apocalypse Now,” no sex; “Patton,” no
sex; “Star Wars,” one kiss, no sex
(anyway, it’s her brother, and you psych
people shut up); “Red Dawn,” no sex,
“Blade Runner,” lots of innuendo, but no
graphic sex. You see all the best don’t
need bodies, except the ones that are
piled to the skies and filled with lead.
Now let’s look at some loser movies:
“Pretty Woman,” a dumb movie with
those worthless actors, Julia Bigsmile
and Richard Dumbstud, whose
characters are both scum, decide to have
sex all the time and everywhere without
any sort of decency or commitment (“An
Officer and a Gentleman” was stupid too
because Richard would rather have the
girl than his F-14); Basic Instinct, where
Michael Douglas, normally a good actor,
flirts with the slutty blond-bisexual-
bimbo murderer woman throughout the
whole movie; “The FYano,” which I would
not even lower myself to go see, where a
mute woman finds a guy who she would
love to have sexual encounters with,
instead of her husband who bought her
(what a »ice film!); and so many other
trashy, worthless movies that waste the
very film they were recorded on.
Yeah, I know that those stupid movies
made lots of money and won some
awards, but who cares? When it comes
down to it, you can watch “Star Weirs” a
hundred times and still love it — and the
whole family can go see Luke Skywalker
torpedo the Death Star and still have fun
without figuring out new ways to
contract venereal disease. That’s what it’s
all about.
Just remember, in the old days Gary
Cooper got to shoot Germans, Cary Grant
acted cool, Tishiro Mifune cut ’em down,
and John Wayne shot ’em up, all of them
just messing around a bit with the lovely
ladies without having to show it all.
Graphic sex ain’t macho, cool, sexy or
anything else. Tell Hollywood to take it to
the bedroom, not the screen.
Josef Elchanan is a senior
business management major
Former president Jimmy Carter ap
pears to have succeeded the late Richard
Nixon as the United States’ top unoffi
cial diplomat. Carter received great re
gard from the North Koreans as a trust
worthy representative and negotiator.
Earlier this month, Carter was in
vited to the North Korean capitol of
Pyongyang to discuss
growing political contro
versy over suspicions that
North Korea is building
nuclear weapons as an of
fensive method for eventu
ally reclaiming South Ko
rea and acting against oth
er Asian nations. The U.S.
government has been
walking on political
eggshells in hopes that the
tensions would ease and
avert the growing threat
of military conflict. Since
the Korean War of the
1950s, communist North
Korea has been showing
increasing interest in the economic
rise and political stance of its neighbor
to the south. This important visit had
to steer talks around all those fears
and interests.
After conferring with North Korean
President Kim II Sung, Carter brought
back encouraging news regarding the
arrest of nuclear weapons prepara
tions. Despite the White House claims
that the former president is not a rep
resentative of the American govern
ment and acted on his own. Carter’s
gesture of good will has accomplished
what no one else could manage — con
tinued peace and open talks.
Ironically, the Carter presidency end
ed after four years of many embarrassing
and infamous events. Enormous cars
guzzled gasoline during the fuel short
age. The Iranian hostage crisis was at
the forefront of American
political and military con
cern. Interest rates hit 21
percent, and inflation was at
an. all-time high. Justly or
not, Carter suffered almost
exclusive blame for most of
the country’s problems and
was considered by many to
be a terrible president.
Today, Carter also is
using his political power
and tireless concern to
combat the ever-increas
ing problem of inner city
homelessness and despair.
Through his Habitat for
Humanity organization,
Carter has spearheaded a number of
programs implemented to aid urban
degeneration without increase in fed
eral spending.
Carter left for the meeting without
the support of the current administra
tion. He returned with the gratitude and
ear of President Clinton and the world.
With his latest service Carter has
redeemed himself in the eyes of this
country, if not earned himself recogni
tion as one of the greatest ex-presi
dents in history.
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Today’s university education neglects life’s great questions
T he purpose of a university is to
educate. Students should begin
their higher education asking the
very basic questions of human life. What
is good, what is just, what is true. The
university has the duty to guide its
students in their search for goodness,
justice, and truth. This is where the
American university, including Texas
A&M, has failed.
In “The Crisis of Liberal Education,” Allan
Bloom, the late professor of political and social
philosophy at the University of Chicago and
author of the best selling “The Closing of the
American Mind,” argues that universities are no
longer “a preserve for the quiet contemplation of
the permanent questions ... and the pursuit of
those disciplines whose only purpose is intellectual
clarity, and more a center for the training of highly
qualified specialists.”
This type of school “does not appeal to the
students’ longing for an understanding of the most
serious problems, in particular, their doubts about
the route to follow in order to live a good life and
their questions about the nature of justice.” Rather
than helping students answer, “How should I live
my life?” the modem university simply trains
students to be successful at particular careers.
At Texas A&M
we have a core
curriculum of basic
subjects like
history, political
science, and
English.
University-wide
xrements
.^uiand several
credit hours of work in L Humanities, natural
sciences, and mathematics. This requirement is a
nice idea. Unfortunately, it does not serve to bring
these fields of study together under what Bloom
calls “the unifying grip of philosophy.”
The engineer and the English major do not
share much common ground. They do not see the
relationship between their fields of study, or how
each of those fields fits in the larger field of human
knowledge. “All sense of unity and hierarchy has
had to be abandoned,” c ays Bloom.
As a student of chemical engineering for the
past two years, I am receiving the best technical
education money can buy. By the time I graduate,
I should be prepared to take my place as a
productive member of the real world with a good,
high paying job. If all this goes according to plan, I
should be a big success, right?
But what will I have done to get there? I will
have a thorough understanding of chemical and
physical principles and a working knowledge of
how to apply them to industrial processes. I will
have spent four (maybe five) years pursuing this
knowledge, receiving a degree which certifies me
to accomplish such tasks. I will be a highly
qualified “specialist.”
Is this what I came to college for? Well, I do
want a good job, and a degree from Texas A&M is
certainly step in the right direction. I also want to
graduate an educated man. Unfortunately, the
contemplation of life’s ultimate questions usually
takes a back seat to equations of state and second
order tensors.
I’m not suggesting that engineers are
spiritually depraved machines who crunch
numbers for a living and are oblivious to the world
around them. If that was all that this field entails,
it would have become obsolete years ago with the
development of powerful computer that can
accomplish these tasks in a few seconds. In fact,
engineering requires the uniquely human
characteristics of critical thought and abstract
reasoning, in addition to the knowledge of a broad
range of fundamental principles, that no computer
can ever accomplish.
Neither am I suggesting that we all abandon
our plans for the future and become philosophy
majors. What I am suggesting is that we take the
time to look beyond our chosen fields of study and
see what else is out there. Talk to people whose
major seems to have nothing to do with your own.
You might be surprised how much there is to learn
from them. Take a liberal arts class, not just for an
“easy A” or to get your humanities requirement
out of the way, but to learn about something which
we normally don’t encounter. Shakespeare may
not help you pass fluid mechanics, Plato won’t
inspire the design of a distillation column,
Newton’s laws of motion are not the subject of
American history. But these fields are not separate
and distinct. They are inextricably interwoven to
form the whole body of human knowledge. The
technical sciences have an important place in this
body, but knowledge of them alone do not make a
complete human being.
All students should make an effort to learn
about others and see beyond themselves. Let us
see the importance of all fields of human
endeavor, including those that are “useless” to
our own careers, and strive to become not just
something, but somebody.
Jim Pawlikowski is a junior
chemical engineering major
Mountain bikes ride
well on B-CS terrain
• I am writing this letter in response
to Constance Parten’s actuate June 22
sports column entitled, “Mountain Bikes
at A&M Just an Image.” My undergradu
ate institution in Pennsylvania had nu-
- ■■■■
.
merous rocky, muddy, hilly trails. The al
terations, such as front suspension sys
tems, were added for comfort and safety.
Unfortunately during the drive to Texas,
my Trek 820 fell off the back of my car
and was run over. After surveying Bryan-
College Station, I bought the appropriate
bike - a Murray mountain bike. Yet, I
disagree with the author claiming tour
ing cycles are appropriate, due to the fact
the rims are too weak to withstand nu
merous stairs and curbs. However, it is
inconceivable to me that any intelligent
rider would spend more than S200 for a
bike without the intention of carrying the
bike out of town for riding! Mountain
bikes are not intended for road racing
and the riders endanger other students
and faculty when they utilize the campus
as their “trail.” The student interviewed
who spent S1000 dollars loading up his
bike and then feared he had the ability to
damage high-quality parts should have
saved his money and bought the sports
gear appropriate for the College Station
area - roller blades. The “Joe-Dude
Mountainbiker” interviewed ought to re
alize the yuppie spending of the ’80s is
over and give his bike to somebody who
has the guts to tool around in the hills.
Carol Thomas
Graduate Student
• I think Constance Parten is correct
that many people at Texas A&M are buy
ing very expensive mountain bikes that
are made for real mountains. It is obvious
that many of these people are seriously
lacking bike handling skills and would
not get anywhere with their 81,200 bike
even in the mountains.
I think she is totally wrong on her oth
er opinions. I am from northeastern New
Jersey and have been riding and fixing
bikes almost all my life. I used my moun
tain bike for running errands in central
Manhattan and as an undergraduate at
Rutgers University in the busy city of
New Brunswick, N.J.
Why a mountain bike is your best bet
today - note I am referring to mountain
bikes in the 8250-82500 range. Mountain
bikes are much safer than hybrid or tour
ing bikes on wet or dusty streets. Moun
tain bikes are made to get wet and mud
dy, and require less-frequent greasing of
moving parts. They are also easier to
maintain. Although fat tires can add ex
tra resistance, the gear ratios and
—m Ifl H1 HI H ■
amount of gears to choose from make
mountain bikes more suitable for a wider
range of riding environments. I ride from
Scandia Apartments (on Anderson) to the
Heep Center (on west campus) in about
nine minutes, faster than the on-road
bike riders I pass on the way.
Jason Goldman
Graduate Student
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